Andrew Curran
Andrew Curran, the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University, is a specialist of eighteenth-century France. A writer-scholar, he has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, El País, Merkur, and The Paris Review. His most recent book (edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) is entitled Who's Black and Why? (www.whoisblackandwhy.com), which received the 2022 Prose Award for the Best Book in European History. His 2019 biography of Diderot (Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, Other Press) was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, the Irish Times, Open Letters Review, the Australian, El Cutural, and NRC, and has appeared in Chinese, Portuguese, Brazilian, Italian, and Spanish translations. He is the author of two previous books, including the Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, which won the Prix Monsieur et Madame Marin and also earned a Choice Outstanding Title designation. His new book is entitled The Race Makers, the first biography of the history of race. He is a Fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l'ordre des Palmes Académiques. www.andrewscurran.com
Address: Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures
300 High St
Middletown, CT 06459
Address: Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures
300 High St
Middletown, CT 06459
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The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment era life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: the vast majority of eighteenth-century
thinkers who were engaged in theorizing the human were often far more preoccupied with preserving a belief in an essential human sameness than they were in creating categories of
essential difference. This article charts the problem of a potential human sameness as it related to questions of category, biological processes, and the human and non-human through an examination of a neglected and key construct in the eighteenth-century life sciences,the albino.
The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when Maupertuis used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or monogenesis. Positing that the nègre blanc—quite literally a “white Negro”—was a racial throwback, a reversion to
a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist Buffon, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a
prototype white variety. The significance of the concept nègre blanc, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of
the nègre blanc clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.
The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment era life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: the vast majority of eighteenth-century
thinkers who were engaged in theorizing the human were often far more preoccupied with preserving a belief in an essential human sameness than they were in creating categories of
essential difference. This article charts the problem of a potential human sameness as it related to questions of category, biological processes, and the human and non-human through an examination of a neglected and key construct in the eighteenth-century life sciences,the albino.
The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when Maupertuis used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or monogenesis. Positing that the nègre blanc—quite literally a “white Negro”—was a racial throwback, a reversion to
a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist Buffon, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a
prototype white variety. The significance of the concept nègre blanc, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of
the nègre blanc clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.
A. Curran, «Imaginer l'Afrique au siècle des Lumières», Cromohs, 10 (2005):