Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (review)

Abstract

Setting out to examine "French cultural, scientific, and literary representations of black femininity and the psychosexual and cultural implications of those representations" (1999, 5), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting's book Black Venus argues that, in nineteenth-century France, black women inspired repulsion, attraction, and anxiety in French men and that black women thus found themselves entrapped in a lubricious image of primitive and excessive sexuality, a stereotype that she names "Black Venus." Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, and feminist film studies, Sharpley-Whiting insightfully analyzes a series of literary texts and situates those texts in a larger cultural milieu through [End Page 169] readings of scientific, historical, and journalistic documents. If the chapters in this book are short, the advantage of this approach is that it allows Sharpley-Whiting to cover a lot of territory and make more compelling her argument for the widespread nature of the Black Venus stereotype; the drawback is that her analyses recoil from the more complex theoretical issues that they inevitably step into. Thus the value of the book, in my view, lies less in its theoretical cogency, than in its wide-ranging scope and in the dense significance of its evidentiary detail: in the telling facts, for example, that Sarah Bartmann (the so-called "Hottentot Venus") was exhibited next to a rhinoceros and that spectators threw candy at her to encourage her to leap about and sing. Sometimes actions speak louder than theories.