Black Venus

Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French

AvTracey Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Häftad, Engelska, 1999

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Beskrivning

Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, and scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus.The book opens with an exploration of scientific discourse on black females, using Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and natural scientist Georges Cuvier as points of departure. To further show how the image of a savage was projected onto the bodies of black women, Sharpley-Whiting moves into popular culture with an analysis of an 1814 vaudeville caricature of Bartmann, then shifts onto the terrain of canonical French literature and colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, and Loti. After venturing into twentieth-century film with an analysis of Josephine Baker’s popular Princesse Tam Tam, the study concludes with a discussion of how black Francophone women writers and activists countered stereotypical representations of black female bodies during this period. A first-time translation of the vaudeville show The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen supplements this critique of the French male gaze of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Both intellectually rigorous and culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, feminist and gender studies, black studies, and cultural studies.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:1999-05-19
Mått:152 x 229 x 17 mm
Vikt:399 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:208
Förlag:Duke University Press
ISBN:9780822323402

Utforska kategorier

Freudiansk psykologi inom Psykologi och pedagogik
Genusvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Associate Professor of French, Film Studies, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms and coeditor of Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions and Fanon: A Critical Reader.

Recensioner i media

“A cogently argued study of representations of black women in French literature. In locating the Black Venus and the ideologies surrounding and informing her representations at the center of literary and cultural narratives, this book makes significant interventions in nineteenth-century French studies and current race and gender studies.”-Thadious M. Davis, Vanderbilt University “Intellectually rigorous, extremely well written, and solidly arguing against the dated French (and European) conceptualizations of black female sexuality. What a refreshing and much needed addition!”-Marjorie Attignol Salvodon, Connecticut College

Innehållsförteckning

List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction: Theorizing Black Venus 1Writing Sex, Writing DIfference: Creating the Master Text on the Hottentot Venus 16Representing Sarah- Same Difference or No Difference at All? La VÉnus hottentote, ou haine au FranÇaises 32"The Other Woman": Reading a Body of Difference in Balzac's La Fille aux Yeux d'or 42Black Blood, White Masks, and NÉgresse Sexuality in de Pon's Ourika, l'Africaine 52Black Is the Difference: Identity, Colonialism, and Fetishism in La Belle DorothÉe 62Desirous and Dangerous Imaginations:: The Black Female Body and the Courtesan in Zola's ThÉrÈse Raquin 71Can a White Man Love a Black Woman? Perversions of Love beyond the Plae in Maupassant's "Boitelle" 86Bamboulas, Bacchanals, and Dark Veils over Whtie Memories in Loti's Le Roman d'un spahi 91Cinematic Venus in the Africanist Orient 105Epilogue 119Appendix: The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen 127Notes 165Works Cited 177Index 185