{"id":56993,"date":"2018-11-08T20:53:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T20:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56993"},"modified":"2018-11-08T20:53:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T20:53:16","slug":"making-race-in-british-colonial-north-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56993","title":{"rendered":"Making Race in British Colonial North America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making Race in British Colonial North America<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Black Perspectives<\/a>
\n2018-11-08<\/p>\n

Elise A. Mitchell<\/strong><\/a>, Ph.D. Candidate in Atlantic World History and Caribbean and Latin American History
\nDepartment of History
\nNew York University<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nUncle Sam<\/a> challenging the interference of John Bull<\/a>, the personification of Great Britain<\/a>, in the Civil War<\/a>, 1861 (Photo: Library of Congress).<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

When confronted with three eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements seeking a missing man from Connecticut<\/a> named Ishmael Mux of \u201ca white Complexion,\u201d a missing Pennsylvanian<\/a> named John Daily who had a \u201cblack Complexion, bushy Hair,\u201d and a man who went missing on his way to North Carolina<\/a> named Andrew Vaughan with a \u201cred\u201d complexion, most readers would presume that their complexions, \u201cwhite,\u201d \u201cblack,\u201d and \u201cred,\u201d indicated their race. However, as Sharon Block<\/a> shows in her latest book, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America<\/em><\/a>, to eighteenth-century readers:<\/p>\n

White, black, and red complexion did not automatically parallel European, African, and Native American heritages, respectively. In fact, Ishmael was described as mulatto<\/a>; John as Irish; and Andrew was listed as an infantryman in the British 40th regiment, was born in Philadelphia<\/a>, with no nationality or ethnicity specified. Skin and hair appearance were features related to, but not constitutive of, ethnic or national background (60-61).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is but one of many examples Sharon Block uses to illustrate how the relationships between bodily descriptions, ethnicities, and racial meaning are not transhistorical, but developed through contextually specific discourses that have changed over time (83). Block, a digital humanist<\/a> and historian of race, gender, rape, sexuality, and the body, examined thirty-nine British North American colonial newspapers published between 1750 and 1775 and analyzed over 4000 advertisements for missing enslaved and free people. Her ambitious study of these advertisements reveals how British North American colonists constructed race through quotidian<\/a> discourses. Colonial Complexions<\/em> is a crucial contribution to the history of race and a noteworthy model for digital age historical methodology…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Colonial Complexions” will be an enduring contribution to digital age historical methodology and interpretations of early Atlantic newspapers as digitized eighteenth-century British newspapers and databases of British runaway advertisements continue to become available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8413,459,8,6940,20],"tags":[26485,29055,29053,29054,29052],"class_list":["post-56993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-communications","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-black-perspectives","tag-british-north-america","tag-elise-a-mitchell","tag-elise-mitchell","tag-sharon-block"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56993","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=56993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56994,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56993\/revisions\/56994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}