The Black African in Enlightenment Cultures of Writing

Both of these books illuminate the role of enslaved Africans in Europeans’ creation of knowledge and prestige, and they explore in distinctive ways paradoxes of Enlightenment self-fashioning. Anatomy of Blackness features “the textualization of the black African” (xi), especially making 1730–1790 come alive decade by decade, publication by publication, as a period in which scientific writers were obsessed with determining the nature of the African. French anatomists played a leading role in discovering the putative origins, measurements, and characteristics of human blackness, stressing the significance of African blood, bile, and sperm; the result explained “why this particular category of human was fundamentally inferior to the highest expression of humankind, the European” (6). Generations of travel writers and the “prevailing authority of natural history” (220) also contributed to defining blackness “by its supposed materiality” (224). A “shifting mosaic” of the image of the black African rather than “a fixed portrait” emerges (6). The debates that most compel Curran are not negative claim and positive counterclaim about the nature of black Africans, but the ones that occur between those who regarded blacks as inferior. “Pro-slavery and anti-slavery thinkers had generally accepted a shared set of ‘facts’ regarding the natural history of the African. While elements of these data varied significantly, the African was, for the most part, considered on both sides of the slavery debate as an inferior ‘variety’ or ‘race’ whose pathological physiology was the result of climate-induced degeneration from an original white prototype” (25–26). In eschewing a common explanation such as political hegemony as the cause of racism, Curran explores instead the role of discipline-driven knowledge, especially “a general tendency [among Enlightenment scientists] to unbundle the moral status of enslavement from the physical status of those people being enslaved” (220). This explains why writers would cull from texts without considering their authors’ politics or “the context within which these [putative] facts were derived” (177).

Curran’s strength is in illuminating the “numerous inconsistencies and divergences within Africanist discourse” (6) by analyzing both the famous and now-forgotten writers’ textual choices and their intellectual impact. The book provides a long view of the topic in the first chapter, and then, in subsequent chapters, treats several smaller units of one or two key decades within the eighteenth century. Significantly, Curran introduces and studies a new body of texts that addresses the origin and meaning of blackness: sixteen unpublished essays written between 1739 and 1741 that were submitted to a competition sponsored by the Académie royale de sciences de Bordeaux. The two questions posed to contestants were, “What was the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what was the cause of their degeneration?” (81). Curran’s investigation emphasizes the importance of degeneration theory and albinism for what they reveal about whiteness as much as blackness. As have others, such as George Boulukos in The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (2008), Curran deconstructs the dominant ideology of human sameness in both religious teaching and science in order to make us view the standard invocation of Enlightenment universalism with suspicion. In regard to scientific knowledge, Curran carefully attends to residual, dominant, and emergent beliefs (the latter is his major emphasis), and he scrupulously discriminates between major and minor eighteenth-century texts, which is frustratingly absent from many other studies of race and racism, some of which present all historical tendencies as equal contenders in a free marketplace.

The attention that Curran gives to individual texts and writers is rewarding; treating the same writer and text in its various editions with its attendant changes in more than one chapter and in more than one context allows a network of writerly adoption, adaption, and rejection to emerge. Because he is interested in the disciplinary contexts in which writers wrote as well as...