{"id":56995,"date":"2018-11-08T21:42:28","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T21:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56995"},"modified":"2018-11-08T21:42:28","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T21:42:28","slug":"review-sharon-block-colonial-complexions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56995","title":{"rendered":"Review: Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review: Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History<\/a>
\n2018-06-02<\/p>\n

Vanessa Holden<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of History and African American and Africana Studies
\nUniversity of Kentucky<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America<\/em><\/a> (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the opening of Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America<\/em>, Sharon Block<\/a> poses two provocative questions: \u201cWhat were the meanings of black, white, and red in the colonial eighteenth century; and how did Anglo-American colonists describe people\u2019s appearance?\u201d (1) To answer these queries Block presents a cultural history race in Britain\u2019s 18th century American colonies. She makes a careful study of the descriptors advertisers and editors used in missing colonial persons adds for runaway African descent and their European and Native American servants.<\/p>\n

Block argues that the terms \u201cblack\u201d; \u201cwhite\u201d; \u201cred\u201d; and \u201cyellow\u201d did not have static meanings that neatly corresponded to racial identities for 18th-century Anglo-colonists. Those terms evolved into markers of racial difference right alongside American constructions of race that would not become commonplace until the 19th century. Block challenges readers to understand how humoral theory influenced European colonists\u2019 ideas about physical appearance and how the form of the missing person ad reflected and shaped the meanings of signifiers like age, height, and health for colonial subjects.<\/p>\n

Block engages thirty-nine colonial newspapers from all over the across colonial America for her study, drawing from them both quantitative and qualitative data to support her arguments. From their pages, she gleans categories and descriptors used by 18th-century subjects to describe other 18th century subjects. \u201cThrough a range of descriptive choices,\u201d she writes, \u201cadvertisers communicated the features they deemed significant for readers to know and revealed shared assumptions about bodily norms.\u201d(5) Block remains very critical of her sources throughout and highlights both the form and the content of the ads she analyzes. She is well aware that the ads are part of an archive of mastery and makes sure to note this throughout. Block remains clear that the norms she excavates from these advertisements are norms for Anglo-colonizers and takes care to acknowledge African and Native American understandings of physiology. That the descriptors and signifiers she analyzes allow Anglo-colonists to flatten individual human experiences and bolster colonial systems of power is precisely her point.<\/p>\n

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

At the opening of “Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America,” Sharon Block poses two provocative questions: \u201cWhat were the meanings of black, white, and red in the colonial eighteenth century; and how did Anglo-American colonists describe people\u2019s appearance?\u201d (1) To answer these queries Block presents a cultural history race in Britain\u2019s 18th century American colonies.<\/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":[29052,25730,25729,29056,29057],"class_list":["post-56995","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-sharon-block","tag-the-junto","tag-the-junto-a-group-blog-on-early-american-history","tag-vanessa-holden","tag-vanessa-m-holden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56995","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=56995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56996,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56995\/revisions\/56996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}