Lesson Plan: Three Black Women in Conversation, Unifying Discussion

Plan: This is a classroom activity designed to have students connect the discourse surrounding the narratives of the three women as individuals and examine how their histories worked in tandem to facilitate new definitions of French identity after the Haitian and French Revolutions. As Mitchell states, allowing these women’s histories to communicate this way enables scholars to see how Black women in France specifically contributed to nineteenth-century French definitions of race.

Sample Discussion Prompts

• Baartmann, Ourika, and Duval appear in the historical record mainly through white Europeans appropriating their likeness—for instance, the various forms of “racial ventriloquism” or the cultural trends and fads inspired by the women. Why were some of these forms of appropriations “accepted” by French society while others were not? (Keep in mind the social contamination Duras experienced after publishing Ourika, or some actresses refusing to don blackface to portray Ourika or Baartmann in numerous plays VS. male satirists utilizing Baartmann or Ourika’s voice in their work and not receiving backlash, or the fashion trends of “Ourika Mania.”)


• Throughout the narratives created around Baartmann, Ourika, and Duval, Ourika is portrayed as receiving the most sympathy from white French society. How did the three women’s lifestyles contribute to how the white French public received them? What aspects of Ourika’s constructed narrative lend to this different reception? And how may the ending of Duras’s Ourika—where Ourika enters a nunnery until her death—elevate her, whereas the actress Duval experienced more contempt from the white French public? What similarities existed between white Europeans' conceptions of Baartmann and Duval in nineteenth-century France? And how did these conceptions contribute to racial definitions established in nineteenth-century French society (and ripple into the present)?


• While Baartmann and Ourika were taken to Europe from Africa and Duval was born in France and resided there her entire life, the three women were treated racially and culturally “Othered” similarly. Many writers even ascribed Duval to a fictional Haitian origin to justify this “Othering.” Why was the (purposeful) misremembering of Duval’s heritage significant to the treatment she received from the white French circles she existed within? How were the portrayals of these women similarly conflated despite their disparate origins?