The two scholars reveal a hidden chapter from the 18th-Century invention of race. For recommended reading, event details, and more, visit [ Ссылка ]


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In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences had announced their latest essay contest: explain the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, they asked, and what is the cause of Black degeneration? By the time answers were received two years later, more than four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic into a life of brutal enslavement in cities, farms, and plantations on the other side of the world. None of the contest submissions were ever published, until last year, in a new book edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, Who’s Black and Why? The essays, written by a mix of naturalists, theologians, physicians, and amateurs, document the search for a “scientific” understanding of race. Together they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

For the annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture, Gates and Curran retell the story of the contest, contextualize it in the history of the period, and discuss how the essays lay bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, who was a co-founding editor of The New York Review of Books.


ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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.


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