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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, "Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Description: Who's Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin. In 1739 Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of "blackness." The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why. Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped acr...