Le sens de l’orientation. Le changement de place de l’Afrique dans les premières conceptions européennes modernes du monde

Abstract

AbstractAnalyses of early modern European representations of Africa have sought to pinpoint the origins of European racism rather than to understand such representations in their own context. In fact, depictions of Africa and Africans were often an epiphenomenon of European understandings of their own place within the world as a whole. In the sixteenth century, the predominant schema was a variant of Hippocratic theories of humors and climates. Regions of the world were classified in terms of a north/south axis corresponding to cold and hot climates, with Africa unambiguously relegated to the hot zone. The eighteenth century saw the elaboration of an alternative focus on the east/west axis, in terms of a contrast between Asian empires (if not “despotism”) and American “savagery”. Africa’s place within this scheme was fundamentally ambivalent, allowing representations of Africans either as “savages” or as quasi-Asians.