Book ID: CBB584439647

Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (2022)

unapi

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.

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Authors & Contributors
Paolo Conte
Donovan, Joan
Newman, Brooke N.
Livio Sansone
Evans, Jazmin Antwynette
Kimani S. K. Nehusi
Concepts
Science and race
Slavery and slaves
Science and society
Racism
Slavery, abolition, and emancipation
Great Britain, colonies
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
17th century
Early modern
Places
United States
Great Britain
Jamaica (Caribbean)
Germany
France
Mozambique
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