¹ Les bijoux is largely treated as marginal to the author's work in both English- and French-language scholarship, and has not yet, to my knowledge, been treated as a text registering a dispersed colonial anxiety about black self-agency in the way that I do here.

² See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Problem of Translation,” trans. Peter Mollenhauer, in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 68–70, 69.

³ Doris Garraway, “Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism,” in Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 207–39, 207.

⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” trans. Daniel Breazeale, in Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1979), 79–97, 90, emphasis added.

⁵ I trace the multilingual and transnationally dispersed anxiety in Europe about black self-agency against colonialism in my book The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others (London and New York: Routledge, 2014).

⁶ The transatlantic imaginary of Europe was richly informed by travel documents of the early settlers and explorers of the Americas, such as Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Christopher Columbus, and Sir Walter Raleigh. In the eighteenth century, travel narratives such as Antoine de Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde (1771) and John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Mission of Pacification Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname 1772–1779 (1790, 1796) were widely translated, providing the European transatlantic literary and visual imaginary with rich material from which to draw in their cultural imaginings of self against, or in relation to, other. Novels such as Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772) and Voltaire's Candide (c.1759) provide insight into some of the contradictions that the violence of the colonial process posed for the Europeans who were witnessing it with a critical, sometimes horrified eye. As A. Y. Mudimbe succinctly explains in the Preface to The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xi, “From Herodotus onward, the West's self-representations have always included images of peoples situated outside of its cultural and imaginary frontiers. The paradox is that if, indeed, these outsiders were understood as localized and far away geographically, they were nonetheless imagined and rejected as the intimate and other side of the European-thinking subject.”

⁷ It is unlikely that the awareness of and anxiety about black self-agency would have derived from direct experience of black self-affirmation against slavery in France. Free Africans lived in France at the time Diderot was writing, but their presence there was rarely a result of escape. It was more usually due to abandonment by owners or being stranded at sea. These free blacks formed part of marginal cultures and communities of France, taking professions as jugglers, boxers, and household servants. Others were involved in cultures of antistate crime as well as prostitution, thus forming part of the traveling interracial and transnational community of laborers that Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 1992), have termed the “transatlantic proletariat.” As a collective, this population of people would have harbored direct knowledge and experience of the indispensable labor they performed in the service of empire. Although not involved in direct revolutionary activity, these people stood as a body of collective signifiers of counterstate agency across the sea. They would also have represented an uncomfortable reminder of the indiscreet story of Europe, the Europe that could not be without the transatlantic proletariat or without Africa. For relevant work on this see William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Rediker and Linebaugh; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2000; first published 1983), and my The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others.

⁸ Written evidence of early black anticolonial agency is dispersed throughout the colonial archive. Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism provides a thorough and encyclopedic account of the roots of Black radicalism in chapters 4–6. Evidence of anticolonial activism was recorded by colonial administrators and survives in official historical archives, usually housed in what were previously the colonial metropoles. The letters of Toussaint L'Ouverture are a rare example of archival documents written by a black, and these date around the revolutionary period, as do the letters and speeches of Simón Bolívar. However, documentation of black activism can be read within the colonial archive of domination, even if the hand that penned it was not black. As is evidenced by the Code Noir issued in 1685 by Louis XIV, the system of discipline and punishment of blacks in the French colonies was designed in response to agency in the black communities that was disturbing to the French colonists (See especially Articles 15–19, 30–38). One of the largest collections of these records of anticolonial activism in the Americas is to be found in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain, with additional evidence in the Archivo Histórico Nacional de España as well as in the Archivo General de Simancas. Traces and representations of black agency are also to be found in political pamphlets, artistic images, travel literature, and other literary texts, as I have shown in The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others. For examples of specific forms of documents in which this activism was registered, and a closer study of the ways in which it was figured and represented in the European imaginary, please refer especially to chapters 2 and 3 of The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others, where I analyze a variety of literary and historical documents to show the refused imprint left on the colonial imaginary by black anticolonial activism. See also Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, and Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World.

⁹ See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

¹⁰ A strikingly illustrative example of this symbolic relationship between jewels and the material wealth extracted from the Antilles is the painting attributed to Johan Zoffany, Lady Elizabeth and Dido (c.1780), a double portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray, grand-niece and adopted daughter of William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, and Dido Belle, Murray's protégée and nephew's illegitimate daughter. Dido Belle was the product of interracial and possibly forced intercourse between Sir John Lindsay and Dido's mother, documented as Maria Bell, a black slave of African origin whom Lindsay had taken prisoner from a Spanish vessel in the West Indies and taken to England. For more critical and historical background on this see Adams, Gene, “Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl in Kenwood,” Camden Historical Review, 12 (1984), 10–14Google Scholar; and Rabin, Dana, “‘In a Country of Liberty?’ Slavery, Villeinage and the Making of Whiteness in the Somerset Case (1772),” History Workshop Journal, 72, (2011), 5–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989; first published 1963).

¹² See James E. McClellan III. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; first published 1992), 1–8.

¹³ See Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Colonial World (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Susan Parrish, “Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge,” in James Delbourgo and Nicolas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 281–310.

¹⁴ Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

¹⁵ Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987).

¹⁶ This is one of the central premises of my book The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others.

¹⁷ The relationship between imperial Europe and the black radical tradition has been extensively and most notably documented by C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson, and need not be rehearsed here. In addition, this tradition has been further traced by Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1996; first published  in French 1981);  Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997); Laurent DuBois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2004); and David Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).

¹⁸ Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry, 26, 4 (Summer 2000), 821–65.

¹⁹ The temporal proximity of publication between Bijoux and the first volumes of the Encyclopédie make it possible to read his first novel partly as a reflection on the scientific information and process of knowledge-gathering for the Encyclopédie. Although Bijoux has often been dismissed even by thoughtful eighteenth-century scholars, I agree with Miran Bozovic, who states that this novel should not be “dismissed as a youthful literary experiment,” but that it “should be considered an integral part of the author's philosophical canon.” Miran Bozovic, “The Omniscient Body”, in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Lacan: The Silent Partners (New York and London: Verso 2006), 17–33, 30.

²⁰ For a brilliant account of the relation between the nonlinear, heterogeneous, and messy narrative forms of the Enlightenment and the processes of the emergence of a new social order in pre-Revolutionary France see Dick Terdiman, Body and Story: the Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Bozovic.

²¹ Adam Vartanian, Introduction to Denis Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Marsilio, 1993), 10, emphasis added.

²² Interestingly, Diderot places Mirzoza and his novel in the realm of popular myths of resistance by inscribing the Mirzoza–Mangogul relation with another story, the story of Scheherazade, which may already have been circulating in France.

²³ Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 8.

²⁴ Diderot's texts are rife with small ironies of this sort, of which a comprehensive cultural analysis remains to be done.

²⁵ Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 20.

²⁶ Ibid., 16.

²⁷ See Lisa Lowe's chapter “Travel Narratives and Orientalisms,” in Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), in which she argues that the revolutionary discourse of a new nation, social order, laws, and social conventions is veiled by the orientalist genre, which displaced the act of imagining a reality and social structure fantastically different from the ancien regime to the realm of the radically different, unreal, and fantastic.

²⁸ The speech of the organ identifies it as an organ of pleasure rather than a reproductive organ. It is important to note also the symbolic value of the challenge posed specifically by the vagina to the status quo of the sultanic order through vaginal speech. As we receive it through the tradition of écriture femenine, vaginal speech insists upon the female organ as a resource of pleasure to the female body rather than as the tool that serves the patriarchal order through its reproductive capacity.

²⁹ The infidelity and deviancy of the bodies carry implications also at the level of the language/discourse that the bodies produce and the mechanisms of translation required to understand them. As long as the language remains incomprehensible, it causes no harm. It is when the language of the bijoux begins to be understood, through the mechanism of translation provided by the ring of Cucufa that the social disruption begins to happen. It seems, then, not only that is the discourse of the bijoux about illicit sexual acts, adultery, and infidelity, but also that the act of translating it (entering it) is itself transgressive. Thus the mechanism that silences this language – the muzzle – is produced by a population (the artisan class) that is somehow already transgressive, and therefore is the best prepared to understand the language of the bijoux.

³⁰ See Moira Ferguson's Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

³¹ Robinson, Black Marxism.

³² Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 145.

³³ Louis de Jaucourt's 1765 entry on “Singe” lists several types of sapajou, or spider monkey, locating them primarily in Brazil and the Guyanas. See this entry on page 208 of the fifteenth volume of the Encyclopédie at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k505471/f209.image.r=.langEN.

³⁴ Much scientific research on monkeys circulated in Europe at the time the Encyclopédie was being edited. The Encyclopedia of the Natural Sciences was published in Spain and France in 1782 and also locates the sapajou in the Americas. In the Colonial Art of Demonizing Others, the chapter “Jean François, the Spanish Constitution and the Monkey of Seville” shows that the figure of the monkey served as a rhetorical strategy for the Spanish imaginary to explore and define its sense of self at a moment of sociopolitical upheaval and loss of political sovereignty to the French. Even though he did not write the entry on monkeys in the Encyclopédie, it is entirely possible, if not likely, that Diderot would have been up to date on this research and would have known that the spider monkey was a species of monkey that was to be found in the Americas, turning what would appear to be a casual reference to a small object into a deliberate insertion of the American colonies into the narrative.

³⁵ See Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), in which he places the scientific study and description of the abnormal bodies at the center of the discursive production of the British nation during the nineteenth century, showing how the detailed examination and descriptions of “abnormal” bodies played a central part in the delineation of what the “normal” national body should look like. Youngquist's study of the shaping of the British nation points to the process of the monstrous whereby the description of the monster or that which is perceived as monstrous prescribes the contours of the normative subject.

³⁶ It is explicitly stated in the narrative that the artisan body designs the muzzle to silence the speech of the babbling organs; it is implicit that the artisan community would have produced the jewel most prized by Mirzoza: the little enamel spider monkey, a symbolic reference to non-European subversive agency.

³⁷ Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 28.

³⁸ Ibid., 29.

³⁹ Ibid., 28–29.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 28–29.

⁴¹ See Lezra, “Jean @François, the Spanish Constitutional Debates and the Monkey of Seville,”.

⁴² Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 48–49.

⁴³ Diderot scholars who have written on this novel do not grant the forceful blackening and gendering of the reading and imagining subject any critical attention: Vartanian's notes to the original text insist on the allegorical reading of the Congo and Banza, resisting the discomfort of the discursive blackface that Diderot's narrator imposes on the reader, even across time. See Vartanian, Introduction.

⁴⁴ Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 3.

⁴⁵ Diderot seems to be critiquing the tradition of European colonial discourse where the black exploited and exploitable female, an extension of the ever-bountiful and resourceful Africa, stands in for colony. In contrast to the procolonial discourse of his time, Diderot's black female emerges as a powerful opponent to an ailing monarchical and colonial social order.

⁴⁶ That the quest for “truth” lies in (or, more precisely, that “truth” is produced and labored over by) the people rather than in God or the monarch points to the essential shift in the concept of power at the fall of monarchy and the rise of nationalism in France and its colonies.

⁴⁷ Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 59–60, emphasis added.

⁴⁸ In The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992), Lynn Hunt shows that the aristocracy was described by Jacobin publications as a diseased body during the years of the French Revolution and that it was the aristocracy's material and ideological property that would eventually be overtaken by this multifarious population.

⁴⁹ The location of power in the ability to describe or identify diseased bodies in need of an ideological “cure” whose location in turn is the source of heightened power is what Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). Diderot's narrative critique and observation of the workings of mid-eighteenth century distribution and exchange of power anticipates Foucault's rendition of the structures of religious and secular power that control through surveillance. Diderot's narrative renders the bodies producing the devices to control the diseases that they themselves propagate as the bodies in power, as Foucault does, but in Diderot we see these bodies contrasted with the aristocratic “you” that Diderot interpolates, while Foucault emphasizes the ties that the network of power and surveillance produces between the bourgeois body and the criminal or deviant body.

⁵⁰ Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, 7, emphasis added.

⁵¹ Ibid., 15, emphasis added.

⁵² Ibid., 20.

⁵³ Ibid., 75.

⁵⁴ The Encyclopédie has a 1765 entry on the Inca/Ynca that refers to the Royal Commentaries of the Incas written by the mestizo Inca author El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. In his work, written originally in Spanish and published in 1609 as Comentarios Reales, Que Tratan del Origen de los Yncas, Reyes que Fueron del Peru, Garcilaso makes multiple references to the quipu, the knots and the knotting method used by the Inca society for historical, political, and social documentation. See, for instance, pages 44–48 of Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru (Abridged) by Garcilaso de la Vega, H. V. Livermore, and Karen Spalding (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006.) Although the entry in the Encyclopédie was written a few decades after Bijoux, Garcilaso's Comentarios Reales is a text of which Diderot would have been aware when he was writing the novel. See “Inca,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, by Monica Barnes (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing and University of Michigan Library, 2005), at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.517, accessed 30 Oct. 2014, for a translation of “Inca/Ynca,” in Encylopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1765), Volume VIII, 642, at http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.7:2205.encyclopedie0513.6471417 accessed 17 June 2015.