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

Cover -- Contents -- 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, 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: Prévost's Histoire générale 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 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," 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 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, 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 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 -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.

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.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.