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  • Black Girls in Paris:Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, and French Racial Dystopias
  • Salamishah Tillet (bio)

My Paris is the enchantment of wandering through an old museum, hand in hand with an old friend from Hollywood, lost in the wonder of Rodin. My Paris is the magic of looking up at the Champs-Élysées from the Place de Concorde and being warmed by the merry madness of lights. . . . Whenever I encountered racism in any form, it was the exception rather than the rule and it stuck out as an incident. I'm not going say France is paradise but I will say this: 'You can live anywhere if you've got the money to live. You can go anywhere if you've got the money to go and whomever you marry or date is your business.'

Hazel Scott

When Africans, on the other hand, traveled to France to find work, they would find only shame and humiliation at the hands of the French police. Everyday, they ran into arrests; everyday, there were planeloads of Africans being sent back home.

Manthia Diawara

Written more than two decades apart, Barbara Chase-Riboud's first novel Sally Hemings (1979) and most recent book Hottentot Venus (2003) appear to be parallel "bookends" to each other. Both Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus are black feminist revisions of the most controversial and the most popular images of black women in the early nineteenth-century. In Sally Hemings, through a series of flashbacks, multiple narrators, and weaving in and out of the consciousness of her title character, Chase-Riboud reconstructs the historical relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson primarily from the point of view of Hemings. Invoking a similar narrative strategy, Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus recreates the story of Sarah Baartman, the Khoisan woman who left South Africa in 1810 for England and France, publicly exhibited her body for European scientists and carnival spectators, and reluctantly bore the pejorative moniker Venus Hottentot. Much like Sally Hemings, the novel Hottentot Venus retells Baartman's story by challenging the dominant nineteenth-century visual and written accounts of her life and by giving the fictional Baartman authorial control. Due to prevailing racial and gender stereotypes about black female sexuality, both Hemings and Baartman endured and continue to experience what Chase-Riboud once described in an interview with Monique Wells as "the eternal negation of their humanity" (65), in the Western imagination. In an attempt to rescue Hemings and Baartman from the dehumanizing images that defined them for the vast majority of the [End Page 934] nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus grant these women an interiority and subjectivity denied to them in their real lives.

And yet, despite these compelling textual similarities of black feminist revision and recuperation, this essay shall focus more on the meaningful and timely political differences between these two novels. More specifically, I examine how Chase-Riboud puts forth radically different, if not opposing, representations of the French racial landscape in these novels. And in addition to situating these differences in the historical contexts of (post) Revolutionary France, I offer a more "presentist" reading of these works—one which recognizes that embedded in Chase-Riboud's paradoxical depictions of Paris are the late-twentieth-century debates about French racial policies and practices. Historically, while both Sally Hemings and Sarah Baartman involuntarily emerged as the two dominant stereotypes of black female sexuality in the nineteenth-century, they also were one of a small group of black people who lived in Paris, France, during their respective periods. Hemings traveled to Paris as the maid and traveling companion of Jefferson's youngest daughter on the brink of the French Revolution from 1787 to 1789, while Baartman lived in Paris under the duress of a French showman named S. Réaux for fifteen months before her premature death in 1815 during the Napoleonic Empire. Understandably, due to the actual historical circumstances that set these novels, Chase-Riboud does not reproduce and homogenize a singular image of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century French racial politics. For example, in 1787, once Sally Hemings arrived in France, she was free according to the "Freedom Principle...

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