Angelo Soliman: desecrated bodies and the spectre of Enlightenment racism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Portraits and digressions on the figures of the “pious negro” and the “white negro” are quite well known in natural philosophy thanks to prestigious works such as Buffon’s Histoire naturelle or Maupertuis’ Vénus physique, in which theories on the generation and natural history of human being are put forward. However, the history of their visual representation, exhibition in halls, collections or shows, and how they came across in a scientific or amusing sense are not as well known. The history of natural persons as semiophores isn’t known either. This paper aims at elucidating the various meanings attached to the different scenarios where these albino or pious “negroes” where exhibited, in order to understand the scientific, artistic and amusing nature they had in Europe and in the creole context. Hence, we will expose the epistemology and historical context reflected in exhibitions such as: that “white negro” taken in person to the Louvre Museum in 1744; several copies of the portrait of a “pious negro woman”, “painted from life”, by da Rocha; her reappearance in Conrado Roza’s choral portrait La mascarada nupcial; the wax sculpture of the “white negro woman” of Santo Domingo shown in the Palais Royal; the “pious negro” John Bobey shown in person in English shows and whose portrait was owned by John Hunter; the cannibal “white negro woman” in the Quadro de la Historia Natural, Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú; and many others, since they were fascinating for the visual culture of that time.
New West Indian Guide, 2013
The biological discourse of race that emerged in Europe in the mid-1700s influenced Western writing about human diversity for more than two centuries. Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the French Enlightenment's puzzling legacy in this area. Philosophes criticized slavery's inhumanity yet they invented and publicized the racial concepts that justified enslaving Africans. Among those publishing in this field, Andrew Curran is unique for his focus on racial "science." As a literary scholar he concentrates almost exclusively on texts published in French, including work by prominent Dutch and German figures, but few Britons. His close attention to the ethnographic and anatomical construction of the concept of the nègre is both a strength and a weakness of this valuable study. Chapter 1 surveys European ethnographic writing about Africa from the 1450s to the 1750s. For Curran the critical period in this literature was from 1670 to 1730, when a handful of French authors, mostly missionaries, published descriptions of the captive Africans they had encountered in the Caribbean. The Dominican Father Labat, who wrote about managing a sugar plantation in Martinique, eventually published three books about Africa based on the work of other travelers. These texts helped redefine the word nègre from "dark-skinned African" to "slave," raising the essential question eighteenth-century Europeans asked about blackness: were Africans made to be enslaved? Chapter 2 introduces the Comte de Buffon, the leading biologist of the Enlightenment. Many proslavery writers claimed human races sprang from different origins, justifying their belief that Africans but not Europeans were ideal for plantation slavery. Like these authors, Buffon relied on other peoples' descriptions of Caribbean and African societies, as well as the claims of anatomists who dissected African cadavers looking for the physical essence of blackness. But he rejected the word "race," maintaining that humans come from a common ancestor, with "varieties" caused by environmental adaption. Buffon used his observations of two Africandescended children with albinism to argue that humanity's original color was white. Africans only differed from Europeans physically and culturally because tropical climates had caused "degeneration."
The Invention of Race and the Status of Blackness
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022
It is at this point a longstanding tradition that scholarly works investigating Black and African presences in premodernity, works that challenge accepted notions about the origins of and participants in Western civilization, meet with significant resistance in the marketplace of ideas. The scholarship in question has focused on a wide range of subjects-from the roots of Greco-Roman knowledge and culture to the presence of Africans in those established centers of classical antiquity to the role of Africans in the Old World's exploration of the New. Yet, resistance arises at every turn. The case is no different for Geraldine Heng's 2018 The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages-except that this time the focus is the European Middle Ages. The book deftly introduces and defines "race-making" to describe the very active process by which elements of what I have called "race-thinking" are coalesced in the Middle Ages as race proceeds toward the ideological status it achieves in modernity. Of the now six full-length monographs-including my own-that take as their primary inquiry the nature, development, and salience of race in the European Middle Ages, Invention is the most ambitious and proceeds from the "thoroughly interdisciplinary vantage required of a concept as ideologically powerful and multifaceted as race, one whose study defies disciplinary divisions between literature, history, biology, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields." 1 Praise has been swift. So has backlash. This article will consider the latter in order to understand the motivations and implications of criticisms against studies that similarly innovate within their fields.
Europe are not commensurate with ideas of race, which emerged under particular conditions in Western Europe, especially the racialization of the transatlantic slave trade, labour conditions in modernity and European imperialism. Bolstered by the development of 'scientific racism' in the nineteenth century, such ideas lead directly to the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. 4 It is suggested that those on this side of the argument define race in relation to the body and to biology, a definition that has its root in the fifteenth century, the period under consideration in this article. The word 'race', or razza in Italian, appeared in various Romance languages around this time, where it was often used in relation to blood lines or pedigree, especially of dogs, horses or aristocratic lineages. 5 It was therefore an idea tied to inherited qualities. David Niremberg is among those scholars who trace the history of the vocabulary of race in the fifteenth century, especially in Catalan. Although Niremberg is sometimes associated with this side of the debate, he subtly refuses to be drawn into arguing that race did not exist in the period. He finds that 'it would be a mistake to see […] evidence that these late medieval discriminations were not "racial"'. 6 He notes the fundamental problem faced by historians approaching questions of race, who on the one hand examine 'the ontological status of key works and concepts such as race' but at the same time try to understand the 'concepts and categories that their historical subjects used to […] ground identities in their own societies'. 7 For all that he finds evidence of racial discriminations in the period, he nonetheless warns that race and racism produce such a heterogeneous set of ideas that they can 'scarcely be subsumed into a "concept" or "theory"'. 8 He reasons that it is not possible to say that race did not exist before
2014
This edited collection explores the genesis of scientifi c conceptions of race and their accompanying impact on the taxonomy of human collections internationally as evidenced in ethnographic museums, world fairs, zoological gardens, international colonial exhibitions and ethnic shows. A deep epistemological change took place in Europe in this domain toward the end of the eighteenth century, producing new scientifi c representations of race and thereby triggering a radical transformation in the visual economy relating to race and racial representation and its inscription in the body. These practices would play defi ning roles in shaping public consciousness and the representation of "otherness" in modern societies. The Invention of Race provides contextualization that is often lacking in contemporary discussions on diversity, multiculturalism and race.
Mistaken Identities?: Alessandro de’ Medici and the Question of “Race”
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2015
Alessandro de' Medici's life and its representation reveal important beliefs about family, politics, and genealogy during the Italian Renaissance. Duke Alessandro's government marked the end of the Florentine Republic and the beginning of hereditary rule. Many scholars interpret Alessandro's assassination as a fitting end to the tyrannical usurpation of Florentine liberty. This moral and political interpretation, championed by supporters of Italian unification and cherished by writers from the Romantic period until this day, has dominated assessments of Alessandro's life and rule. The fact that he was illegitimate has given rise to many accounts of his origins and to the related controversies over the possibility that his mother was a peasant or a slave. The slave controversy admits a further question: was his mother's background North African? Or Southern (i.e., sub-Saharan) African? Such arguments assume that slaves are black and that blacks are a clearly defined group. The history of Alessandro de' Medici is inseparable from claims made for liberal society against tyranny, from evolving concepts of race, and from ideas of European cultural superiority over Africa. This essay studies images, both written and visual, of Alessandro de' Medici with a focus on race and on the changing significance of traits now associated with ideologies of ethnicity and nationhood. I t is important to determine how the life of Alessandro de' Medici (1512-37) has been conceived by historians and art historians with regard to the empirical and theoretical biases that underpin the perception of race. Historically, the concept of race measures physical, mental, and spiritual differences among various human groups. Race has been construed in two broad directions: as a natural phenomenon and as a social construct. Thus the taxonomic dimension of racial thinking invariably entails the following questions: how