In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • What We Mean When We Say "Race"
  • Philip Gould (bio)

Let me begin by pointing out a telling moment in a recent review of scholarly work about the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. The reviewer, Jonathan Elmer, first acknowledged that early black writing presents "a world of such profound dislocation, risk, and contingency that we are forced to acknowledge that questions of national, religious, and ethnic identity are very often up for grabs according to the pressures of the moment." Then he went on to assess the state of the scholarly field as a whole: "While the work on the black Atlantic has done much to call into question the explanatory paradigms of nation and ethnic identity, we have not yet settled on new paradigms to help us move beyond merely raising such problems to an attempt to resolve them in some interpretively satisfying way." The tension between these two claims—that we need more satisfying critical terms with which to read a body of literature that may resist them altogether—begins to suggest just how difficult it is to articulate the meaning of "race" in the eighteenth century. This difficulty of course creates the critical occasion for a roundtable such as this one in EAL. I am grateful to be part of the discussion though realistic enough to recognize that our differences already have produced disagreements, even animosity, in print.

When I was first invited to participate, I could not help but recall the scene in The Godfather where the aging Vito Corleone warns his son Michael that after his death the other dons will try to arrange a supposedly constructive meeting where, as Vito tells Michael, he will be assassinated.

What does Barbaric Traffic contribute to the paradigm of race in eighteenth-century studies? I knew that the book's argument about the historical relations between race and commerce in early antislavery writing would be unsettling to some because it was interrogating important categories upon which the field of African American studies had established itself. (It is no surprise that critical and theoretical disruptions have come from British academics like Paul Gilroy who intentionally were trying to divest [End Page 321] African American studies of its assumptions about race and nation). The book's argument arose from the dissonance I felt as I began to read early antislavery literature seriously, the slippage I sensed between the historical frequencies of eighteenth-century discourse and the modern critical categories used to interpret that language. The historical center of gravity in African American studies, after all, traditionally does not lie in the eighteenth century. Its scholarly trajectory tends to move from the antebellum period (when the slave narrative supposedly came of age) to literary modernism (focusing on the Harlem Renaissance) and onto modern and contemporary writers. Critics like Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates who helped to shape the field certainly took an interest in writers like Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley. But this work also tended to situate eighteenth-century writing within a larger, African American literary "tradition." In the metahistorical terms of Hayden White, the narrative concern for constructing such a tradition "emplotted" this early work: the eighteenth-century "talking book" points to the role of literacy in Frederick Douglass, for example. Hear me right: the formulation of racial literary motifs and traditions was necessary to putting African American studies on the academic map.

Yet this orientation to the antebellum period tends to produce critical vocabularies of race and racism that are read backward, so to speak, onto eighteenth-century writing and culture. Barbaric Traffic does not argue that these categories did not exist—as Brooks and Kazanjian suggest—but rather asks how they took shape and operated culturally during a crucial yet transitional historical period. For those readers of EAL unfamiliar with the book (and there are, I imagine, many), it reads race in context of the historical formations of sentimentalism and capitalism, particularly as they inform the language about the African slave trade before its abolition in 1808. Eighteenth-century antislavery's preoccupation with the African slave trade registers the complex ways in which this writing registers concerns about the cultural ramifications of trade itself. The literature I...

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