Reviewed by Catherine Kelly | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Catherine Kelly | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Catherine Kelly, University of Oklahoma

Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. By John Wood Sweet. Early America: History, Context, Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 486 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
John Wood Sweet offers scholars a capacious history of race in the North and a primer for thinking about the relationship between "cultures" (8) and identities, especially ethnic identities. Sweet's study traces the connected stories of Native Americans, English settlers, and African Americans over a century as they sought to define who could and could not lay claim to citizenship, broadly defined. The trajectory of their stories is suggested by the book's section titles: "Coming Together," "Living Together," and "Moving Apart." Building on the growing body of literature that challenges long-standing assumptions about New England's homogeneity and drawing on an impressive array of sources, Sweet offers readers the most comprehensive picture to date of how and why race was implicated in the region's history. Moreover, Sweet places culture, marked by hybridity, paradox, and transformation, at the center of his analysis. He effectively challenges interpretations that reify cultural difference, reduce it to cultural conflict, and then posit it as the source of race and racism. As he astutely observes, "contemporary assumptions about cultural conflict are in large part a legacy of the nineteenth-century theory that national peoples have intrinsic 'folk' cultures—an idea that, despite its patent absurdity, continues to have currency in a variety of cultural nationalist guises" (8). In Sweet's telling racial identities and ideologies are not the de facto result of cultural difference; on the contrary, they emerge as complex responses to physical and especially cultural proximity.	1
Consider, for example, the contest over Rhode Island's Narragansett reservation in the mid-eighteenth century. Various members of the Ninigret family, anxious to consolidate political and economic power, cast themselves as kings, carefully blurring the very real differences between Native American sachems and English princes. The Ninigrets' genteel anglicization, critical to their performances as "Indian kings" (20), was subvented by the sale of tribal lands, usually at rock-bottom prices, to their eager English neighbors. Faced with poverty, dependency, and rapidly dwindling lands, ordinary Narragansett responded by casting themselves as yeomen who "adorned their bodies with manufactured textiles, worked on English farms, were sued in colonial courts, and filled their wigwams with English goods" (43). Though the English were happy to further anglicizing strategies that resulted in cheap land, they were loath to recognize a viable role for the Narragansett as a people in colonial society. As a result discrimination and outright contempt reinforced the Narragansett's identity as Indians who shared the interests of other tribal enclaves. "Ultimately, the process of becoming culturally more like the English made natives more conscious of themselves as members of a distinct group" (43), Sweet concludes.	2
More striking still is Sweet's discussion of Christianity and conversion. He usefully argues that people of color joined New Light and Old Light churches, seeking the fellowship of faith not only in denominations that emphasized egalitarian social change but also in those that elaborated and enforced social hierarchy. Then as now faith need not correlate with social status. Yet regardless of their denominations, "the closer Indians and blacks came to converting and becoming civilized, the more adamant settlers grew about drawing new lines of exclusion" (110). Even Christian celebrities such as Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley quickly discovered that the more demonstrably pious and overtly English they became, the more salient their racial identities appeared to English patrons and observers.	. . .

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