## Introduction: new definitions  
When discussing 'new definitions' or different definitions of blackness, we must first dispense with one long-standing myth: that blackness is a biological determination. While the members of any human collective from one geographical region may share some physiological characteristics, these markers quickly become obsolete once we move from a small collective to the much larger category of race. There is no one physical (or cultural) trait shared by all black people, whether we are speaking of skin colour, facial features, body type, hair type, or a propensity towards a particular medical condition.  
Indeed, blackness is neither a scientific nor a biological discovery, nor is it the creation of black peoples. With the rise of the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century, those white Europeans employed by or profiting from the trade often wrote or spoke about black Africans as a repugnant, inferior breed of human being. The racial category of blackness (or of the 'Negro', as it was first termed) was formally codified towards the beginning of the eighteenth century by white European and American politicians and philosophers. As I have argued in Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004), and as Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have detailed in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (1997) and Figures in Black: Words, Signs  
and the "Racial" Self (1987) respectively, otherwise respected thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel made a number of outrageous and fantastical pronouncements on black inferiority and the lack of civilized history in Africa under the guise of 'objective observation' - and this despite the fact that none of those authors ever visited the continent. ${ }^{1}$