Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race edited by Andrew S. Curran ’86 and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

July 1, 2022

Tags Alumni Book

(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2022).
In 1739, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay addressing the following question: “What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [hair and skin]?” The academy’s members were interested in obtaining essays that solved the riddle of Africans’ distinctive physical traits. More broadly, they wanted to know who is Black and why, and what being Black signified.

Curran and Gates’ book, which features 16 previously unpublished submissions to the notorious essay contest, represents a chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism. Although the slave trade had yet to reach its peak, by the time the contest was announced, some four million Africans had already been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic.

The essays, written in French and Latin, were dispatched from throughout Europe. Their authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. “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,” the publisher notes. “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.”

Andrew Curran ’86, P’20 is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University and a leading specialist of the Enlightenment era.