Download Genealogies of Genius 1st Edition Joyce E. Chaplin ebook All Chapters PDF
Download Genealogies of Genius 1st Edition Joyce E. Chaplin ebook All Chapters PDF
com
https://textbookfull.com/product/genealogies-of-
genius-1st-edition-joyce-e-chaplin/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-unquiet-genius-1st-edition-dyer-
glenn/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/wordpress-genius-guide-coll/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/indo-caribbean-feminist-thought-
genealogies-theories-enactments-1st-edition-gabrielle-jamela-hosein/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/ritwik-ghatak-and-the-cinema-of-
praxis-culture-aesthetics-and-vision-diamond-oberoi-vahali/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/pearson-ugc-net-slet-general-paper-i-
teaching-research-aptitude-2nd-edition-k-v-s-madaan/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/reading-the-late-byzantine-romance-a-
handbook-adam-j-goldwyn/
textbookfull.com
https://textbookfull.com/product/eichmann-and-the-destruction-of-
hungarian-jewry-1st-edition-braham-randolph-l/
textbookfull.com
Of Storms and Triumphs Thunderbird Academy 3 1st Edition
Valia Lind
https://textbookfull.com/product/of-storms-and-triumphs-thunderbird-
academy-3-1st-edition-valia-lind/
textbookfull.com
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Series Editors
Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University
Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University
Javed Majeed, King’s College, London
The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three pri-
mary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches,
thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage inter-
disciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field,
both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to
work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and
the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; reli-
gion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychol-
ogy; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but also
Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes
both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural
exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encom-
passes research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad
works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books
in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous
contextual analysis.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment
By Shompa Lahiri
The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe
By Paul Stock
Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East
By Yaseen Noorani
Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context
By Scott Breuninger
The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of
Practice
By Mark Gamsa
Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain
By Lynn Zastoupil
Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative
By Jay Sherry
Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire
Edited by Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter
Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India
By Jack Harrington
The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century
Edited by Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism
By K. Steven Vincent
The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values
By Lisa Szefel
Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India
Edited by Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali
The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840
By Julia Berest
Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the
Making of Protestant Identity
By Hephzibah Israel
Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the
Nineteenth Century
By Kathrin Levitan
Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment
Edited by Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning
The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British
Empire
By Peder Roberts
The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology,
1780–1880
By Rama Sundari Mantena
Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal
By Arie Dubnov
At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History
By Steven E. Aschheim
Making British Indian Fictions: 1772–1823
By Ashok Malhotra
Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 1890–1933
By Colin Loader
Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview
Edited by Todd H. Weir
The French Enlightenment and Its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the
Invention of the Human Sciences
By David Allen Harvey
Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present
Edited by Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin
History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past
Edited by Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress
By Silvia Sebastiani
Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation, 1911–1938
By Thomas Ort
Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and
Cross-Cultural Communication
By Bob van der Linden
Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel,
1790–1830
By Angela Byrne
Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle
Russia
By Anna Fishzon
Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe
Edited by Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor
The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi
Biopolitics
By Nitzan Lebovic
The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea
By Tim Lacy
German Freedom and the Greek Ideal: The Cultural Legacy from Goethe to Mann
By William J. McGrath and Edited by Celia Applegate, Stephanie Frontz, and
Suzanne Marchand
Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism, and Apocalypse in Italian Culture
Edited by Fabrizio De Donno and Simon Gilson
Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany,
1760–1795
By László Kontler
Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View
Edited by László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and
Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic
By Trygve Throntveit
The Uses of Space in Early Modern History
Edited by Paul Stock
Genealogies of Genius
Edited by Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
Genealogies of Genius
Edited by
ISBN: 978-1-349-49764-2
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–49767–3
DOI: 10.1057/9781137497673
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave Macmillan®,
a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number
785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Genealogies of genius / [edited by] Joyce E. Chaplin and
Darrin M. McMahon.
pages cm.—(Palgrave studies in cultural and intellectual history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Genius—History. I. Chaplin, Joyce E., editor.
BF412.G385 2015
153.9⬘8—dc23 2015019296
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
Contents
List of Figures ix
1 Introduction 1
Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
vii
viii Contents
Index 185
Figures
ix
Visit https://textbookfull.com
now to explore a rich
collection of eBooks, textbook
and enjoy exciting offers!
1
Introduction
Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
1
2 Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently
identified by modern science, but instead it is a categorical mode of assessing
human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and
resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the
societies in which it has had a historical presence.
It is precisely because of the varying historical manifestations of genius
that we suggest it had multiple genealogies, even as its branching lines of
descent can be traced to a common ancestor. That shared ancestry is at least
as complex as it is long, but its main developments occurred in three phases
during the ancient, early modern, and modern eras. In the first phase, the
ancient Greeks referred to daimones (demons)—what in Latin would be called
a genius—to describe a type of divinity that offered protection or inspiration.
Such entities could occupy hearth and household, they could accompany
individuals into workshops or onto battlefields, or they could hover over fam-
ilies, communities, and even entire nations. Daimones might be “demonic”
in the present and negative sense of that word, or they could be what later
peoples would think of as angelic; the idea of having two guiding daimones,
good and evil, itself comes from antiquity. For the Romans, a genius origi-
nally meant this kind of deity, though gradually the term began to imply not
just the origin of the divine force that possessed one but also the gift that
an individual possessed. In Roman times (and here we see one origin of a
long-standing and insidious prejudice), only men were thought to possess a
genius. All men had a genius for something, which gave shape to their individ-
ual character, but the greatest individuals could lay claim to a superior force
of this kind—what Cicero, in describing the daimonion or “little demon” of
Socrates, called the philosopher’s quiddam divinum, his “divine something.”
That mysterious force was what set a man such as Socrates—said by the oracle
at Delphi to have been the wisest who lived—apart from all others. It was the
supernatural source that gave him superhuman, even godlike, powers.
The eventual dominance of Christianity in Europe did not dispel these
associations, nor did it do away with the name or the concept of the pagan
genius. Although Christian monotheism in its western and eastern manifesta-
tions certainly discouraged open acceptance of blessings that did not come
from the Trinity, faith in interventions from angels, appeals to patron saints,
and fear of demonic influence bore more than passing resemblances to the
pagan beliefs that had preceded them. In short, the daimones and genii sur-
vived.4 Well into the seventeenth century, European dictionaries bore testi-
mony to that fact, recording, like Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall of
Hard Usual English Words (1604), that genius implied “the angell that waits on
man, be it a good or evil angell.”5
Genius as a notion that bore a more direct relationship to the modern
understanding of individuals of superior creative or intellectual endowments
began to emerge only gradually in the early modern period and rose to prom-
inence in the eighteenth century. During the Renaissance, the elision of the
word genius with ingenium, a classical Latin term for natural talent or ability,
began to articulate the possibility that human beings could actually possess
Introduction 3
godlike abilities, not just borrow them or receive them via divine inspira-
tion or bestowal.6 “Genius,” that is to say, began to imply a kind of superior
human mind, an understanding that gained widespread acceptance during
the eighteenth century, when illustrious individuals were celebrated as gen-
iuses themselves, persons who embodied the force of genius.
Indeed, whatever the place of reason in the Enlightenment, and despite
that era’s amply noted liberationist tendencies in political philosophy and
actual reform, it was precisely during this period that the genius figure
achieved prominence as a member of a kind of supra-human elite with god-
like capacities that seemed to surpass ordinary human reason. That may have
been gratifying to the early living exemplars—almost exclusively white men
of European origin—though genius, like sainthood, was most often conferred
after the fact. Still, it is from contemporary descriptions that we inherit the
designation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, as a genius in letters, Isaac
Newton or Benjamin Franklin as geniuses in natural science, or Napoleon
Bonaparte as a genius in statecraft and war. This novel meaning of genius as a
human individual of original and exalted powers was also, in the eighteenth
century, extended backward in time, bestowed upon the likes of Homer or
William Shakespeare, neither of whom would have recognized the label in
its new form, however convinced the latter may have been of his “ingenuity”
and “genius” for playmaking.7
But it was really only during the modern period, the nineteenth century
and continuing into the twentieth, that geniuses acquired the full range and
complement of associations they now most commonly share. The genius
became in this period a human paragon—unique, exceptional, and one of a
kind—and yet somehow multiplying in ever-greater numbers and across an
expanding set of domains. The proliferation was first apparent in terms of
Romantic definitions of the individual, and especially the artist, as beyond
human typicality. That view endorsed a strong sense of individual differ-
entiation, indeed of individualism as essential to the human personality—
any personality. But geniuses were deemed more individual than ordinary
human beings, less likely to think and act by established conventions and
norms, genuinely original and so often eccentric, or even mad.8 Geniuses
were imagined as lawgivers and lawmakers (at times lawbreakers) who chal-
lenged established authorities in art and thought and were believed to fol-
low a higher law. And they were driven by powerful energies and an intense
capacity for sustained concentration and labor.
As if to make genius indelible, beyond any human ability to acquire or alter
it, nature was assigned a fundamental role in governing human experience
(and determining human aptitude). That designation of genius as deeply nat-
ural grounded it within each person who had it, or supplied him (typically)
with an intensity of knowledge from without, as in Wordsworth’s “impulse
from a vernal wood.” And it was precisely because of their engagement with
nature, with universal truths based in materiality, that many more scien-
tists joined artists as the kinds of people thought most likely to personify
genius, just as they increasingly played a role—in fields such as phrenology,
4 Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
And yet these same conjectures beg new questions. Future research might,
for instance, draw comparisons with the understandings of divine protec-
tion (and inspiration) that extended well beyond the classical world to Africa
and much of the ancient Near East, if not farther still. The old correlation
between the West and modernity, moreover, of which increasing social and
political equality has been a part, is itself suspicious. It may be an artifact of
historiography rather than a fixed truth of history. Given that a steady and
straightforward trajectory toward human equality is no longer assumed for
the West (as this volume’s essays themselves make clear), it is possible that
nations and cultures that had even less linear histories of democracy were,
nevertheless, incubators of concepts similar to that of genius. In any case,
virtually all societies possess conceptions of intellectual, artistic, or inven-
tive/creative heroism. In what ways are they comparable to the western para-
gon of genius, and how did they evolve in different social, religious, and
economic contexts? The circulation of western ideas of genius to other parts
of the world, moreover, and the subsequent patterns of cultural uptake, criti-
cism, rejection, or modification, is a subject ripe for further exploration. It is
our hope that future scholarship on the category of genius will take up some
of these unexplored possibilities.
Finally, a word of thanks is due to the Huntington Library in Pasadena,
California, and particularly to its successive directors of research, Robert C.
Ritchie and Steve Hindle, who kindly allowed us to convene the majority
of this volume’s contributors for two days of fascinating discussions in the
spring of 2012. It became very apparent to us there that the subject of genius
has the capacity to stimulate passionate interest and exchange. We hope the
essays in this volume will do the same.
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, Geniuses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans.
Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 3–4.
2 . Lewis M. Terman, ed., Genetic Studies of Genius, 5 vols. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1925–1959), 1: v.
3. The seminal study is Edgar Zilsel’s Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffes: Ein Beitrag zur
Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1926). See
also Penelope Murray, ed., Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989);
Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius, ed. Michael Schröter (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993); Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical
Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jochen
Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und
Politik, 1750–1945, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2004). Most recently, the two
editors of this volume have published studies on the subject: Joyce E. Chaplin, The First
Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York: Basic Books,
2006); Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books,
2013).
4. The story of the transmutation of the ancient genii into Christian and modern forms of
spiritual guardians is told in McMahon, Divine Fury, esp. chs. 1–2. See also Jane Chance
Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1975), and Jean-Patrice Boudet, Philippe Faure, and Christian Renoux,
Introduction 9
eds., De Socrate à Tintin: Anges gardiens et démons familiers de l’Antiquité à nos jours
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011).
5. Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words (1604), a facsimile
reproduction with an introduction by Robert A. Peters (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), 61.
6. On ingenium and the fusion of genius and ingenium, see Zilsel, Die Enstehung des
Geniebegriffes, 265–96; Harald Weinrich, “Ingenium,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der
Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, 13 vols. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007), 4: 36–63, and
the discussion in the text and appendix of ingenium in Patricia Emison’s Creating the
“Divine” Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
7. See Chaplin, First Scientific American, 1–3, 134–36; 342; Fred Inglis, A Short History of
Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 37–73; McMahon, Divine
Fury, ch. 3, and Jonathan Bates, The Genius of Shakespeare (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 6 (“The Original Genius”).
8. References to the extensive literature on the perceived connection between genius and
madness will be found in the essays that follow. A somewhat dated, but still essential,
place to begin for the modern period is George Becker, The Mad Genius Controversy: A
Study in the Sociology of Deviance (London: Sage, 1978).
9. Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques: Aux origines de la célébrité (1750–1850) (Paris: Fayard,
2014), and David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity,
and Politics (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2005).
10. McMahon, Divine Fury, ch. 5. On the fascination with the brains of geniuses, see Michael
Hagner’s excellent Geniale Gehirne: Zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2007).
11. Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion: Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal,
intro. Johann Dvorak (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990 [1917]); Nathalie Heinich, The Glory
of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration, trans. Paul Leduc Browne (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996); Julia Barbara Köhne, Geniekult in Geisteswissenschaften
und Literaturen um 1900 und seine filmischen Adaptionen (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2014).
12 . Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
210–11.
13. For a broad overview of scholarly (and other) attempts to study genius, see Darrin M.
McMahon, “Where Have All the Geniuses Gone?,” The Chronicle Review, October 21, 2013.
14. See, for example, Hans Jürgen Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), or the prolific body of work on genius
and creativity by the psychologist Dean Keith Simonton.
15. A notable exception is Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002).
16. Noteworthy examples of this literature include Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius:
Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Andrew
Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999); Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein and the Problem of “Genius”
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2000); Peter Kivy, The Possessor and the
Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001).
17. In addition to the historical works already cited, see Kathleen Kete, Making Way for
Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the Old Regime to the New (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2012); Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of
Modern Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Patricia Fara, Newton: The
Making of a Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
18. For a discussion of the role of commerce, see John Hope Mason, The Value of Creativity:
The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), esp. chs.
4–6. On commerce and religion, see McMahon, Divine Fury, esp. 5–6, 71–75.
19. See, for example, Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and
10 Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425–48; Zeynep Tenger and Paul Trolander,
“Genius versus Capital: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Genius and Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations,” Modern Language Quarterly 55 (1994): 169–89; Carla Hesse, “The
Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 B.C.–A.D. 2000: An Idea in the Balance,” Daedalus
131 (2002): 26–45.
Visit https://textbookfull.com
now to explore a rich
collection of eBooks, textbook
and enjoy exciting offers!
2
The Problem of Genius in the Age of
Slavery
Joyce E. Chaplin
11
12 Joyce E. Chaplin
talent, so far above the average that she or he is qualified to enter a pantheon,
a short list of extraordinary worthies and their amazing works. In those terms,
one is supposed to ask, does Wheatley deserve to be placed alongside Sappho,
Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickinson, and so on? Or was Sancho, in his well-
meaning and protective rage about her, instead exaggerating her talents?2
One difficulty with this level of debate is that it does not bother to recover
what Sancho, or any of his contemporaries, might have meant by using the
word “genius,” which did not carry the same meaning for him as it might
for whoever would, today, confidently call Shakespeare a genius. What cul-
tural work, exactly, did the word “genius” perform, in English, during the
late eighteenth century, when it was used to describe a person of sub-Saha-
ran African descent, a person who either was in or had only recently been
released from bondage?
I interrogate the significance of Sancho and others in the late eighteenth
century who put “genius” in proximity not only to slavery but, more specifi-
cally, to the chattel slavery that existed in the new world. And I do so to argue
that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, chattel bondage based on
racism and genius as an extraordinary human condition invoked statuses
that were strangely similar. Each state was irresistible and involuntary; each
also delivered its human subjects into a hierarchy. Both “race” and “genius”
implied that people became what they were despite their willed intentions,
and each suggested a kind of inequality. That was a problem. If someone
disapproved of slavery because it used racist criteria to reduce human beings
to a state of dependence that was corrupt, if not sinful, how then could they
applaud instances of genius, which similarly supposed that unequal abilities
might be implanted in humans from their birth within places or circum-
stances more or less conducive to genius, or perhaps even descend through
certain lineages? If superior merit could be thus fixed within specific places
or lineages, why not inferior statuses?
Although it had always had its critics, racially defined chattel slavery was
only beginning in the eighteenth century to be publicly contested as unjust,
and therefore defined as an injustice that would require substantial changes
in law and society. Those who undertook the contestation were aware that
they were up against centuries of arguments that social status (and concomi-
tant levels of privilege and respect) could be determined by how, where, and
to whom a person was born. Meanwhile, genius was beginning to signify a
human capacity that sprang from some mysteriously endowed ability, which
echoed the divinely instilled kind of genius that had once been conveyed by
the word, yet was now thought to be something within human nature, if only
among a minority of human beings.
All of this is to say that the phrase “genius in bondage” is particularly fas-
cinating for its internal tension. Genius seems revolutionary, in the same
way that contestation over the justice of fixed human statuses was revolu-
tionary. Racially defined arguments for slavery seem to be the opposite. And
yet this trio of ideas coexisted historically, as examples of how the likeli-
hood of human equality seemed debatable, indeed, was debated. There
The Problem of Genius in the Age of Slavery 13
if not beyond. This last usage is particularly relevant for the history of rac-
ism. Although definitions of human races as constituted through lineage may
have attached racial characteristics to people in an inescapable way, a cor-
responding idea that different human races resulted from long adaptation to
particular places made it seem that the consequences of such physical mold-
ing could not be undone, except over many if not dozens of generations.
The ostensible slowness of that process was hardly likely to imply that the
national genius of anyone would be altered on a time-scale of significance to
workaday political and legal regimes.8
Finally, “genius” was becoming a noun applied to individual humans. In
this way, it acquired the common definition still used today, with various
atypical people being described as geniuses, usually positively. The newer
definition by no means replaced the older ones—at first, it simply augmented
them. That trend probably explains why the Google Ngram for the word
“genius,” in English, shows an impressive eighteenth-century spike, with use
of the word trending upward beginning around 1750, peaking in the 1770s,
and commencing a decline around 1800. It would be hard to argue that one
comprehension of genius was suddenly generating all of these “hits”; it is
more credible that multiple iterations of them were doing that together, and
that once the meaning of the word narrowed, use of it dwindled.9
That this was an ongoing and productively incomplete transition during
the long eighteenth century, and of particular relevance to the Atlantic soci-
eties built upon slavery, may also be seen in a keyword search of the Early
American Imprints database of printed material from colonial British America
and then the independent early American republic. Plug the word “genius”
into the database and you generate 101 hits; put in the phrase “a genius,”
and you see only two results, and these direct you to two different editions
of the same work. This is of course a rough measure, and yet that 101 to 2
ratio at least hints that, however much genius was beginning to indicate an
extraordinary kind of person, it was still mostly used as a modifier in order to
designate something characteristic of a nation or an individual. But these ver-
bal proportions beg a question: how was the older meaning of genius being
transformed by the newer one in order to designate a personal characteristic
perhaps only found in certain exceptional individuals?10
Tracing that shift would indicate the extent to which the ingenuity that
might have been present in many kinds of people—high born or low born;
male or female; enslaved or free; European or not—was turning into some-
thing reserved only to a particular sort of person. That paragon existed
among a minority or even among an elite. He (but maybe sometimes she) was
a leader who should not be made to follow others.
In English, descriptions of genius as existing within some state of bondage
had at first described white people, especially Europeans who found them-
selves subjected to political or confessional tyranny. Thus the dedication to
Samuel Pufendorf’s 1698 work, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in
Reference to Civil Society, asked, in relation to religious intolerance, “How much
more in-supportable must the Slavery of the Mind be to a sublime Genius,
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
Kellett, Sgt. F., M.S.M.
Sloan, R.Q.M.S. R., M.S.M.
Kelsey, R.Q.M.S. C. (F.).
Morris, Sgt. W., M.M. (F.).
Robinson, L.-Cpl. J. (F.).
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks
Officers
Other Ranks