Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America

Early American Studies

by Sharon Block

In Colonial Complexions , historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists transformed observable characteristics into racist reality. Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily language called race and identity into being before the rise of scientific racism.In the eighteenth century, a multitude of characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions, and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of European-based identities.Colonial Complexions suggests alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American history.

Genres: History, 18th Century

232 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 13, 2018

About the author

Sharon Block is an associate professor of history at the University of California Irvine.

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Colonial Complexions traces the power of bodily description in the creation of early American racial ideologies. Sharon Block is trying to answer two questions: how were the meanings of black, white, and red in the colonial 18th century; and how did Anglo-American colonist describe people's appearance? What triggered Block down this road is the desire to explain the intersections of colonial Anglo-American racial ideologies and physical appearance which led her to question historians' deployment of skin colour categorisations of stable identities.

Block argues that "historians make a mistake if we equate complexion to skin colour to race in the transatlantic world of the pre-revolutionary British colonies. Complexion was neither reduced or separate from skin colour. Complexion allowed viewers to tie bodies to geographic locations, experiences, and ideological and economic purposes."

Block has a short succinct book with a great narrative. Block says her book illustrates that the stories that society tells has the power to mark whose bodies can be possessed, whose are available for others to name and label, and whose are afforded the privilege of individual recognition and self identification.

For my own work, Block has fantastic ideas about advertisements and quantification. Her thinking about ideas of colour and their hardening over time is great for him. The categories that she uses in her appendixes are also really helpful.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction of her book, Block states, “Historians are left to decide how to best represent, yet not endorse, the colonial gaze.” (8) By reflecting on the written descriptions of runaway slaves she chooses to represent the colonial gaze through the medium of language and the construction of racial identity.

In recognition of the power of language, Block writes in her conclusion that “The stories a society tells have the power to mark whose bodies can be possessed, whose are available for others to name and label, and whose are afforded the privilege of individual recognition and self-identification.” (138)

The story Block tells affords historical figures, obscured but for a brief glimpse via the descriptions of others, the chance to have individual recognition. Block’s book is creative, well researched, and offers an inspiring scholarship approach for current and future historians. A must read for scholars of the colonial world and for curious people who wonder how that world continues to shape ours today.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for honors thesis research

[Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting use of runaway slave ads. Her argument was well-formatted and her writing was engaging.