Who's black and why? : a hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race / Henry Louis Gates (Editor), Andrew S. Curran (Editor). - Cambridge , Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022. - xiii 303 pages : illustrations (black and white), map (black and white) ; 24 cm

Contenidos : Preface: Who’s Black and Why?

Note on the Translations

Part I — The 1741 Contest on the “Degeneration” of Black Skin and Hair

Blackness through the Power of God

Blackness through the Soul of the Father

Blackness through the Maternal Imagination

Blackness as a Moral Defect

Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone

Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence

Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity

Blackness as a Reversible Accident

Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood

Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor

Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow

Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory

Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness

Blackness Degenerated

Blackness Classified

Blackness Dissected

Part II — The 1772 Contest on “Preserving” Negroes

A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing

A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade

Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing

Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race

Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index

In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest seeking answers to a pressing question: What was the cause of Africans’ black skin? Published here for the first time and translated into English, these early documents of scientific racism lay bare the Enlightenment origins of the phantom of racial hierarchy.

9780674295452

/ W628 2022