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Dark Side of the Light - Slavery and the French Enlightenment (Paperback, Annotated Ed)
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Dark Side of the Light - Slavery and the French Enlightenment (Paperback, Annotated Ed)
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Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu are best
known for their humanist theories and liberating influence on
Western civilization. But as renowned French intellectual Louis
Sala-Molins shows, Enlightenment discourses and scholars were also
complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, becoming instruments of
oppression and inequality.
Translated into English for the first time, "Dark Side of the Light
"scrutinizes Condorcet's "Reflections on Negro" "Slavery" and the
works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot side by side with the
"Code Noir" (the royal document that codified the rules of French
Caribbean slavery) in order to uncover attempts to uphold the
humanist project of the Enlightenment while simultaneously
justifying slavery. Wielding the pen of both the ironist and the
moralist, Sala-Molins demonstrates the flawed nature of these
attempts and the reasons given for this denial of rights, from the
imperatives of public order to the incomplete humanity of the slave
(and thus the need for his progressive humanization through
slavery), to the economic prosperity that depended on his labor. At
the same time, Sala-Molins uses the techniques of literature to
give equal weight to the perspective of the "barefooted, the
starving, and the slaves" through expository prose and scenes
between slave and philosopher, giving moral agency and
flesh-and-blood dimensions to issues most often treated as
abstractions.
Both an urgent critique and a measured analysis, "Dark Side of the
Light" reveals the moral paradoxes of Enlightenment philosophies
and their world-changing consequences.
Louis Sala-Molins is a moral and political philosopher and emeritus
professor at the University of Toulouse. He is the author of many
books, including "Le Code Noir, ou Le calvaire de Canaan" and
"L'Afrique aux Ameriques."
John Conteh-Morgan is associate professor of French and
Francophone, African-American, and African studies at Ohio State
University. He is the author of "Theatre and Drama in Francophone
Africa: A Critical Introduction. "
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