"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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(1)
