Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900)

Review\nBased on extensive research in primary sources, Vénus Noire is a groundbreaking study of how, despite their relatively few numbers in metropolitan France, black women were weighted with powerful symbolic valence. French writers, scientists, and artists all depicted black women as sexualized, mysterious, and uncontrollable "others," thus burdening actual black women with living their lives in tension with these stereotypes. Mitchell brings to life the biographies of three particularly well-documented black women, while deconstructing artistic and literary icons of many more, to show how French discourse produced race and gender from the Revolution and Napoleonic era through the Second Empire. Haunting, breathtaking, and riveting, this book will linger in your mind long after you close its pages. -- Sue Peabody ― author of Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies\nMitchell’s research is rigorous and presented in a riveting way. Indeed, Vénus Noire is essential reading for any historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, as well as history enthusiasts. -- The Society for the History of Collecting\nVénus Noire, apart from breaking this reader’s heart, attests to the ongoing significance of the relational, intersectional approach in the study of European empire. -- Gloria Wekker ― New West Indian Guide\nBy demonstrating the points of intersection and parallel between these Black women’s stories, Mitchell illuminates the ongoing contentiousness that undergirded France’s relationship to Black subjectivity and Black sexuality in an era marked and striated by slavery and its abolition. -- H. Adlai Murdoch ― H-Net France Forum\nThe book is a triumph not only because it shows how narratives around black women’s bodies have evolved, but because Mitchell unashamedly makes the personal political. -- Kate Lister ― The Guardian\nIn this attractively written, handsomely illustrated volume, historian Robin Mitchell discusses the lives and representations of three Black women in nineteenth-century France in the context of the devastating loss of France’s most profitable colony at the time: Saint-Domingue.... In exemplary intersectional fashion, the study brings issues of race, gender, and sexuality to the fore, with regard to both the book’s three protagonists and the French metropolitan population. -- Gloria Wekker ― New West Indian Guide\nA much-needed tour de force. . . . Mitchell offers an insightful analysis of black women’s bodies as framing the discourse around national identity in post-revolutionary France. -- Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy ― Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora\nA timely and historically grounded Black feminist contribution to the study of race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial period....Essential reading for any scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, Vénus Noire is an exciting contribution to the field of French studies. -- Sage Goellner ― Oxford University Press French Studies Journal\nEven 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.\nVénus 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 g