The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

by Andrew S. Curran

Overview

2012 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421409658
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Tissue Samples in the Land of Conjecture 1

Defining le Nègre 6

The New Africanist Discourse after 1740 11

The Contexts of Representation 15

Representing Africanist Discourse 18

Anatomizing the History of Blackness 26

1 Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450-1750 29

The Early Africanists: The Episodic and the Epic 32

Rationalizing Africa 38

The Birth of the Caribbean African 48

Jean-Baptiste Labat 58

Labat on Africa 62

Processing the African Travelogue: Prévost's Histoire générate des voyages 67

Rousseau's Afrique 70

2 Sameness and Science, 1730-1750 74

The Origin of Shared Origins 76

Toward a "Scientific" Monogenesis 79

Historicizing the Human in an Era of Empiricism: The Role of the Albino 87

Creating the Blafard 95

Buffonian Monogenesis: The Nègre as Same 105

Blackness Qualified: Breaking down the Nègre 107

The Colonial African and the Rare Buffonian Je 113

3 The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African "Ethnography," 1750-1775 117

The "Symptoms" of Blackness: Africanist "Facts," 1750-1770 118

Montesquieu and the "Refutation" of Difference 130

The Nagging Context of Montesquieu's Anti-slavery Diatribe 133

Voltaire: The Philosophe as Essentialist 137

Voltaire and the Albino of 1744 142

Voltaire, the Nègre, and Human Merchandise 145

Processing Africa and Africans in the Encyclopédic 149

The Preternatural History of Black African Difference 157

Teaching Degeneration: Valmont de Bomare's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle 162

4 The Natural History of Slavery, 1770-1802 167

The Hardening of Climate Theory and the Birth of New Racial Categories circa 1770-1785 169

Toward a Human Biopolitics circa 1750-1770 176

The Politics of Slavery in the Encyclopédie 181

Mercier and Saint-Lambert and the New Natural History 186

The Synchretism of the 1770s: Grappling with "Nature's Mistreatment" of the Nègre 190

Anti-slavery Rhetoric in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes 194

The Era of Negrophilia 199

Epilogue: The Natural History of the Noir in an Age of Revolution 204

Coda: Black Africans and the Enlightenment Legacy 216

Notes 225

Works Cited 275

Index 295

What People are Saying About This

Lynn Festa

Wide-ranging, well-researched, and compellingly argued, The Anatomy of Blackness makes a substantial and valuable contribution to our understanding of the complexities of Enlightenment theories of racial difference. Curran's turn from the linear, figurehead-driven histories that describe the crystallization of the concept of race within classification systems to the halting, uncertain elaboration of environmentalist and anatomically based explanations throughout the period represents an important shift in the ways these questions have been treated.

— Lynn Festa, author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Laurent Dubois

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

Christopher L. Miller

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

From the Publisher

Wide-ranging, well-researched, and compellingly argued, The Anatomy of Blackness makes a substantial and valuable contribution to our understanding of the complexities of Enlightenment theories of racial difference. Curran's turn from the linear, figurehead-driven histories that describe the crystallization of the concept of race within classification systems to the halting, uncertain elaboration of environmentalist and anatomically based explanations throughout the period represents an important shift in the ways these questions have been treated.
—Lynn Festa, author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

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

The most comprehensive analysis of Enlightenment science of race since Michele Duchet's Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières. Curran's careful attention to the emerging sciences of dermal anatomy and albinism highlight tensions between environmentalist and essential explanations of racial difference in a wide range of canonical and understudied eighteenth-century texts, within the wider contexts of European colonialism, slavery, and abolitionism.
—Sue Peabody, author of "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime

Sue Peabody

The most comprehensive analysis of Enlightenment science of race since Michele Duchet's Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières. Curran's careful attention to the emerging sciences of dermal anatomy and albinism highlight tensions between environmentalist and essential explanations of racial difference in a wide range of canonical and understudied eighteenth-century texts, within the wider contexts of European colonialism, slavery, and abolitionism.

— Sue Peabody, author of "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime

Editorial Reviews

This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of 'Blackness.'
—Marshall Poe, New Books in History

Curran's approach to intellectual history is an exciting one that transcends the oft-written biographies and other author-centered discussions. His focus on trends and his immersion in the writings of the time creates an accurate rather than anachronistic mindset, which is truly useful for historians.
—Sarah Goodwin, Alpata: A Journal of History

A definitive statement on the complex, painful, and richly revealing topic of how the major figures of the French Enlightenment reacted to the enslavement of black Africans, often to their discredit. The fields of race studies and of Enlightenment studies are more than ready to embrace the type of analysis in which Curran engages, and all the more so in that his book is beautifully written and illustrated.
—Mary McAlpin, Symposium

A highly intelligent book on an important topic. The breadth of Andrew Curran's knowledge about the Enlightenment is astonishing . . . The book makes the convincing point not only that Africa is a major focus in the Enlightenment's imagination, but also that natural history and anthropology are central to understanding not only its scientific agenda, but also its humanitarian politics.
—Carl Niekerk, Centaurus

This engrossing, comprehensive study traces 18th-century European thought on anatomical blackness of Africans . . . Curran's ability to dissect and explain complicated arguments of the period's major thinkers is impressive.
—Choice

Curran's Francotropism and medical background enable him to develop insights that should prove important to the ongoing transnationalization and discipline-blurring of literary and cultural studies.
—Ian Finseth, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

This study reveals with striking clarity the complex interaction of the science of human difference in this period with other strands of Enlightenment thought as well as the practices of (French) slave trading and colonial slavery.
—Carolyn Vellenga Berman, H-France

A major contribution to the study of the uses of natural history, the presence and absence of universalism in the Enlightenment, and the origins of modern racial thought.
—Martin S. Staum, H-France

Curran has produced a powerful argument about how Europeans defined not only Africans but themselves in the early modern period; about how depictions of the 'other' furnished slavers and planters with the necessary intellectual justifications for slavery; about how natural science has the (frightening) ability to define both body and soul.
—Jeremy L. Caradonna, H-France

The Anatomy of Blackness is an intense and challenging reading experience, but one that certainly repays the effort.
—Stephen Kenny, Reviews in History

The rise of racial science in the late eighteenth century has become a flourishing field of investigation over the past twenty or so years. Andrew S. Curran's The Anatomy of Blackness is a significant contribution to this scholarship. . . In trying to understand why these events unfolded so differently in each nation, Andrew Curran's study has greatly enlarged our knowledge of an emergent race science in "enlightened" France.
—Nicholas Hudson, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

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.
—Rebecca Earle, European History Quarterly

From the Publisher

The rise of racial science in the late eighteenth century has become a flourishing field of investigation over the past twenty or so years. Andrew S. Curran's The Anatomy of Blackness is a significant contribution to this scholarship. . . In trying to understand why these events unfolded so differently in each nation, Andrew Curran's study has greatly enlarged our knowledge of an emergent race science in "enlightened" France.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Nicholas Hudson

A definitive statement on the complex, painful, and richly revealing topic of how the major figures of the French Enlightenment reacted to the enslavement of black Africans, often to their discredit. The fields of race studies and of Enlightenment studies are more than ready to embrace the type of analysis in which Curran engages, and all the more so in that his book is beautifully written and illustrated.

Symposium - Mary McAlpin

Curran's approach to intellectual history is an exciting one that transcends the oft-written biographies and other author-centered discussions. His focus on trends and his immersion in the writings of the time creates an accurate rather than anachronistic mindset, which is truly useful for historians.

Alpata: A Journal of History - Sarah Goodwin

A highly intelligent book on an important topic. The breadth of Andrew Curran's knowledge about the Enlightenment is astonishing . . . The book makes the convincing point not only that Africa is a major focus in the Enlightenment's imagination, but also that natural history and anthropology are central to understanding not only its scientific agenda, but also its humanitarian politics.

Centaurus - Carl Niekerk

This study reveals with striking clarity the complex interaction of the science of human difference in this period with other strands of Enlightenment thought as well as the practices of (French) slave trading and colonial slavery.

H-France - Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Curran has produced a powerful argument about how Europeans defined not only Africans but themselves in the early modern period; about how depictions of the 'other' furnished slavers and planters with the necessary intellectual justifications for slavery; about how natural science has the (frightening) ability to define both body and soul.

H-France - Jeremy L. Caradonna

This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of 'Blackness.'

New Books in History - Marshall Poe

"This engrossing, comprehensive study traces 18th-century European thought on anatomical blackness of Africans... Curran's ability to dissect and explain complicated arguments of the period's major thinkers is impressive."

Choice

Curran has produced a powerful argument about how Europeans defined not only Africans but themselves in the early modern period; about how depictions of the 'other' furnished slavers and planters with the necessary intellectual justifications for slavery; about how natural science has the (frightening) ability to define both body and soul.

— Jeremy L. Caradonna

H-France

Curran's Francotropism and medical background enable him to develop insights that should prove important to the ongoing transnationalization and discipline-blurring of literary and cultural studies.

— Ian Finseth

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

A highly intelligent book on an important topic. The breadth of Andrew Curran's knowledge about the Enlightenment is astonishing... The book makes the convincing point not only that Africa is a major focus in the Enlightenment's imagination, but also that natural history and anthropology are central to understanding not only its scientific agenda, but also its humanitarian politics.

— Carl Niekerk

Centaurus

A definitive statement on the complex, painful, and richly revealing topic of how the major figures of the French Enlightenment reacted to the enslavement of black Africans, often to their discredit. The fields of race studies and of Enlightenment studies are more than ready to embrace the type of analysis in which Curran engages, and all the more so in that his book is beautifully written and illustrated..

— Mary McAlpin

Symposium

Curran's approach to intellectual history is an exciting one that transcends the oft-written biographies and other author-centered discussions. His focus on trends and his immersion in the writings of the time creates an accurate rather than anachronistic mindset, which is truly useful for historians.

— Sarah Goodwin

Alpata: A Journal of History

This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of 'Blackness.'

— Marshall Poe

New Books in History

Curran's Francotropism and medical background enable him to develop insights that should prove important to the ongoing transnationalization and discipline-blurring of literary and cultural studies.

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment - Ian Finseth

The Anatomy of Blackness is an intense and challenging reading experience, but one that certainly repays the effort.

Reviews in History - Stephen Kenny

A major contribution to the study of the uses of natural history, the presence and absence of universalism in the Enlightenment, and the origins of modern racial thought.

H-France - Martin S. Staum

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.

European History Quarterly - Rebecca Earle