ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a handful of baroque explanations for biological variation. It focuses on constructionist essentialism. Contemporary scholars of race collapse myriad explanations for biological variation in humans into a singular and overarching biological essentialism or biological race concept, shirking Stuart Halls call for historical specificity. Within critical race studies baroque modalities of race are ignored or misrepresented as if alternative ways of thinking about biological variation notions opposite to nineteenth-century biological determinism had not existed prior to contemporary notions of biological essentialism. The chapter presents a pre-theoretical foreshadowing of what biologist Robin Andreasen terms the geographical race concept, which was to characterize post-Darwinian racial thinking. At the same time, this baroque sketch of the geographical notion of biological race is offset by the precursor to what Andreasen terms the typological race concept. Constructionist essentialism in the Baroque epoch encompassed the entire organic world, including the environment, unlike modern and postmodern biological essentialisms.
