In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia , an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition's success as being «Black as Coal.» Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons—but neither was the statement that followed: «here, thro' Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men.» The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to...
Arguing that the major hallmarks of Romantic literature—inwardness, emphasis on subjectivity, the individual authorship of selves and texts—were forged during the Enlightenment, Rajani Sudan traces the connections between literary sensibility and British encounters with those persons, ideas, and territories that lay uneasily beyond the national border. The urge to colonize and discover embraced both an interest in foreign «fair exotics» and a deeply rooted sense of their...
