While analyses of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko abound, this edited anthology provides new and fresh insight into both the text and the context of the novella. Derek Hughes seeks to provide a more nuanced reading of “a range of attitudes toward slavery, colonialism, black Africans, and Native Americans” by selecting among late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents ranging from travel narratives to polemical tracts to philosophical ideas about what constitutes the rights of man. The anthology advances the idea that “the oppressions of the seventeenth century were driven by imperatives and anxieties that are not the same as those of more recent times and that it is a mistake to read the earlier period entirely in light of the later one” (xvi). In essence, Hughes recontextualizes slavery discourse through the use of literary and nonliterary sources in order to challenge scholarship that tends to read these texts through the lens of eighteenth-century ideas.

The anthology divides neatly between “text”—selected literary output about slavery—and “context”—works that may have influenced the literature. Hughes's introduction raises a number of interpretive issues that are intended to tie each section of the anthology to the other, such as reading Behn's handling of race against the debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda regarding the humanity of Native Americans. He suggests rather than states the ways in which the primary or “major” texts can be read against the supporting contexts. Fundamental to this study (as the title might suggest) is the construction of “blackness” in the late seventeenth century as a category that was neither clearly defined nor clearly hierarchized to European audiences. Though Oroonoko is really the centerpiece, Hughes includes four key texts for analysis: Henry Neville's Isle of Pines, Aphra Behn's tragedy Abdelazer, in addition to the novella Oroonoko, and Thomas Southerne's dramatic adaptation, Oroonoko. Neville's text has only a tenuous connection with the overall theme of the anthology, but it does provide a very different perspective on sexuality and the idea of “race.” Hughes reads the story of George Pine, who is shipwrecked on a deserted island with four women with whom he proceeds to father many children, as a connection between “primitivism” and “libertinism” (viii). Each of the four mothers, one of whom is “one of the handsomest Blacks,” leads to the formation of different races on the island (15). Hughes uses this text to illustrate that “the intellectual foundations of this pseudo-science had not been established, race primarily meant family, genealogy, or nation” (xii).

Behn's Oroonoko and, to a lesser extent, Abdelazer, provide tempered views of “blackness” in which “the savage and the civilized, the exotic and the familiar constantly change places, in ways that are quite incompatible with fixed notions of racial character” (xxiv). He positions Behn as being “actively uninterested in using the nascent racism of her time” (xxi). Abdelazer, her only tragedy, is based on Thomas Dekker's Lust's Dominion and recounts the political machinations of a Moor in the Spanish court. Unlike Dekkar's blatantly racist text, the “blackness” of Behn's character is less about “racial type” than it is about his “individual” behavior (xxii). Hughes's reading of Behn's and Southerne's Oroonoko refers to the fluidity of racial categorization that leads to what modern audiences would read as an inherent contradiction in seventeenth-century thinking—critique of slaveholding with a tacit approval of slavery. In choosing these particular texts, Hughes contends that these writers “deplored the excesses of the institution rather than the institution itself ” (xxviii). Thus Hughes concludes that seventeenth-century literary output cannot be subjected to analysis using the ideological arguments about race and slavery that would solidify in the centuries to come.

To support his contention about seventeenth-century perceptions of race and slavery, Hughes devotes the second half of the anthology to materials published during the same period that may have influenced these works. Though the major works do not include much about Native Americans, in the section on contexts, Hughes draws from several sources that discuss Native Americans in racialized terminology similar to that used to describe Africans. He includes extracts from José de Acosta, Charles de Rochefort, and Morgan Godwyn about the capabilities of native societies in the New World. He reproduces Montaigne's sophisticated essays “On Cannibals” and “On Coaches” as well as excerpts from English writers like Richard Ligon, Sir William Davenant, and Thomas Tryon, whose works address encounters with the Caribbean. Each of the fifteen pieces in this section is preceded by a short introduction that gives a brief biography of the author and makes a connection to primary sources, albeit mostly to Behn's Oroonoko. Unfortunately, some of the selections are far too brief to offer substantive proof of Hughes's claims. However, the range of sources is quite useful in directing scholars to further research. The third section, in which works discussing colonialism in the New World are excerpted, is far more cohesive and provides a more solid grounding in historical sources for the texts.

Derek Hughes's Versions of Blackness is a useful anthology for the advanced undergraduate or beginning Master's candidate. It successfully reclaims seventeenth-century texts from the more racially charged sociopolitical milieu of the eighteenth century while offering a further nuanced perspective on the ideas of race, slavery, and “blackness” for that time. The short bibliography of primary and secondary sources is quite helpful in directing students of this work to additional research. The specific transatlantic, New World focus of the literary and nonliterary texts makes this anthology useful for students of British colonialism, Restoration literature, and studies of slavery.