Literature in the Key (and Time) of Science

In Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America, Katy L. Chiles immerses readers in an Early American mindset in which race was understood to be an external, superficial trait, dependent upon climate, and, therefore, both acquired and mutable. Her method is to use what historians such as Winthrop Jordan and John Wood Sweet have revealed about the science of racial thinking in the eighteenth century "to tune our ears to what the literature is saying" (4). In four chapters and an epilogue that place Native American, African American, and Anglo American writers in conversation, Chiles aims "to maintain the historical and cultural specificity of each" and to intervene "in some of the most central scholarly debates" about these authors (25, 27). With its innovative pairings and well-considered interventions in scholarship, Transformable Race will undoubtedly prove useful to all who teach Early American literature. However, the issue of whether science serves as literature's primary frame of reference strikes me as deserving an even broader consideration by historicist literary critics and cultural historians, regardless of period.

Chiles effectively dislodges any sense that her readers already know what race is and how it works. In her introduction, she arrays competing explanations for human variation circulating in North America in the late colonial era and in the Early Republic. If European descendants learned a Biblical account that positioned Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all humanity, participants in the Indian Great Awakening averred that black, white, and red people had separate origins. Within natural history, the precursor of modern biology, the consensus held that complexion and character could degenerate from a white original with changes in climate. Yet Chiles shows early dissenters from the mainstream: John Mitchell, who thought the first color was not white but "dark swarthy" (13); Thomas Jefferson, an early proponent of the idea of unalterable racial differences (16—17); and Samuel Stanhope Smith, who suggested that social practices and cultural habits could affect bodily composition as much as climate could (18). Having established this discursive field, Chiles proceeds to chapters that make cogent interventions, by juxtaposing texts by Phillis Wheatley and Samuel Occom; Ben Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut; John Marrant, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown; and Olaudah Equiano and Henry Brackenridge.

In the first chapter, Chiles points to a subtle intellectual kinship between North America's two most famous nonwhite correspondents, Phillis Wheatley and Samuel Occom. She argues that these converts did not swallow white supremacy with Biblical literacy but rather "rel[ied] upon religious doctrine" to pinpoint the hypocrisies of colonial Christians (32). In Chiles's portrayal, Wheatley is a woman of letters who draws black Africans inside the body of Christ and the literary canon by reinvigorating Biblical and classical descriptions of black complexion. In the same spirit, Chiles builds upon recent work in Native Studies to argue that Occom "indigenized Christianity" to assert "Native sovereignty" throughout this "Boundless Continent" (32, 49).

Although earlier chapters do not elaborate the distinctiveness of eighteenth-century racial theory, Chiles does so explicitly in the third chapter. There, she engages substantively with the relationship between eighteenth-century racial thinking and later models, employing three captivity narratives to delineate a version of racial masquerade particular to Early America. She argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century passing narratives feature an external body that fails to register the inner truth of racial identity, while Crevecoeur's Letters, John Marrant's spiritual autobiography, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly assume that an eighteenth-century subject has no racial interior and simply "is" whatever her complexion and clothing convey (110). In conjunction with the first chapter, with its focus on "becoming colored," the third chapter helps readers enter a mode of thought in which race was recognized as an unstable exterior trait constantly acted upon by physical stimuli. For its part, the second chapter links the changeable nature of literal, racialized bodies...