More than meets the eye … representations of black women in mid-19th-century french photography

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at issues raised by some French photographs of black women taken in the mid-19th century. While standard readings of Orientalist painting describe representations of North Africa as constructing an imaginary Orient for the male white viewer, I argue that this oversimplifies a complex historical, cultural, and ideological configuration of factors relating to the transition between colonialism and imperialism in the mid-19th century and the embodiment of this configuration consciously and unconsciously in the representations of black women. Using photographs taken in France and in North Africa, I look at issues of gender, “race,” and class in relation to these images, locating some serious problems in attempts to read them as discourses of racialised femininity, which construct signs more real than the material circumstances and lived experiences through which they were produced and viewed. I offer a Marxist reading of these images as profoundly contradictory and unstable—embedded in modern historical and cultural processes rather than successfully fixing a clear and unchanging stereotypical view of North Africa and the racialised sexuality of black women’s bodies. This should in no way be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate these images.