Enfilade

Forthcoming from Harvard UP:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew Curran, eds., Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0674244269, $30 / £24 / €27.

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of ‘black’ skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of ‘blackness’. What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Andrew S. Curran is a leading specialist of the Enlightenment era and the author of The Anatomy of Blackness and Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. He is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

C O N T E N T S

Preface: Who’s Black and Why?
Note on the Translations

I. The 1741 Contest on the ‘Degeneration’ of Black Skin and Hair
Introduction
1  Blackness through the Power of God
2  Blackness through the Soul of the Father
3  Blackness through the Maternal Imagination
4  Blackness as a Moral Defect
5  Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone
6  Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence
7  Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity
8  Blackness as a Reversible Accident
9  Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood
10  Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor
11  Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow
12  Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory
13  Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness
14  Blackness Degenerated
15  Blackness Classified
16  Blackness Dissected

II. The 1772 Contest on ‘Preserving’ Negroes
Introduction
1  A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing
2  A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade
3  Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing

Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race
Notes
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index