Defining Blackness: Difference, Skin Color, and Enslavement in Early Seventeenth-Century France

FAIN: FT-291624-23

Katherine Dauge-Roth
Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME 04011-8447)

Research and writing leading to an article analyzing a public conference on the nature of Blackness held by Théophraste Renaudot’s Bureau d’adresse in Paris in 1640.

Modern conceptions of race as linked to physical difference—notably difference in skin color—have long been historicized as an Enlightenment invention. Scientific investigations into the “anatomy of blackness” in late 17th and 18th-century Europe continue to receive important scholarly treatment. But, as scholars of earlier periods have argued, though the word “race” came into its modern meaning in the 18th century, race-thinking has a much longer history. This article and translation project examines a key moment in this history, bringing to light for analysis a previously unknown public conference on Blackness that took place at journalist Théophraste Renaudot’s Bureau d’adresse in 1640 Paris, just as the French slave trade began. The transcribed proceedings allow access to a wide range of fictions about Sub-Saharan African difference that were circulating in France, providing a unique snapshot of race-thinking at this crucial juncture in its history of colonization and enslavement.