Dr. Nelson's talk will address the Enlightenment birth of biopolitics, focusing on the
creation of a formal regime of racial segregation aimed at identifying,
managing, and eventually removing all people of color who lived in
metropolitan France. The creation of a series of racial laws in the 1770s will
be contextualized within the revolution that occurred within Enlightenment
life sciences and the development of new biological ideas of race, revealing
how ideas and practices of racial exclusion were a part of a larger
development of programs aimed at biologically recreating populations.