Serving Exoticism: The Black Female in French Exotic Imagery, 1733-1885
Serving Exoticism: The Black Female in French Exotic Imagery, 1733-1885
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Date
1999
Authors
Childs, Adrienne L.
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Abstract
The black female played an important part in the construction of
exotic female sexuality in French painting for nearly two hundred
years, yet her symbolic complexity has not been fully explored. This
thesis is a contextual analysis of the image of the black female in
French painting from the early part of the eighteenth through the
nineteenth century.
Representations of black females in this era are part of the
larger development of turquerie in the eighteenth century and
Orientalism in the nineteenth century. Centered around European
fantasies of Near Eastern and North African harem culture, turquerie
and Orientalism provided an exotic framework in which issues of
female sexuality and its relationship to race was explored. The objects
discussed in this thesis, primarily well known works by academic
painters, are examples of images in which the black female plays a
significant stylistic and ideological role.
The works are examined in relation to literary and scientific
discourses in which ideas about black women were negotiated during
the period. Slavery, imperialism, as well as colonial expansion
contextualize the imagery, and offer tools with which to uncover
encoded meanings inscribed in the exoticized black female.
This analysis provides an expanded definition of the nature of
the black female as a symbol, and outlines a complex, multidimensional
framework in which black female figures operate as a
sexual signifier.