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

Preface

Preface From its inception, I was convinced that this book would require an explanatory preface. After all, it confronts the reader with the same set of eighteenthand 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 literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences. The second describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era’s understanding of the black African by emphasizing both the supposed liabilities of this group and the corresponding “advantages ” 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 eighteenth 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 sensitive racial or ethnic categories when writing about black Africans. Such “en- x Preface lightened” terminology, of course, serves a number of worthwhile functions in contemporary society. Not only do these expressions explicitly acknowledge the right of ethnic or racial groups to choose their own names; they also allow these same constituencies to construct their identities as they see fit. But progressive terminology is, alas, poorly suited to a study that seeks to recover the full texture of what French eighteenth-century thinkers referred to as the nègre. And this brings me to the wounding one-syllable word that I have just typed: nègre. In his now well known book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy explains that his primary intention in examining this derogatory term was to put “a tracer on [it]” in order to “report on its use, and assess the controversies to which it gives rise.”1 While Kennedy’s combination of history and individual testimony differs from my own approach, his desire to force his reader to think through the content and contexts of racialized terms certainly echoes my intent as well. Like Kennedy, I have avoided both euphemism and paraphrasing when citing eighteenth-century writers. I have, for example, specifically steered clear of translating nègre into “Negro,” because to do so would be to inflect what was a French and therefore Catholic-inspired construct with its British-Protestant equivalent. Likewise, in keeping with eighteenth-century typography and practice, I generally do not capitalize nègre, which would confer a false and misleading dignity on a concept that often had very little at the time.2 In fact, I capitalize nègre only when this is unequivocally done in the text being discussed. This is the case, for example, in Abbé Henri Grégroire’s De la litt érature des Nègres (1808), where capitalization presumably serves the author’s larger politics of humanization. This also seems to obtain when the word nègre was cited alongside other, more often capitalized, human categories, such as Chinois. Similarly, in discussing eighteenth-century thinkers, I have also employed the specific language that they themselves used to refer to the so-called nègre. When I cite the monogenist Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis’s discussion of the black African, for example, I use the term “variety.” When I quote from Voltaire , I cite the more trenchant markers that he used, “race” or “species.” Although perhaps initially a little confusing, this ultimately allows the reader to absorb the meanings of these troublesome categories (variety, race, species) within the specific...