The Aesthetic Life of Racism: Figuring Humanity in the 1810s

Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.