Early American Literature

Who's Black and Why? is a collection of essays submitted in response to contests sponsored in the eighteenth century by the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences. Together with the editors' impressive introductory material, these essays do indeed reveal, as the work's subtitle indicates, the how and the why of the invention of "race" in the modern sense of this term. The "when" of this invention is implicitly considered as well, for one of the unstated purposes of this collection seems to be to dispel the lingering belief that scientific approaches to racial categorization began to develop only in the nineteenth century. This volume clearly demonstrates that the confluence of colonial exploitation and Enlightenment rationalism in the mid-eighteenth century had serious consequences for those peoples whom Europeans considered racially inferior to themselves. The editors bring considerable expertise to placing the nineteen essays included in this collection in their historical context. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is among the most eminent scholars of African American literature and history, while Andrew Curran's Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (2013) established him as a major voice in the history of race and science in the eighteenth century. Additional contributors to the volume include the four translators: Sheldon Cheek, Rosanna Giammanco, Karen C. C. Dalton, and Susan Emanuel. Working from Latin and French, they have made these little-known essays newly available in accessible English prose. [End Page 795]

Founded in 1712, the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences was dedicated to the promotion of "mankind's happiness," a goal the members set out to achieve in part by offering prize money for the best essays on a variety of subjects. Who's Black and Why? is divided into two parts corresponding to two separate essay competitions, the first in the 1740s (on the origin of Blackness) and the second in the 1770s (on how to improve the survival rate of those confined in slave ships crossing the Atlantic). Such contests were common at the time in France; Jean-Jacques Rousseau's two Discourses (1750, 1755) were of course entries to similar competitions sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The interest of the relatively minor essays produced for the two competitions proposed by the Bordeaux Academy lies, as the editors argue, in what these highly varied pieces reveal about changing cultural attitudes toward race and slavery as the eighteenth century, and thus the Enlightenment philosophical project, progressed. For those who might question the utility of publishing treatises based in views of the human body and mind that have since been quite thoroughly disproved, the editors note the three "unspoken" questions at the heart of the academy's competitions: Who is Black? Why? and, most important, "What did being Black signify?" (ix).

The first, much longer section of the collection presents sixteen essays received by the Bordeaux Academy in 1741 in response to a call for considerations of "the physical cause of the Negro's color" (qtd. in Who's ix). A cash prize of three hundred livres was offered, but none of the essays was considered good enough to merit the prize money. The introduction to this first collection of essays is in many ways the most interesting and important section of the book. In it, the editors review the scientific and religious considerations at play in the very posing of the question of the origin of Blackness. This introduction also answers, to great effect, the question "Why Bordeaux?" Why did this particular institution, that is, among the host of other academies of science active in France at this time, "find the question of blackness so compelling" (8)? We learn that the choice of topic corresponded to a sharp rise in the number of enslaved individuals passing through the Port of Bordeaux on their way to the French...