Ideas of blackness and racial difference have deep roots in European culture, stretching further back than the slave trade and 19th-century imperialism. This text exposes this history through an archaelogy of the racial imagination, exploring the work of both black and white artists and writers. Adam Lively shows how racist beliefs in innate intellectual and moral difference developed from the classificatory sciences of the 18th century, and Enlightenment model stemming from older, biblical divisions of mankind into "tribes". This book also questions the more opaque racism of integration, where professed ideas of "equal" often mean "like us". This is akin to the older abolitionist tradition of describing black slaves as pure victims; their skin might be "ugly and black" but their soul is always white. Tracing these two strands of thought, the text places them against a third "existential" definition of blackness, which has come mostly from black writers themselves. Lively looks closely at specific texts, from the 18th-century novels to jazz and rap, encompassing sentimental romances, propagandist verse, the trickster tales of slaves and their autobiographical narratives, the science of Darwin and fictions of blood and empire. Examining the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the subversive effect of black feminism, he argues that only by understanding the complex evolution of present attitudes can we understand the impact of race on our imaginations, and on our lives.