The Anatomy of Blackness

This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Andrew S. Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of eighteenth-century readers. Surveying French and European travelogues, natural histories, works of anatomy, pro- and anti-slavery tracts, philosophical treatises, and literary texts, Curran shows how naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences, describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era's understanding of black Africans, and charts the shift of the slavery debate from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the "black body" itself. In tracing this evolution, he shows how blackness changed from a mere descriptor in earlier periods into a thing to be measured, dissected, handled, and often brutalized. Penetrating and comprehensive, The Anatomy of Blackness shows that, far from being a monolithic idea, eighteenth-century Africanist discourse emerged out of a vigorous, varied dialogue that involved missionaries, slavers, colonists, naturalists, anatomists, philosophers, and Africans themselves.

ISBN 1421401509   Pages 328 ISBN13 9781421401508 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 590 Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press   Published in Baltimore, MD Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press   Height (mm) 231 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 162 Publication date 07 Oct 2011   Spine width (mm) 26 DEWEY 809.93355   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate DEWEY edition DC22   Interest age From 17

"Curran beautifully illuminates and analyzes the complex field of Enlightenment-era thought on race, and shows how it shaped the broader society and culture. An exemplary work of intellectual, literary and cultural history." (Laurent Dubois, coeditor of Origins of the Black Atlantic) "Curran offers a more comprehensive view of this subject than anyone before him: showing how the slave islands of the Caribbean were, in effect, laboratories in which Europeans studied Africans; how sameness and difference chased each other in a hermeneutic circle from which we have still not entirely escaped. The Anatomy of Blackness combines meticulous, original scholarship with unflinching analytical judgments." (Christopher L. Miller, author of The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade)"

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