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

A feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural and scientific imagination of 19th-century France. The text employs psychoanalysis, feminist film theory and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, and argues that black women invoked both desire and primal fear in French men.