TY  - BOOK
AU  - Block,Sharon
TI  - Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America 
T2  - Early American Studies
SN  - 9780812294934
AV  - E184.A1 
U1  - 305.800973 
PY  - 2018///]
CY  - Philadelphia : 
PB  - University of Pennsylvania Press, 
KW  - Human body and language
KW  - United States
KW  - History
KW  - 18th century
KW  - Human skin color
KW  - Social aspects
KW  - Race awareness
KW  - Racism
KW  - History-United States
KW  - HISTORY / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775)
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - African Studies
KW  - African-American Studies
KW  - American History
KW  - American Studies
N1  - Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; Introduction --; Chapter 1. Complicating Humors and Rethinking Complexion --; Chapter 2. Shaping Bodies in Print: Labor and Health --; Chapter 3. Coloring Bodies: Naturalized Incompatibilities --; Chapter 4. Categorizing Bodies: Race, Place, and the Pursuit of Freedom --; Chapter 5. Written by and on the Body: Racialization of Affects and Effects --; Epilogue --; Appendix 1. Advertisements for Runaways: Sources and Methodology --; Appendix 2. Graphic Overview of Advertisements for Runaways --; Appendix 3. Newspapers with Advertisements for Runaways (1750–75) --; Notes --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access
N2  - 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 described: 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294934
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812294934
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780812294934/original
ER  -