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Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley's Early America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Katy L. Chiles
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Abstract

Engaging contemporaneous ideas about how environmental factors could alter the surface of the human body, Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley use language emphasizing the ostensible malleability of physical characteristics—what I call a symbolics of metamorphosis—to depict the formation of racial identities. For Occom, the beliefs his Anglo- and Native American contemporaries held about the status of the “red” Indian enable him to challenge colonial society's contradictory Christian epistemology in his 1772 A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian. In her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley fuses ancient mythological beliefs and natural-historical axioms about the production of poetic genius and dark skin to characterize the black poet as an inevitable outcome rather than an anomalous exception. Drawing on the late-eighteenth-century notion of transformable race, this essay posits a historically specific model of critical race theory for interpreting early American literatures.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1398 - 1417
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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