| Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French Contributor(s): Sharpley-Whiting, Tracey Denean (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822323079 ISBN-13: 9780822323075 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $94.95 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: May 1999 Annotation: "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 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Women's Studies - Performing Arts | Film - History & Criticism - History | Europe - France |
| Dewey: 940.935 |
| LCCN: 98-37728 |
| Lexile Measure: 1450 |
| Physical Information: 0.85" H x 6.38" W x 9.37" (1.04 lbs) 208 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Cultural Region - French - Cultural Region - Western Europe - Ethnic Orientation - African - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |