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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, – 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 générale 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,” – 117 The “Symptoms” of Blackness: Africanist “Facts,” 1750–1770 118/Montesquieu and the “Refutation” of Difference 130/The Nagging Context of Montesquieu’s Antislavery Diatribe 133/Voltaire: The Philosophe as Essentialist 137/Voltaire and the viii Contents Albino of 1744 142/Voltaire, the Nègre, and Human Merchandise 145/Processing Africa and Africans in the Encyclopédie 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 ...

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