The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies

Chakravarty, Urvashi

doi:10.1086/706214

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Representation of race was multifaceted, as consideration of the visual culture of Africans by Europeans has particularly shown (Carerra, 2003; Kaplan, 1979; Parker et al., 2000; Walker, 2017). It is nonetheless clear that what Hall terms the “languages of blackness” mattered, as did “what people did with text”—how they read it, and re‐read it, how text was staged, performed and enacted, and how, by these means, concepts of racial difference were disseminated and reanimated outside the arena of real‐life colonial encounters (Chakravarty, 2020; Hall, 1995; Jones, 2019; Spiller, 2011, p. 21; Thompson, 2008, 2021).…”

Section: Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Re‐writing race in early modern European medicine

Murphy

2021

History Compass

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This short article explores the role of medical practitioners from across Europe in the practice of slavery and in the making of early modern race. Medical practitioners were present from the earliest moments of European encounters with African slavery. As the slave trade developed, their participation developed and became more formal. From their role on board ship, to their bureaucratic role in the process of inspecting enslaved peoples, to their practices within colonial administration, the nascent arena of the slave trade depended on a transnational network of medical practitioners. The politics of their expertise linked the practice of slavery with the production of scientific ideas about race. Drawing together the current literature along two lines of theory and practice, I suggest that the construction of the slave trade relied on thousands of such medical encounters. Examining this process reveals a history of enslavement and race as intimate practices, defined in a case‐by‐case manner, by people, rather than systems. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking about medicine and slavery through categories of knowledge and practice provides insight into the intimate and embodied way in which racial categories of difference were constructed.

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