(Post)-colonial persistence: the presence of the "Black Venus" in the work of Warnauts and Raives

Abstract

Although largely absent from pre-1939 comic strips depicting imperial conquest, the woman of non-European origin has finally found, to an albeit limited extent, a place in the bande dessinee following the emergence of Francophone post-colonial BDs in the late 1970s. However, this delayed arrival within the frames of the ninth art has not rendered the post-colonial woman entirely immune to the established pictorial tropes first used to depict the female colonized subject in the publications of the French and Belgian imperialist era, with a level of pictorial similarity to the colonial sexualized Black Venus figure to be found in some female characters of the late-twentieth-century post-colonial BD. This article takes as case studies two such works by the Belgian creative team Warnauts and Raives – Equatoriales (1994) and Lettres D'Outremer (1996) – in order to examine the representation of women of colonial origin within the texts. Focusing predominantly on the creators' manipulation of color and mise-...