Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World

Abstract

On the back cover of Sara E. Johnson's phenomenal new work, Jennifer L. Morgan declares, “This is the book we have been waiting for.” That blurb is no exaggeration. In this beautifully written, brilliantly framed, painstakingly researched communal biography, Johnson makes critical interventions to Black studies, Atlantic history, and comparative literature. She does so by working across visual mediums and alphabetic languages (Dutch, English, French, Kikongo, Kreyòl, Mandarin, Spanish) that are preserved in and omitted from archives in and about the eighteenth-century Caribbean, metropolitan France, and the multilingual book market of Philadelphia.Each intervention—pertaining to frame, art, and language—relates to the others. Whereas the historiography has long focused on actors like Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a multilingual scholar, proslavery advocate, avid bibliophile, and sadistic violator of human rights—in sum, “a repugnant man”—Johnson shows why traditional biography is methodologically and ethically inadequate for Caribbean history (p. 237). Here, instead, Moreau is an “unreliable center” whose extensive literary production surfaces the experiences of the Black women, children, and men whose stolen knowledge and labor made his books possible (pp. 4, 12). In chapter 4, “Encyclopédie noire: Part II,” Johnson re-creates the social world of an unnamed woman, identified only as “mulâtresse,” who appears in Moreau's Parisian diary on February 9, 1787, with an analysis of what can and cannot be glimpsed (pp. 142–48). Chapter 1, “Encyclopédie noire: Part I,” analyzes passages excised from Moreau's published geography on Saint-Domingue to show how his work could not hold the contradictions of racial slavery. Johnson's careful—and caring—attention to materiality appears thematically and structurally throughout the book, often upending dominant conventions. Portions of chapter 7 are set upside down so that readers adopt the perspective of women and men who lived with slave owners’ names branded into their skin. Johnson's “illustrative storytelling” blends sight and sound to re-create affective, humanizing experiences—including misunderstood languages and intentional silence. This critical reframing is the book's first intervention.The second intervention uses artistic creation to reclaim space. Chapter 3, “Print Culture and the Empires of Slavery,” appears in Bodoni font, the closest to Moreau's, in contrast to the other chapters’ Garamond, as a call “to glean meaning from the design of the words and the material conditions that made their production possible” (p. 88). Moreau's attention to books belies his disregard for humans; he treated bound volumes as if they were alive, “even though he knew they were not,” and Black lives as if they were “without feelings for kin that approximated his own, even though he knew that this was not true” (p. 241), as Johnson argues in chapter 8, “Encyclopédie noire: Part III.” Surfacing the mechanics of Moreau's choices proves that he was no mere “man of his times” but an active shaper of white supremacist political economy (pp. 2–3, 58). A counterpoint to Moreau's fabulations is a remarkable range of original art—collages that combine eighteenth-century portraits and twenty-first-century designs; prints, watercolors, and sequins that tell and retell; juxtapositions of newspaper ads, scholarly glosses, fiction, and digital media; composite title pages from primary sources about Chinese history; remixed page proofs from Moreau's Mémoire justificatif (1790)—many in collaboration with artist Luz Sandoval.Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Moreau's multilingual worlds, the book's third intervention. Moreau manipulated the power politics of languages to position himself in enlightened spaces, even as he denied the knowledge and labor of the women and men whose ideas he extracted from Spanish, Guaraní, Kreyòl, and especially Kikongo. Both chapters flip the script on natural histories and vocabularies, genres that present themselves as objective registers of information, to show how they contributed to the denial of Indigenous and African knowledge systems.The global scope of the work shows the terrifying convergence of white supremacy, land and labor theft, and books. Yet the place-based stories of the Black communities and kinship networks that made Moreau's world are always at the center. When the archive is silent on their thoughts, feelings, and intents, Johnson insists that we speculate so that their stories claim space in our scholarship and create a record that future generations of researchers and artists can learn from. After all, writers like Moreau have been inventing so-called facts for 200 years. What is at stake in the scholarly policing that asks us to take Moreau at his word and to deny the same to the women, men, and children he abused?Johnson's stunning encyclopedia, grounded in Black thought and community, is designed as an “antidote” to the “poison” that Moreau, men like him, and the scholars who follow them have long put into Caribbean art, language, literature, and history (p. 246). At the heart of this act of scholarly rigor and artistic creation there are pain and generosity, trauma and pleasure, disgust and love, all at once. It is the greatest book that I have read in a long time.