A conversation between Andrew Curran and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 20/09/2022 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

The birth of scientific racism has been increasingly associated with the Enlightenment era. If this is true, how did the Enlightenment era invent race? Andrew S. Curran speaks about this as well as his new book (co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.), Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter in the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.

In 1739, the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay competition on the scientific cause of ‘blackness.’ The Academy received sixteen submissions. Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran have published these never-before-seen documents alongside a study of the birth of ‘scientific racism’. Curran spoke at the Library on this curious competition, the history of race and racism, the relationship of science and the Enlightenment, and the relationship of these ideas to the concept of race in the present-day.

About the speaker:

Andrew S. Curran is a non-fiction writer and William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. He has contributed to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Time Magazine, and more. He is also the author or editor of five books, including The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment (2013), which received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the Académie des sciences d’outre-mer. He was also a finalist for the American Library in Paris’s best book of 2019 for his Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.

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