Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.)
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women, in particular, appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution.