RETHINKING RACE HISTORY: THE ROLE OF THE ALBINO IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT LIFE SCIENCES

The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment-era life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: 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. 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 albino. The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when Maupertuis used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or monogenesis. Positing that the negre blanc-quite literally a "white Negro"-was a racial throwback, a reversion to a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist Buffon, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a prototype white variety. The significance of the concept negre blanc, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of the negre blanc clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.