The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture by Roxann Wheeler (review)

99 estants that they were now, if not Irish, no longer English.’’ Further chapters discuss mid- and late eighteenth-century playwrights, Charles Macklin, Francis Dobbs, and Gorges Edmond Howard. In this deft analysis of seven Protestant playwrights, Mr.Wheatley delivers on his promise ‘‘to explain how some of the Protestants may have thought about the world to write the plays that they did.’’ John C. Greene University of Louisiana, Lafayette ROXANN WHEELER. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth -Century British Culture. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania, 2000. Pp. ix ⫹ 371. $65; $26.50 (paper). With a detailed and definitive account of Enlightenment racial ideology and imperial discourse framing its central chapter on midcentury intermarriage novels, The Complexion of Race charts an assured chronological course through a parade of the period’s significant Others. Ms. Wheeler makes her reader’s encounter with a succession of relevant writings as arresting and absorbing as any of the encounters those writings themselves contain. Sensitively reconstructing eighteenth -century lines of thought—even reviving certain eighteenth-century usages (with ‘‘contemptuous,’’ for instance, allowed to embrace and erase common or garden ‘‘contemptible’’)—she catches the period’s perceptions of human variety ‘‘in transition from an older conception of difference based on religion to a newer one based on complexion.’’Theblackand white clouds from which Blake’s little black boy so affectingly aspires to be freed gradually gather and build. The book is precise and painstaking in plotting the stages of this progressive ‘‘transference from a cultural emphasisto a bodily emphasis.’’ Telling evidence comes from the illustrated afterlife of Robinson Crusoe: ‘‘a persistent Negroization of Xury’’ and, correspondingly, ‘‘the periodic Negroization of Friday.’’ Skin color is increasingly importantinorganizing human variety; and physical attributes , fixed and visible where cultural criteria were bound to be subtle and shifting , become more and more decisive as signifiers of difference. The result, by the final quarter of the eighteenth century, is ‘‘a deeper and less changeable notion of national and racial differences than was previously fashionable.’’ In this way Ms. Wheeler demonstrates that dark skin color was not always the ‘‘diabolic dye’’of which PhillisWheatley came to write, and warns us against the historical distortion of projecting a relatively recentcolorconsciousnessuponthe early eighteenth century. ‘‘Complexion’’ in eighteenth-century British culture (rather like ‘‘class’’ in the social life of the Victorians) seems a complexandvariable concept now, no longer casually to be considered the chief component in human difference throughout thisperiod.Of course, for reasons which Ms. Wheeler’s conclusion acknowledges, the appeal of that view remains considerable. But so is our indebtedness, now, to a work able to dismantle such inappropriate frames of reference and specify the true terms of the unexpectedly ‘‘fluid’’ eighteenthcentury understanding of human variety. Ms. Wheeler has therefore written a book that is its own resounding justification on a topic that is in some ways its own negation. For eighteenth-century racial theory emerges from these pages as the leopard that does change its spots. Ms. Wheeler is done a slight disservice by an Index which starts without Aijaz 100 Ahmed and ends without Robert Young; she in fact refers her reader very usefully to the work of both scholars, and to much other work besides. A signal strength in this book, therefore, is its constant commitment to a principled inclusiveness which mirrors intellectually the philanthropic projects of the period (‘‘Am I not a man and a brother?’’). There is a genuine interdisciplinary focus, with climate theory here and Linnaeantaxonomythere deftly joined to the analysis of narrative. The range of texts extendsfromRobinson Crusoe (1719) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), with space in between for such provocative pairings of contemporaneous works as that of Johnson ’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774). Ms. Wheeler’s term ‘‘amalgamation,’’ for the subject of her central chapter, defines the spirit of her study generally. What it yields is very fine and consistently compelling. Peter Merchant Canterbury Christ Church University College, U.K. JOHN L. MAHONEY. The Enlightenment and English Literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1999. Pp. xiv ⫹ 625. $43.95 It takes some investigative work to...