{"id":19994,"date":"2012-01-20T02:02:14","date_gmt":"2012-01-20T02:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19994"},"modified":"2012-01-20T02:02:14","modified_gmt":"2012-01-20T02:02:14","slug":"rethinking-race-history-the-role-of-the-albino-in-the-frence-enlightenment-life-sciences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19994","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the Frence Enlightenment Life Sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1111\/j.1468-2303.2009.00502.x\" target=\"_blank\">Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the Frence Enlightenment Life Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/journal\/10.1111\/(ISSN)1468-2303\" target=\"_blank\">History and Theory<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/hith.2009.48.issue-3\/issuetoc\" target=\"_blank\">Volume 48, Issue 3<\/a> (October 2009)<br \/>\npages 151\u2013179<br \/>\nDOI: <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1111\/j.1468-2303.2009.00502.x\" target=\"_blank\">10.1111\/j.1468-2303.2009.00502.x<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wesleyan.edu\/templates\/dept\/rlan\/general_faculty.htt?function=f1&amp;department=RLAN&amp;faculty=acurran\" target=\"_blank\">Andrew Curran<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Romance Languages &amp; Literatures<br \/>\n<em>Wesleyan University<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Age_of_Enlightenment\" target=\"_blank\">Enlightenment-era<\/a> life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: <strong>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.<\/strong> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Albinism\" target=\"_blank\">albino<\/a>. The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Maupertuis\" target=\"_blank\">Maupertuis<\/a> used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Monogenism\" target=\"_blank\">monogenesis<\/a>. Positing that the <em>n\u00e8gre blanc<\/em>\u2014quite literally a \u201cwhite Negro\u201d\u2014was a racial throwback, a reversion to a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon\" target=\"_blank\">Buffon<\/a>, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a prototype white variety. The significance of the concept <em>n\u00e8gre blanc<\/em>, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of the <em>n\u00e8gre blanc<\/em> clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.<\/p>\n<p>Read or purchase the article <a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/j.1468-2303.2009.00502.x\/pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the Frence Enlightenment Life Sciences History and Theory Volume 48, Issue 3 (October 2009) pages 151\u2013179 DOI: 10.1111\/j.1468-2303.2009.00502.x Andrew Curran, Professor of Romance Languages &amp; Literatures Wesleyan University The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment-era life sciences generally overlooks a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,459,1196,8,6941],"tags":[9279,9278],"class_list":["post-19994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","tag-andrew-curran","tag-history-and-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}