Who's Black and Why? : A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Signed First Printing)

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Andrew S. Curran

ISBN 10: 0674244265 / ISBN 13: 9780674244269

Published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022

About this Item

SIGNED BY BOTH AUTHORS, HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. AND ANDREW S. CURRAN, in black ink on title page at a Harvard Book Store author event. Belknap Press 2022 First Edition, First Printing, signed by both authors. Condition: brand new, flawless, fine/fine/fine condition. Black clothboards with silver printing on spine; corners sharp and square. Text block clean, tight, square, unmarked, unread, brand new. Black satin gloss dust jacket with white and tan lettering; flawless condition; protected in clear archival Brodart wrapper. A flawless collector's edition. Packaged with care and shipped in a box to arrive in best condition. Complete satisfaction guarantee; no sale is final until you are satisfied. "A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism." (Publishers Weekly) ".never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux's municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West." (from the flap).

Seller Inventory # 220419-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Who's Black and Why? : A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Signed First Printing)
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674244265
• ISBN 13: 9780674244269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Black History
  • African-American
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

“A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.”
―Publishers Weekly

“The eighteenth-century essays published for the first time in Who’s Black and Why? contain a world of ideas―theories, inventions, and fantasies―about what blackness is, and what it means. To read them is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.”
―Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin―an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. 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. 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.

These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

About the Authors

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Andrew S. Curran is a leading specialist of the Enlightenment era and the author of The Anatomy of Blackness and Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. He is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University.