Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-century France
- ISBN-10
- 0820354317
- ISBN-13
- 9780820354316
- Category
- African diaspora
- Pages
- 209
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020
- Publisher
- University of Georgia Press
- Author
- Robin Mitchell
Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country's postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France's need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2020-05
- 208 pages
- Paperback
- University of Georgia Press
-
- 2020-02-15
- 208 pages
- Paperback
- University of Georgia Press
Similar books
-
The African Diaspora
By Joseph E. Harris38 Another elaborate study of bonded populations in the Sokoto Caliphate is the one on the Bida emirate by Michael Mason, who describes how the Bida state, a unit of the Sokoto Caliphate, was established by a Fulani aristocratic family ...
-
Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements
By Ronald W. WaltersThis groundbreaking volume analyzes important case studies of Black political movements since the 1960s and the impact of the movements on the African-American community.
-
Urbanism and Poetics: The Role of Europe's Black Intellectuals in the African Digital Diaspora
By Thomas Lucien Vincent BlairUrbanism and Poetics: The Role of Europe's Black Intellectuals in the African Digital Diaspora
-
Zimbabwe's Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival
By Jonathan Crush, Daniel S. Tevera12 C. Stoneman, “Structural Adjustment in Eastern and Southern Africa: The Tragedy of Development” In D. Potts and T. ... 18 C. Becker, A. Hamer, and A. Morrison, Beyond Urban Bias: African Urbanisation in an Era of Structural ...
-
Slavery, Islam and Diaspora
By Paul E. Lovejoy, Ismael Musah Montana, Behnaz A. MirzaiWritten by a cast of experts in the field, Slavery, Islam and Diaspora identifies the distinct cultural identity and social stratum of slaves in Islamic society and shows how Islam has been used alternately to justify enslavement, liberate ...
-
Global Africans: Race, Ethnicity and Shifting Identities
By Toyin Falola, Cacee HoyerCover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Editor and contributor biographies -- Global Africans: race, ethnicity and shifting identities -- PART I Shifting identities -- 1 Diaspora intellectuals, alienation and the production ...
-
Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place and Identity
By Jennifer T. Kaalund"Kaalund examines the constructed and contested Christian-Jewish identities in Hebrews and 1 Peter through the lens of the 'New Negro,' a diasporic identity similarly constructed and contested during the Great Migration in the early 20th ...
-
Black Waters, Pink Sands
By Yi-Sheng NgAyer Hitam : a black history of Singapore -- Desert blooms : the Dawn of Queer Singapore Theatre.
-
Tarnished Gold: Ghana and the Netherlands from 1593
By Gijs van der HamIn 2013 he published The history of the Netherlands in 100 objects, a book likewise based on the Rijksmuseum collection. Tarnished Gold is part of the Country Series published by the Rijksmuseums History Department.
-
Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean
By Darién J. DavisFocusing on areas traditionally associated with Afro-Latin American culture such as Brazil and the Caribbean basin, this innovative work also highlights places such as Rio de La Plata and Central America, where the African legacy has been ...