ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of some of the most influential ways by which human difference was represented in eighteenth-century anglophone literature by both White and global-majority writers. It first outlines five common ways of writing “race”: climatic theory; Biblical explanations; civilizational and stadial thought; the “Great Chain of Being”; and polygenism. It then examines how these ideas were adopted, adapted, and challenged through the representation of some Africans as “exceptional.” Finally, it approaches reader responses to “racial” exceptionalism by focusing on Black and White writers’ representations of the poet Phillis Wheatley as an extraordinary “genius in bondage.”
