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

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/iss070

1759-1090

Ian Finseth,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

In this deeply researched study, Andrew Curran provides an intellectual history of racial thought in the European Enlightenment extending from fifteenth-century Portuguese travel narratives through the Haitian Revolution. His primary emphasis is on the French philosophes and natural historians in the eighteenth century who, in dialogue and debate with one another, sought to explain the origins and nature of the nègre (i.e. the black African), and in doing so helped shape the contemporary biopolitics of human bondage. Much of this territory, at least in its broad outlines, will be familiar to those who have studied race, slavery, and the Enlightenment. In fact, one might be forgiven for wondering why we need yet another study of eighteenth-century racial pseudoscience with all its spurious “discoveries,” its regurgitation of falsehood, and its preposterous theorizing about non-Europeans. Still, there are three related reasons to welcome Curran's book. First, he adds great texture to the usual narrative of the Enlightenment's unholy embrace of racialized natural science, moving beyond the usual suspects like Diderot, Buffon, and Montesquieu to head into the nooks and crannies of early racial thought—illuminating connections, tracing influences, clearing up misconceptions. Second, 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; in addition to specialists in race and slavery, scholars working in science studies, early natural history, and the history of philosophy will find much of value in The Anatomy of Blackness. Third, Curran demolishes any remaining suspicion that Enlightenment thought was some kind of monolith; rather, it appears as a nuanced, highly idiosyncratic intellectual field shaped by individual personalities and interests, with no clear relationship between philosophical and political commitments.