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

Abstract

This book uses the development of a ‘science’ of the black African from the late seventeenth century onwards as a way of interrogating the Enlightenment mentalité (mainly, but by no means exclusively, within France) regarding the interrelated issues of race, slavery, abolitionism, and colonial exploitation. Andrew Curran shows convincingly that both the traditional notion of a post-1740 positive Africanist discourse paving the way for the abolition of slavery as one of the fruits of a progressive Enlightenment, and more recent criticism of that same era for its alleged theoretical support for structures of repression via the construction of scientific ‘proofs’ of the inferiority of the black African, have failed to recognize the complexities and tensions within contemporary European thinking on matters of race and slavery. Curran turns the burgeoning eighteenth-century science of ‘blackness’, which developed in step with the competing ‘human origin’ theories of monogenesis and polygenesis, into a lens through which European engagement with Africa, Africans, and the institutions of slavery and the plantation economy can be examined. It is an approach that yields rich rewards, not least the examination of the Comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelle of 1749 in the context of Europe-wide trends — most notably, competing theories about the human albino's place in the racial hierarchy, and the idea of a degeneration towards blackness that was inherent in theories of monogenesis. The latter trait meant that, while Buffon certainly held progressive attitudes on race, his influential work actually inspired the hunt for scientific proof of the inferiority of anyone who was not a white European, involving such figures as the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel, the Rouen-based anatomist Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, and the Dutch geographer Cornelius de Pauw. Another strength of this book lies in its chronological range, with Curran adept at teasing out continuity as well as change in the way Europeans represented Africa from the fifteenth century onwards. This in turn provides rich context for his argument that from the second half of the seventeenth century chattel slavery is the essential driver of this discourse, in combination with the physical and theoretical examination of the body of the black African. From that point onwards the European image of le nègre (Curran, quite rightly, does not try to sugar the pill when dealing with the prejudice inherent in the contemporary vocabulary being used) is heavily identified with slavery, and many texts were constructed with one eye on the preservation of the plantation system in the Caribbean. Curran's approach also provides stimulating juxtapositions of printed material ranging from Leo Africanus's trailblazing description of Africa through to the Franco-British negrophilia of the last quarter of the 1700s. Furthermore, texts produced by key Enlightenment figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot are shown to require more sophisticated analysis than has customarily been employed hitherto: such writers defy simple categorization when it comes to assessing their opinions on either slavery or the status of both the free and enslaved black African.