{"id":44039,"date":"2015-11-18T22:33:59","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T22:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44039"},"modified":"2017-04-26T16:21:14","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T16:21:14","slug":"transformable-race-surprising-metamorphoses-in-the-literature-of-early-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44039","title":{"rendered":"Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/global.oup.com\/academic\/product\/transformable-race-9780199313501?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp;\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/global.oup.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Oxford University Press<\/a><br \/>\n2014-01-27<br \/>\n336 Pages | 9 halftones<br \/>\n6-1\/8 x 9-1\/4 inches<br \/>\nHardcover ISBN: 9780199313501<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/english.utk.edu\/peopletwo\/katy-chiles\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>Katy L. Chiles<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of English<br \/>\n<em>University of Tennessee, Knoxville<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/global.oup.com\/academic\/product\/transformable-race-9780199313501?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp;\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/global.oup.com\/academic\/covers\/pop-up\/9780199313501\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First detailed study of &#8220;literary race&#8221; in eighteenth-century America<\/li>\n<li>Brings together the scholarly discourses on American Indian identity, the racial regime of African slavery, and the developing discourse of race in eighteenth-century natural history with convincing literary analysis<\/li>\n<li>Covers canonical texts by <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Benjamin_Franklin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ben Franklin<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Samson_Occom\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samson Occum<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phillis_Wheatley\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Phillis Wheatley<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/J._Hector_St._John_de_Cr%C3%A8vec%C5%93ur\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">J. Hector St. John de Cr\u00e8vecoeur<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As surprising as it might seem now, during the late eighteenth century many early Americans asked themselves, &#8220;How could a person of one race come to be another?&#8221; Racial thought at the close of the eighteenth century differed radically from that of the nineteenth century, when the concept of race as a fixed biological category would emerge. Instead, many early Americans thought that race was an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors and continuously subject to change. While historians have documented aspects of eighteenth-century racial thought, <em>Transformable Race<\/em> is the first scholarly book that identifies how this thinking informs the figurative language in the literature of this crucial period. It argues that the notion of &#8220;transformable race&#8221; structured how early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identities. Examining figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charles_Brockden_Brown\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Charles Brockden Brown<\/a>, <em>Transformable Race<\/em> demonstrates how these authors used language emphasizing or questioning the potential malleability of physical features to explore the construction of racial categories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First detailed study of &#8220;literary race&#8221; in eighteenth-century America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1196,8,17,3015,20],"tags":[21921,21924,21925,21923,21920,21919,342,933,21922],"class_list":["post-44039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-ben-franklin","tag-benjamin-franklin","tag-charles-brockden-brown","tag-j-hector-st-john-de-crevecoeur","tag-katy-chiles","tag-katy-l-chiles","tag-oxford-university-press","tag-phillis-wheatley","tag-samson-occum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53705,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44039\/revisions\/53705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}