Curran, A: The Anatomy of Blackness Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

"Curran beautifully illuminates and analyzes the complex field of Enlightenment-era thought on race, and shows how it shaped the broader society and culture. An exemplary work of intellectual, literary and cultural history." (Laurent Dubois, coeditor of Origins of the Black Atlantic) "Curran offers a more comprehensive view of this subject than anyone before him: showing how the slave islands of the Caribbean were, in effect, laboratories in which Europeans studied Africans; how sameness and difference chased each other in a hermeneutic circle from which we have still not entirely escaped. The Anatomy of Blackness combines meticulous, original scholarship with unflinching analytical judgments." (Christopher L. Miller, author of The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade)"