The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment by Andrew S. Curran

Primarily a work of interdisciplinary history, Andrew S. Curran’s The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment takes readers through a mosaic of ideas and epistemologies about the perceived qualities, potential, and taxonomic place of black Africans throughout the course of the eighteenth century. Amorphous to the point of chaos, European conceptualizations of nonwhite individuals recruited a staggering array of data from fields as diverse as anatomy, natural history, theology, politics, economics, literature, and art. Although Curran openly admits that “tracking a specific genealogy within Africanist thought is a daunting task” (7), he crystallizes his narrative around the consideration of anatomy, which, he argues, penetrated into nearly every realm of Africanist imagination throughout the eighteenth century. At the center of the resultant “protean construct” (15) emerges the “textualized African” (ibid.), a profoundly complicated unit of European ethnography dependent not only on anatomical representations of Africans themselves, but also on the re- presentations of Africanist discourses during the Enlightenment era.

Curran’s interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw from a wide variety of genres and sources, focusing predominantly on printed material. Of paramount importance is a cluster of influential texts originating in the “high culture” of the Francophone scientific world: Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, the corporate effort of the Encyclopédie, Dapper’s Description de l’Afrique, academic prize essays, and the writings of the Société des amis des noirs among others. Alongside these fairly well-known sources emerge a host of now little-known, yet contemporaneously momentous, anatomical treatises: Le Cat’s Traité de la couleur de la peau humaine (1765) is one such example, as is Meckel’s “Recherches anatomiques, sur la nature de l’épiderme, et du réseau, qu’on appellee Malpighien” (1755). Curran draws extensively from travel writing, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and epitomes throughout the work both for support of his particular arguments as well as for general contextual purposes. Visual evidence in the form of ethno-graphic or pseudo-ethnographic engravings enters into his discussion at times, although these elements tend to be ambient and illustrative rather than adopted as discrete elements of an art-historical approach. This reader found Curran’s research to be neither encyclopedic nor myopic, but rather a quite judiciously balanced selection from a seemingly endless well of potential sources.

In analyzing this broad base of historical material, Curran adopts a sophisticated framework drawing not only from critical race theory— Christopher Miller’s Blank Darkness comes to mind—but also from material history and the history of science. Uncommon for works dealing with the history of race, the overarching methodology of the work can best be described as a “readers’ history” approach, seeking to “[replicate] the reading practices of an imagined eighteenth-century reader” (18) by starting “where most Enlightenment-era people presumably did: with travelers’ accounts and compilations” (ibid.). Subsequent chapters deviate slightly from a strictly reader-based history, as for instance in chapter 3’s engaging discussion of the theatrical showing of the 1744 albino. Yet the work’s overall focus is very much on the French reading public of the eighteenth century.

That said, the first of Curran’s many conclusions is perhaps the most obvious: Africanist discourse during the eighteenth century was far from static, and indeed seems to undermine any notion of a cogent, centralized Enlightenment perspective on race (27). More ambitiously, however, Curran draws a broader contrast between the racial thought of the pre-Enlightenment era, when “the concept of blackness came into relief against a synthesis of biblical exegeses and vague physical explanations dating from antiquity” (223) and that of Enlightenment broadly considered. Throughout the eighteenth century, Curran argues, the concept of blackness had been “dissected, handled, measured, weighed, and used as a demonstrable wedge between human categories....Blackness had become a thing, defined less by its inverse relationship to light than by its supposed materiality” (223–24). In this observation lies one of the book’s central theses, namely that anatomical materiality increasingly became the fulcrum by which moral, intellectual, or political statements about black Africans were mobilized. Anatomy ultimately usurped other spheres of Africanist discourses as the perspective on race and its concomitant issues. Although distinctly reminiscent of Voegelin’s 1933 work on the internalization of blackness in the eighteenth century, Curran’s investigation reaches similar conclusions from quite different starting points. Broadly stated, his analysis centers on four themes emergent from the work’s constituent chapters: textuality, sameness, difference, and natural history.

Chapter 1, “Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450–1750,” traces accounts of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans from the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries, demonstrating persuasively Curran’s initial premise that these largely travel- or pseudo-travel-based narratives “continued to play a critical role in the overall understanding of Africa during the eighteenth century” (31). Curran addresses a large number of texts with varying degrees of depth. Ca’ da Mosto, Leo Africanus, Duarte Lopes, Edward Tyson, Olfert Dapper, Jacques Savary, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Cavazzi, Abbé Prévost, and ultimately Rousseau enter into his argument throughout the course of the chapter. Although his primary goal is to establish the textual backdrop against which later racial theories emerged, Curran ensconces within his narrative many of the key ideas that emerge later in his work. Most important among these is the recurrent tension between the Plinian legacy of Africa as the source of perpetual strangeness contrasted with the “desire for a more rational view of Africa” (43) evinced by a large number of early-modern authors.

Chapter 2, “Sameness and Science, 1730–1750,” largely focuses on and contextualizes Buffon’s account of black Africans in the third volume of his Histoire naturelle. A central paradox that Curran identifies is the fact that as notions of the black African diversified and became more complex (such as in the consideration of caffres, albinos, and blafards,) Buffon approaches a more fundamental sameness between humanity worldwide. Of great importance in this regard is Buffon’s espousal of monogenesis, the theory of human origins that posits a single shared ancestor among what we would now term “racial groups.” Of equal importance is the fact that Buffon’s text implicitly “[conjures] up a particular group of sensible and sensitive people” (116), an “ideal audience” constituted by an “enlightened reader-ship able to recognize the pitfalls of ethnographic knowledge production and transmission” (ibid.) Such a readership, Curran implies, did not exist in earlier periods. One important corollary of this “sensitive” readership was the introduction of decidedly moral valences to the question of race: the concept of blackness, more than in earlier periods, came to include the “three overlapping realms” (118) of “the moral, the intellectual, and the physical” (ibid.)

Chapter 3, “The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African ‘Ethnography,’ 1750-1775,” traces the unforeseen and brutal consequences of Buffon’s “degeneration-based ethnography” (116) by shifting the analysis to the “increasingly authoritative and naturalized understanding of the nègre” (118) as essentially inferior to its white counterpart. Whereas diversity engendered a concept of perceived sameness in Buffon, writers such as Voltaire and Formey interpreted diversity as evidence of just that: fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the white and black races. Such destructive perspectives generally drew upon polygenicist ideologies, which ascribe different ancestors to different racial groups. Curran introduces a series of sensitive observations, but one that particularly stands out is that by the end of the 1770s there seems to have evolved a distinct understanding of blackness as a material phenomenon, the interpretation of which projected a definite moral stance in the viewer. On the one hand, this opened up (and, at least in part, emerged from) the “zoological” perspective of proslavery politics; however, the newly moralized perspective on race also allowed for better and more concrete articulations of antislavery positions.

Chapter 4, “The Natural History of Slavery, 1770–1802,” coalesces Curran’s interpretations of racial thought around the most poignant of issues during the era: that of black chattel slavery. As throughout the work, Curran notes that racial theorists “rarely operated in lockstep with pro-slavery discourse” (169), thus—with varying degrees of forthrightness— arguing against the common scholarly tradition of analyzing natural history simply as a “subplot within the larger and all-powerful history of slavery” (168). Rather, Curran demonstrates that natural history was wielded by different authors to much different moral ends. Blumbenbach’s comparative study of human anatomy, for instance, “served,” in the hands of antislavery thinkers, “to refute the possibility of essential differences between human groups” (173); the very same work equipped pro-slavery thinkers with “the notion that the physical features of the African and other races were measurable [and] constituted the basis for real categories” (ibid.) However authors decided to utilize natural history in their discussions on slavery, the primacy of natural history as an interpretative lens through which to position oneself seems to have become solidified by the early nineteenth century. Curran concludes by meditating on Enlightenment thinkers’ “general blindness to the biopolitics of representation” (221), arguing that the “distressing paradox” of Enlightenment slavery was not “the inevitable outcome of an intentional European hegemony per se” (220), but rather that it emerged from the complicated relationship between disciplinary compartmentalization and the rising importance of natural history.

Evaluated from the standpoint of the critical philosophy of race, The Anatomy of Blackness serves as a valuable sourcebook for a period of racial thought that remains obscure and woefully understudied. Readers inclined toward system building and broad generalizations will find themselves challenged with the disparity of ideas in contemporaneous eighteenth-century thinkers: the fact of the matter is that eighteenth-century perspectives on race were hugely variegated, not just in their methodology and structure, but also in their moral and political aims. Curran’s approach, while “far from morally neutral” (223), carefully traces the contours of eighteenth-century racial thought, especially the rising ascendancy of anatomy and natural history. At times this gives the work a certain feeling of hesitancy toward analyzing the overt power structures incumbent on the objectification and materialization of the black body; but that might also be Curran’s point. The black African of Curran’s work is profoundly textual, representational, and, in a sense, hypothetical to begin with. The enactment of these racial theories on the ground would be a different and much more jarring story. This reader would recommend Curran’s work as a challenging and rich starting point for scholars seeking to understand the complex intersections of imagination, science, and politics in the fabrication of racial thought during the eighteenth century.