Cadelo Buitrago, Andrea (2013) Luxury, sensibility, climate and taste : eighteenth-century worldwide racialisation of difference. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

In my doctoral dissertation I explore the key role played by the eighteenth-century
enlightened narrative of civilisation in the shaping of a Eurocentric/racist construction
of the world. I do this by analysing how, in sources from the realms of moral
philosophy and natural history, the intertwining discourses of luxury, sensibility, taste
and climate that fuelled the narrative of civilisation created an understanding of human
nature that made eighteenth-century scientific racism possible. The entire non-European
world (the East, Africa and America) was presented as a space inhabited by unnatural
bodies. Although Europe itself was not characterised as monolithic, (these writers saw a
clear boundary between Northern and Southern Europe), the joint efforts of both moral
philosophers and natural historians clearly distinguished Europe and the European body
from the rest of the world. The Eurocentric/racist eighteenth-century construction of the
world was so powerful in naturalising the European human and national prototype as a
universal normative standard that it even found agents in other continents who were
willing to argue that they too belonged to the European civilisation. Even those whom
Europeans explicitly cast as inhabiting spaces unfit for the unfolding of civilisation, and
thus as spaces where the European human prototype inevitably degenerated, might
insist that they too conformed to the European human and national prototype. The idea
of Europe as the centre of the world would not have triumphed had agents outside
Europe not participated in its making. This was the case of the New Granadan Creoles,
the founding fathers of the Colombian nation, who far from questioning the Eurocentric
racist/lens of civilisation whereby European savants had dismissed the non-European
world as inferior, instead reinforced it.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	C Auxiliary Sciences of History > CB History of civilization D History General and Old World > D History (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Eurocentrism -- History -- 18th century, Civilization -- 18th century, Racism -- History -- 18th century
Official Date:	February 2013
Dates:	Date Event February 2013 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of History
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Supervisor/s not known
Sponsors:	University of Warwick
Extent:	377 leaves.
Language:	eng

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