Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Feijoo was a great admirer of Gumilla and praised him in print. See Ewalt Ewalt , Margaret . Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco . Bucknell : Bucknell UP , forthcoming . [Google Scholar] on Gumilla's life and works and his relationship with Feijoo. My friend Manuel Lucena Giraldo, Latin American historian and editor of Revista de Occidente, has told me in conversation that Gumilla's hostility toward Feijoo was probably motivated by the divergent opinions of the Indians in the Orinoco region issued by their respective religious orders, and by competing policies to convert and control the Indians that were rooted in those opinions. 2. On Ham's Curse in Spain and Spanish America, see Girón Negrón Girón Negrón, Luis. 2001. “La maldición del Can: la polémica antijudía en el Libro del caballero Zifar”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 78.3: 275–95. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Sweet Sweet , James H . “ The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought .” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 54. 1 1997 : 143 – 66 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Hill, Hierarchy chs. 5 and 6; and in the English-speaking world, see Peterson Peterson , Thomas Virgil . Foreword by William A. Clebsch . Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South . Metuchen, NJ, and London : Scarecrow Press, Inc., and The American Theological Library Association , 1978 . [Google Scholar]; Haynes Haynes , Stephen R . Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery . New York : Oxford UP , 2002 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Goldenberg; Johnson Johnson, Sylvester A. 2004. The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Braude Braude , Benjamin . “ The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identitites in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods .” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series , 54.1 1997 : 103 – 42 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 3. On Sandoval Sandoval , Alonso de . Un tratado sobre la esclavitud . and trans. Enriqueta Vila Vilar . Madrid : Alianza , 1987 . [Google Scholar], see Vincent; Bénaassy-Berling; Cesareo Cesareo , Mario . Cruzados, mártires y beatos: Emplazamientos del cuerpo colonial . West Lafayette, IN : Purdue UP , 1995 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Olsen Olsen, Margaret M. 2004. Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias, Gainesville: UP of Florida. [Google Scholar]; Tiffany Tiffany , Tanya J . “ Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez's Supper at Emmaus .” Art History 31 1 2008 : 33 – 56 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 4. Browne does not signal any awareness of Roger Williams's A Key into the Language of America Williams , Roger . A Key into the Language of America . introd., and commentary John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz . Detroit : Wayne State UP , 1973 . [Google Scholar] (1643), in which the author's off-the-cuff observation about the Narragansett terms for “White” (Wompésu) and “Black or swarthish” (Mowêsu, Suckêsu) evokes primordial whiteness: “Hence they call a Blackamore (themselves are tawnie, by the Sunne and their annoyntings, yet they are borne white) Suckáutacone A cole blacke man” (132–33). Aldridge mentions Williams’ account though he defines him as an eighteenth-century cleric (114). 5. See M. Hill Hill, Mike. 2004. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority, New York and London: New York UP. [Google Scholar]; Roediger Roediger , David R . The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class . Introd. Kathleen Cleaver. New . London and New York : Verso , 2007 . [Google Scholar]; Yancy Yancy , George What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question . New York and London : Routledge , 2004 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Rasmussen Rasmussen , Birgit Brander , Eric Klinenberg , Irene J. Nexica , and Matt Wray The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness . Durham and London : Duke UP , 2001 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Garner Garner, Steve. 2007. Whiteness: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 6. Richard Popkin Popkin , Richard H . “ The Philosophical Basis of Racism .” Racism in the Eighteenth Century Harold E. Pagliaro . Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture , vol. 3 . Cleveland and London : The P of Case Western Reserve U , 1973 . 245 – 262 . [Google Scholar] identifies the conjoining of blackness and degeneration as an Enlightenment pattern of racialization: “… being non-white is a sign of sickness or degeneracy: the normal, natural condition of man is whiteness, but due to unfortunate environmental factors, some people have lost their whiteness and with this, part of their human nature (Buffon, Blumenbach Blumenbach , Johann Friedrich . “The Degeneration of Races.” Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader . Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze . Cambridge, MA : Blackwell , 1997 . 79 – 90 . [Google Scholar], etc.)” (247). According to Blumenbach, there was a single species of human with six varieties, the results of degeneration from a primordial whiteness. In a weighty section of his Natural Varieties of Mankind (1776) he set out to explain “how in general a primordial species may degenerate into varieties” (80). Herder Herder , Johann Gottfried von . “Organization of the Peoples of Africa.” Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader . Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze . Cambridge, MA : Blackwell , 1997 . 70 – 78 . [Google Scholar] too subscribed to primordial whiteness: “A negro child is born white; the skin around the nails, the nipples, and the private parts, first becomes coloured; and the same consent of parts in the disposition to colour is observable in other nations” (77), and insisted that Nature made Africans for Africa—a people rich in sensuality, and poor in intellect and morals, well-suited to their excessively-hot climate (77–8). 7. Aldridge (112–113) asserts without evidence that Feijoo was influenced by the French monk Jean-Baptiste Dubos Dubos , Jean-Baptiste . Critical Reflections on Poetry . Trans. Thomas Nugent . London: J. Nourse, 1748. 3 vols . [Google Scholar], who devoted a large chunk of his work (originally published in 1719) to the theory that air, food, soil, and other environmental factors alter skin color, hair texture, blood, and intellectual and moral qualities. Still, his negative characterization of Black Africans was not embraced by the Spanish Benedictine: “Does not every body agree in attributing the stupidity of the Negroes and the Laplanders to the excess of heat or cold in their respective countries?” (213). Herder too believed that climate was responsible for pigmentation changes over time and space: “All depends therefore on the causes, that were capable of unfolding it here; and analogy instructs us, that sun and air must have had great share in it. For what makes us brown? What makes the difference between the two sexes in almost every country? What has rendered the descendants of the Portuguese after residing some centuries in Africa, so similar in colour to the negroes? Nay, what so forcibly discriminates the negro races in Africa itself? The climate, considered in the most extensive signification of the word, so as to include the manner of life, and kind of food” (75). However, as was suggested earlier, Herder's racial environmentalism was part and parcel of a false universalism that correlated European origins or whiteness to intellectual and moral greatness, and African origins or blackness to idiocy and depravity. 8. In Andrés González Barcia's 1729 edition of García's treatise, he added numerous sections covering contemporary writers on the origins of the Indians, one of which was devoted to the theory that the direct ancestors of the first peoples in the Americas had been “Africans”. However, it must be taken into account that “African” for such theorists was a mobile signifier that ranged from “Phoenician” to “Arab” to “Moor” to “Carthaginian”. In another section, he summarized Hugo Grotius's dispute with Johannes de Laet (multiple treatises were published in the period 1642–44). None of the Spanish writers, I am convinced, derived his arguments from Grotius. Though the Dutchman was adamant that the indigenous in Yucatan had descended from Ethiopians, he did not define the latter as Gumilla, Feijoo Feijoo , Benito Jerónimo . “ Color etiópico .” Teatro crítico universal . Vol. 7: 66–93 . Madrid : Real Compañía de Impresores y Libreros , 1778 . Proyecto Filosofía en Español. Biblioteca Feijooniana 1–14 . www.filosofía.org . [Google Scholar], Torquemada Torquemada , Juan de . Segunda parte de los veinte y un libros rituales y Monarchia Indiana. Con el Origen y guerras de los Yndias Occidentales. De sus Poblaçones, Descubrimiento, Conquista, Conversion y otras cosas maravillosas de la mesma tierra . Seville : Matthias Clavijo , 1615 . 3 vols . [Google Scholar], and Núñez de la Vega Núñez de la Vega , Francisco , Bishop . Constituciones diocesanas del Obispado de Chiappa . Rome : Gaetano Zenobi , 1702 . [Google Scholar] defined them. Grotius claimed that Ethiopians were already Christians centuries before their encounters with the Portuguese, and those Ethiopians were not the dark-skinned pagans whom these Spaniards called etíopes. Furthermore, Grotius argued that Indians in the rest of North America were the descendants of Scandinavians, and Indians in pre-Colombian Peru had arrived from China.