Vénus Noire: Preface and Introduction

While the Preface gives a brief overview of Mitchell’s motivations and inspirations for Vénus Noire, the entry provides insight into her journey of uncovering the voices of these three Black women in nineteenth-century France. Presenting her work at colleges and universities across the nation (and globally), many have commented on the significance of the sentiments that Mitchell effectively communicates here and the concepts that her Preface raises in the discourse of writing and constructing historical narratives. Specifically, the insertion of Mitchell’s perspective in the narrative with the explicit framing of “I” throughout the Preface; and the thoughtful contemplation of a historian’s responsibility in representing often overlooked or silenced voices—especially when intimately relating to some aspects of the subject’s identity and possible lived experience. For these reasons, Mitchell felt compelled to highlight this aspect of the book in this Instructive Guide.

In the Introduction, Mitchell gives context to the three women’s lives that she pulls inspiration from and puts their experiences and treatment by white nineteenth-century French society into conversation with one another. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination. Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, clothing, and jewelry fads. Mitchell examines how the French appropriated the Black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual Black woman.

Finally, Mitchell shows how the demonization of Jeanne Duval, the longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of Black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.