Interactive Timeline

This interactive map serves the dual purpose of establishing a handful of significant events throughout these three women’s temporal lives while tracing their geographic movements (whether willing or unwilling). The visualization of their lives forces a conversation on the three women’s realities and their French cultural constructions. Students and readers will have to rectify the portrayal of all three Black women as “Other” as they follow Baartmann and Ourika from their origins in Africa (specifically South Africa and Senegal, respectively) to France. At the same time, viewers are confronted with Jeanne Duval existing only in France yet consistently being portrayed as Haitian or Caribbean-born by white French society. Thus, discussion on the concepts of race and foreignness in nineteenth-century France becomes paramount as scholars must dissect this aspect of the Black women’s cultural constructions and their impact on definitions of French identity and citizenship (and conversely, its antithesis).