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 era's 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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Curran beautifully illuminates and analyzes the complex field of Enlightenment-era thought on race, and shows how it shaped the broader society and culture. An exemplary work of intellectual, literary and cultural history." (Laurent Dubois, coeditor of Origins of the Black Atlantic) "Curran offers a more comprehensive view of this subject than anyone before him: showing how the slave islands of the Caribbean were, in effect, laboratories in which Europeans studied Africans; how sameness and difference chased each other in a hermeneutic circle from which we have still not entirely escaped. The Anatomy of Blackness combines meticulous, original scholarship with unflinching analytical judgments." (Christopher L. Miller, author of The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade)"
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Illustrationen
29 s/w Abbildungen
29 Illustrations, black and white
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Dicke: 26 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-4214-0150-8 (9781421401508)
DOI
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Andrew S. Curran is a professor of French at Wesleyan University and a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine in the history of medicine. He is the author of Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe.
Autor*in
Wesleyan University
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tissue Samples in the Land of Conjecture
Defining le Negre
The New Africanist Discourse after 1740
The Contexts of Representation
Representing Africanist Discourse
Anatomizing the History of Blackness
1. Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450-1750
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: Prevost's Histoire generale des voyages
Rousseau's Afrique
2. Sameness and Science, 1730-1750
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 Negre as Same
Blackness Qualified: Breaking down the Negre
The Colonial African and the Rare Buffonian Je
3. The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African "Ethnography," 1750-1775
The "Symptoms" of Blackness: Africanist "Facts," 1750-1770
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 Negre, and Human Merchandise
Processing Africa and Africans in the Encyclopedie
The Preternatural History of Black African Difference
Teaching Degeneration: Valmont de Bomare's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle
4. The Natural History of Slavery, 1770-1802
The Hardening of Climate Theory and the Birth of New Racial Categories circa 1770-1785
Toward a Human Biopolitics circa 1750-1770
The Politics of Slavery in the Encyclopedie
Mercier and Saint-Lambert and the New Natural History
The Synchretism of the 1770s: Grappling with "Nature's Mistreatment" of the Negre
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
