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This French novella narrates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who, after being rescued from slavery, is raised by a noble French family during the French Revolution. She remains unaware of her difference because of being raised in a privileged household until she overhears a conversation that makes her conscious of her race and of the discrimination it faces. After learning about her roots, Ourika lives not as a French woman but as a black person. The story then presents the struggles she faces with her newly discovered identity as an educated African lady in eighteenth-century Europe. Claire de Duras wrote this best-seller twenty-five years before the abolition of the slave trade in France. This period was a time when not a lot of women published their work, so Duras published Ourika anonymously. It marks an important event in European literature as it is the first novel set in Europe to have a black female protagonist. Despite being a short story, this work addresses the themes of race, nationality, interracial love.
John Fowles presents a remarkable translation of a nineteenth-century work that provided the seed for his acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and that will astonish and haunt modern readers. Based on a true story, Claire de Duras's Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race--and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who fe...
A study of representations of the French Atlantic slave trade in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.
This lively history “adds a new dimension to our understanding of 18th-century France” by exploring the Parisian fashion of importing exotic animals (American Historical Review). In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta’s Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor—in all, forty-two live animals. In the streets of the city, one could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which ...
'Madeleine's Children' is a gripping microhistory/legal case involving two generations of a French family enslaved in the Indian Ocean colonies
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. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, r...