Mark M. Smith

Our search for a reliable "perspective", inquiring "focus," and analytical "lens" with which to understand the history of "race" betrays our occularcentrism and Enlightenment conceits. But the preference for "seeing" race is as much a social construction as "race" itself. As a growing literature on the anthropology of the senses suggests, there is no compelling reason for historians to fixate on what was seen rather than heard, smelled, tasted, and touched; nor is there any compelling reason to treat the senses as unchanging "natural" endowments. Remembering that "race" has a sensory history, that it was mediated and articulated in ways in addition to seeing helps profile ordinarily hidden dimensions of racial thought and racism. Taking them seriously, especially in the context of southern history, helps us appreciate just how unthinkingly race is made, how racism is learned, and how the ideology of race has arisen historically.

Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His major publications include Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which received the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the annual book prize of the South Carolina Historical Society; Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and, most recently, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.