The Anatomy of Blackness

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tissue Samples in the Land of Conjecture
Defining le Nègre
The New Africanist Discourse after 1740
The Contexts of Representation
Representing Africanist Discourse
Anatomizing the History of Blackness
1. Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450–1750
The Early Africanists: The Episodic and the Epic
Rationalizing Africa
The Birth of the Caribbean African
Jean-Baptiste Labat
Labat on Africa
Processing the African Travelogue: Prévost's Histoire générale des voyages
Rousseau's Afrique
2. Sameness and Science, 1730–1750
The Origin of Shared Origins
Toward a ""Scientific"" Monogenesis
Historicizing the Human in an Era of Empiricism: The Role of the Albino
Creating the Blafard
Buffonian Monogenesis: The Nègre as Same
Blackness Qualified: Breaking down the Nègre
The Colonial African and the Rare Buffonian Je
3. The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African ""Ethnography,"" 1750–1775
The ""Symptoms"" of Blackness: Africanist ""Facts,"" 1750–1770
Montesquieu and the ""Refutation"" of Difference
The Nagging Context of Montesquieu's Antislavery Diatribe
Voltaire: The Philosophe as Essentialist
Voltaire and the Albino of 1744
Voltaire, the Nègre, and Human Merchandise
Processing Africa and Africans in the Encyclopédie
The Preternatural History of Black African Difference
Teaching Degeneration: Valmont de Bomare's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle
4. The Natural History of Slavery, 1770–1802
The Hardening of Climate Theory and the Birth of New Racial Categories circa 1770–1785
Toward a Human Biopolitics circa 1750–1770
The Politics of Slavery in the Encyclopédie
Mercier and Saint-Lambert and the New Natural History
The Synchretism of the 1770s: Grappling with ""Nature's Mistreatment"" of the Nègre
Anti-slavery Rhetoric in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes
The Era of Negrophilia
Epilogue: The Natural History of the Noir in an Age of Revolution
Coda: Black Africans and the Enlightenment Legacy
Notes
Works Cited
Index

""This is a convincing piece of scholarship... a satisfying and clear analysis of how French writers (among other) constructed images of the African body that reflected, while often simultaneously silencing, the central role played by slavery in attracting European interest to the subject in the first place... This book will be read with interest and profit not only by scholars of the Enlightenment, but also those concerned with the history of racial thinking, slavery, the history of science, and Europe's engagement with the rest of the world.""