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Désir Colonial et "Conscience Historique Authentique": "La Belle Dorothée" de Charles Baudelaire
- Nineteenth-Century French Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 35, Number 3&4, Spring-Summer 2007
- pp. 537-546
- 10.1353/ncf.2007.0069
- Article
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Contemporary critics of Charles Baudelaire's 1863 prose poem "La Belle Dorothée" have interpreted the figure of the liberated female slave Dorothée as a slave of imitation of whiteness. Drawing on colonial history, postcolonial theory, as well as recent developments in Baudelairean criticism, this article focuses on the poem's formal features to argue for a reading of Dorothée as a successful embodiment of emancipation without cultural assimilation. (In French)