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

327 Pages·2011·6.9 MB·English

by  Curran

The Anatomy of Blackness
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The Anatomy of Blackness
Science & Slavery in
an Age of Enlightenment
a
andrew s. curran
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Curran, Andrew S.
The anatomy of blackness : science and slavery in an age of Enlightenment /
Andrew S. Curran.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0150-8 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-0150-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. French literature—18th century—History. 2. French literature—19th century—
History. 3. Blacks—Race identity. 4. Travel writing—History and criticism.
5. Blacks in literature. 6. Africa—In literature. I. Title.
PQ265.C87 2011
840.9'352996—dc22 2010050254
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
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book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least
30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
To the memory of my father,
Thomas C. Curran
a
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Tissue Samples in the Land of Conjecture 1
Definingle Nègre 6/The New Africanist Discourse after 174011/
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
Africa62/Processing the African Travelogue: Prévost’s Histoire générale des
voyages67/Rousseau’sAfrique70
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 Blafard95/Buffonian Monogenesis: The Nègre as Same 105/
Blackness Qualified: Breaking down the Nègre107/The Colonial African and
the Rare Buffonian Je113
3 The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of
African “Ethnography,” 1750–1775 117
The “Symptoms” of Blackness: Africanist “Facts,” 1750–1770118/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
viii Contents
Albino of 1744142/Voltaire, the Nègre, and Human Merchandise 145/Processing
Africa and Africans in the Encyclopédie149/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
circa1770–1785169/Toward a Human Biopolitics circa 1750–1770176/
The Politics of Slavery in the Encyclopédie181/Mercier and Saint-Lambert and
the New Natural History 186/The Synchretism of the 1770s: Grappling with
“Nature’s Mistreatment” of the Nègre190/Anti-slavery Rhetoric in Raynal’s
Histoiredes deux Indes 194/The Era of Negrophilia 199/Epilogue: The Natural
History of the Noirin an Age of Revolution 204
Coda: Black Africans and the Enlightenment Legacy 216
Notes 225
Works Cited 275
Index 295
Preface
From its inception, I was convinced that this book would require an explana-
tory preface. After all, it confronts the reader with the same set of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century beliefs about black Africans that the Academy has
been deconstructing for the past forty years. The people who ultimately read
this book will often find the unpleasantness of the past in these pages, and
without the same mediation that university professors generally provide their
students as a matter of course.
The Anatomy of Blackness has three overlapping narratives. The first relates
how eighteenth-century naturalists and philosophes drew from travel litera-
ture to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent
human sciences. The second describes how a number of now-forgotten anato-
mists revolutionized the era’s understanding of the black African by empha-
sizing both the supposed liabilities of this group and the corresponding “ad-
vantages” of whiteness. The third charts the shift of the slavery debate itself,
from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the black
body itself.
Not unexpectedly, such an approach reveals more about Europeans (and
their secondary construction of themselves) than it does about real Africans.
Readers should bear in mind that this is not a book about black African agency,
or about how Africans grappled with the realities of European aggression and
mercantile exploitation in Africa. Nor is it a book about how men and women
of African descent undertook their own revolution at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, appropriating and deploying a series of republican ideals that
certainly had not been imagined with them in mind. In a word, this study
focuses on the textualization of the black African.
During the course of this project, several people asked me if I thought my
method might inadvertently “ventriloquize or replicate” some of the era’s
structures of oppression; one person suggested that I should use more sensi-
tive racial or ethnic categories when writing about black Africans. Such “en-