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

Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 190 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2340-0 paper.

Black Venus represents a significant addition to the growing collection of studies of the production of alterity in European discourses. In an eloquent yet admirably concise manner, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting covers a vast swath of cultural production, from French nineteenth-century vaudeville theater, cartoons, and novels to twentieth-century exotic revues, colonialist film, and postcolonial novels in order to describe and subvert the racist Hottentot Venus narrative.

That narrative permeated high and low culture in France in the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth century, according to Sharpley-Whiting, who argues cogently that the trope of the Black Venus had an effect on figures as disparate as Balzac and Josephine Baker. Balzac and other French cultural producers were clearly affected by the system of thought that guided Cuvier1's pseudo-scientific study of Sarah Bartman, the South African woman who became the "Hottentot Venus" during her tour of Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century, while Josephine Baker1's roles were often limited because of the stereotypes embodied in the figure of the Black Venus. According to Sharpley-Whiting, "she will be used as a yardstick by which to judge the stages of Western evolution, by which to discern identity, difference, and progress," (23) by scientists such as Cuvier, who not only performed anatomical studies of Barman1's cadaver, but also made sure that her body was preserved and put on display in the Musée de l1'Homme in Paris (where it was on view until the 19801s).

Cuvier's decision to use Bartman as a model of evolutionary development encapsulates the typical responses of the day to the Hottentot Venus. High culture, represented by classics of French literature in this study, provides another occasion to relate this narrative of racial evolutionism. For instance, the title character of Balzac1's narrative "La fille aux yeux d1'or" dies because she is trapped in that story of evolutionary development, a victim of her "blood." In another sense, Josephine Baker was also a victim of that story, for she was relegated to exotic secondary roles and never allowed to become the leading romantic interest in films such as PrincesseTam-Tam, a film which receives an extended critique in the final chapter.

Much of Sharpley-Whiting's study necessarily focuses on describing this narrative trap; however, she states that it is her objective to focus primarily on black women and their sexuality, rather than on white Frenchmen's anxieties. Although this clearly proved to be a difficult task, given the sheer weight of the evidence of French fears of the Other, her reading of the Black Venus figure goes beyond the excessively Eurocentric focus of many earlier studies of alterity. In her illuminating epilogue, Sharpley-Whiting shifts her attention to Caribbean narratives of women who rebel against the strait-jacket of the Hottentot Venus narrative. Simone Scharz-Bart, Marie Chauvet, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, and the heroic Solitude offer other narratives, and "subversive revisionings of black women through writing [that] challenge [s] hegemonic inscriptions of black female bodies" (125).

--Lisa McNee

Lisa McNee is in the Department of French Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

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