This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Andrew S. Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of eighteenth-century readers. Surveying French and European travelogues, natural histories, works of anatomy, pro- and anti-slavery tracts, philosophical treatises, and literary texts, Curran shows how naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences, describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the eras understanding of black Africans, and charts the shift of the slavery debate from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the 'black body' itself. In tracing this evolution, he shows how blackness changed from a mere descriptor in earlier periods into a thing to be measured, dissected, handled, and often brutalized. Penetrating and comprehensive, The Anatomy of Blackness shows that, far from being a monolithic idea, eighteenth-century Africanist discourse emerged out of a vigorous, varied dialogue that involved missionaries, slavers, colonists, naturalists, anatomists, philosophers, and Africans themselves.
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Tissue Samples in the Land of Conjecture Defining le Nègre The New Africanist Discourse after 1740 The Contexts of Representation Representing Africanist Discourse Anatomizing the History of Blackness 1. Paper Trails: Writing the African, 14501750 The Early Africanists: The Episodic and the Epic Rationalizing Africa The Birth of the Caribbean African Jean-Baptiste Labat Labat on Africa Processing the African Travelogue: Prévost's Histoire générale des voyages Rousseau's Afrique 2. Sameness and Science, 17301750 The Origin of Shared Origins Toward a ""Scientific"" Monogenesis Historicizing the Human in an Era of Empiricism: The Role of the Albino Creating the Blafard Buffonian Monogenesis: The Nègre as Same Blackness Qualified: Breaking down the Nègre The Colonial African and the Rare Buffonian Je 3. The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African ""Ethnography,"" 17501775 The ""Symptoms"" of Blackness: Africanist ""Facts,"" 17501770 Montesquieu and the ""Refutation"" of Difference The Nagging Context of Montesquieu's Antislavery Diatribe Voltaire: The Philosophe as Essentialist Voltaire and the Albino of 1744 Voltaire, the Nègre, and Human Merchandise Processing Africa and Africans in the Encyclopédie The Preternatural History of Black African Difference Teaching Degeneration: Valmont de Bomare's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle 4. The Natural History of Slavery, 17701802 The Hardening of Climate Theory and the Birth of New Racial Categories circa 17701785 Toward a Human Biopolitics circa 17501770 The Politics of Slavery in the Encyclopédie Mercier and Saint-Lambert and the New Natural History The Synchretism of the 1770s: Grappling with ""Nature's Mistreatment"" of the Nègre Anti-slavery Rhetoric in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes The Era of Negrophilia Epilogue: The Natural History of the Noir in an Age of Revolution Coda: Black Africans and the Enlightenment Legacy Notes Works Cited Index
""This is a convincing piece of scholarship... a satisfying and clear analysis of how French writers (among other) constructed images of the African body that reflected, while often simultaneously silencing, the central role played by slavery in attracting European interest to the subject in the first place... This book will be read with interest and profit not only by scholars of the Enlightenment, but also those concerned with the history of racial thinking, slavery, the history of science, and Europe's engagement with the rest of the world.""
