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Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, & scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, & the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon & Toni Morrison, T. Denean ...

Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, & scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, & the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon & Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire & primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, & 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, & 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 & colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, & 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 & 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 & early twentieth centuries. Both intellectually rigorous & culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students & scholars in the fields of nineteenth- & twentieth-century French literature, feminist & gender studies, black studies, & cultural studies.