Black Girls in Paris: Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, and French Racial Dystopias

Salamishah Tillet
Callaloo, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2009, pp. 934-954 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/cal.0.0491

For additional information about this article

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BLACK GIRLS IN PARIS Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, and French Racial Dystopias

by Salamishah Tillet

My Paris is the enchantment of wandering through an old museum, hand in hand with an old friend from Hollywood, lost in the wonder of Rodin. My Paris is the magic of looking up at the Champs-lyses from the Place de Concorde and being warmed by the merry madness of lights. . . . Whenever I encountered racism in any form, it was the exception rather than the rule and it stuck out as an incident. Im not going say France is paradise but I will say this: You can live anywhere if youve got the money to live. You can go anywhere if youve got the money to go and whomever you marry or date is your business. Hazel Scott

When Africans, on the other hand, traveled to France to nd work, they would nd only shame and humiliation at the hands of the French police. Everyday, they ran into arrests; everyday, there were planeloads of Africans being sent back home. Manthia Diawara Written more than two decades apart, Barbara Chase-Ribouds rst novel Sally Hemings (1979) and most recent book Hottentot Venus (2003) appear to be parallel bookends to each other. Both Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus are black feminist revisions of the most controversial and the most popular images of black women in the early nineteenth-century. In Sally Hemings, through a series of ashbacks, multiple narrators, and weaving in and out of the consciousness of her title character, Chase-Riboud reconstructs the historical relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson primarily from the point of view of Hemings. Invoking a similar narrative strategy, Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus recreates the story of Sarah Baartman, the Khoisan woman who left South Africa in 1810 for England and France, publicly exhibited her body for European scientists and carnival spectators, and reluctantly bore the pejorative moniker Venus Hottentot. Much like Sally Hemings, the novel Hottentot Venus retells Baartmans story by challenging the dominant nineteenth-century visual and written accounts of her life and by giving the ctional Baartman authorial control. Due to prevailing racial and gender stereotypes about black female sexuality, both Hemings and Baartman endured and continue to experience what Chase-Riboud once described in an interview with Monique Wells as the eternal negation of their humanity (65), in the Western imagination. In an attempt to rescue Hemings and Baartman from the dehumanizing images that dened them for the vast majority of the 934
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nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chase-Ribouds Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus grant these women an interiority and subjectivity denied to them in their real lives. And yet, despite these compelling textual similarities of black feminist revision and recuperation, this essay shall focus more on the meaningful and timely political differences between these two novels. More specically, I examine how Chase-Riboud puts forth radically different, if not opposing, representations of the French racial landscape in these novels. And in addition to situating these differences in the historical contexts of (post) Revolutionary France, I offer a more presentist reading of these worksone which recognizes that embedded in Chase-Ribouds paradoxical depictions of Paris are the late-twentieth-century debates about French racial policies and practices. Historically, while both Sally Hemings and Sarah Baartman involuntarily emerged as the two dominant stereotypes of black female sexuality in the nineteenth-century, they also were one of a small group of black people who lived in Paris, France, during their respective periods. Hemings traveled to Paris as the maid and traveling companion of Jeffersons youngest daughter on the brink of the French Revolution from 1787 to 1789, while Baartman lived in Paris under the duress of a French showman named S. Raux for fteen months before her premature death in 1815 during the Napoleonic Empire. Understandably, due to the actual historical circumstances that set these novels, Chase-Riboud does not reproduce and homogenize a singular image of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century French racial politics. For example, in 1787, once Sally Hemings arrived in France, she was free according to the Freedom Principle which automatically manumitted any slave who stepped foot on French soil. However, in Chase-Ribouds reconstruction of Hemings sojourn there, not only is Hemings a free woman, but France is utterly void of racial prejudice. As such, Sally Hemings privileges France as the denitive site of freedom and the racial foil of the United States, by overlooking what Sue Peabody aptly describes as the very real tension between colonial slavery and the cult of liberty (71) in eighteenth-century France. This overly romantic view of Paris disregards the racial ambivalence and Les Police des Noirs that other enslaved and free blacks from Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the French Antilles routinely encountered in Paris. Using a historical trajectory in which Revolutionary France is a republic that uninchingly extends its rhetoric of Libert, galite, and Fraternit to all enslaved Africans, the racial liberalism of Sally Hemings makes the racial animus of Hottentot Venus even more striking. In effect, close readings of these novels suggests that during the twenty-seven-year span between Hemingss 1787 and Baartmans 1815 French residences, France devolved from being color blind into a racial dystopia. On one hand, the actual historical settings of Sally Hemings and Sarah Baartman do provide insights into Chase-Ribouds divergent depictions of French racial politics in these two novels. For by the time Sarah Baartman arrived in Paris in 1814, Napoleon had not merely discounted the Constituent Assemblys 1794 abolition of slavery by reinstating it in the Caribbean in 1802, but he also was deeply committed to expanding the French empire into the heart of Africa. As noted by Alice Conklin in her study of French colonization of West Africa titled A Mission To Civilize, Napoleon buttressed his imperialist project by implementing oppressive measures and supporting racialized categories that dened Africans as fundamentally different from and inferior to white Europeans (9). So, unlike the ambiguity about slavery and race that would have greeted Sally Hemings, Baartman entered a French society that routinely used scientic racism and Enlightenment ratio935

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nale to justify the subjugation of blacks in both the colonial territories and the metropole. Admittedly, the racial regression that distinguishes Hottentot Venus from Sally Hemings partially reects the more liberal (though questionably so) racial politics of the French Revolutionary period of 1789 to 1799 versus those of the Napoleonic Empire of 1804 to 1814. On the other hand, these novelistic differences are both reections of and responses to the extreme racialization of French politics that occurred between the 1979 publication of Sally Hemings and the 2003 printing of Hottentot Venus. These contradictory descriptions of Paris provide insight into how contemporary France, once the racial haven for African American intellectuals and artists, as Tyler Stovells Paris Noir attests, has emerged as a prime example of the tide of racial bigotry washing across the continent (294). As such, this essay is both an examination of how modern American and French politics inuence the representation of race in these two novels and an exploration of how Chase-Riboud eschews the twin myths of French racial liberalism and African American exceptionalism that dominate Sally Hemings for the transnational racial solidarity that concludes Hottentot Venus.

There are No Slaves in Paris: Sally Hemings and the African American Expatriate in France Je taime, Sally, Je taime, I heard you say, And in Paris I mislaid My slavery. So home to Monticello, I met My mothers loving, though accusatory face, And I knew I should have chosen freedom. (Cassells 2) When Chase-Riboud moved to France in the early 1960s, she, like so many African American writers before her, understood France to be a country that valued its black citizens and welcomed black Americans. In contrast to the racial tensions that plagued their home of the United States, the myth of France as the land of liberty has framed the lens through which African Americans have understood and emigrated to France for much of the twentieth century. According to Tyler Stovall, during the 1950s and 1960s some blacks left the United States expressly to escape the burden of discrimination and came to Paris as self-conscious refugees from racism. . . . Once there, however, most African Americans shared the surprising realization that whites could treat them with affection and respect, that a color-blind society might be possible after all (Paris Noir xiii). In the case of ChaseRiboud, the myth of French racial liberalism not only inuenced her decision to relocate there permanently, but also became the dominant descriptor of France in Sally Hemings. Always described through ashbacks, the character Sally Hemings invokes a nostalgic image of France that directly contrasts her native slaveholding Virginia. By the end of the novel, Hemingss wistfulness for Paris remains for she always remembers it as the ultimate site of black freedom and the only space in which she and Jefferson could freely 936

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express their interracial love. Moreover, Chase-Riboud situates Hemings in a France that materializes its republican rhetoric of color blindness. Void of racial bigotry and slavery, the Paris for which the ctional Sally Hemings continually longs mirrors the libertarian dream that historically inuenced African American expatriate expectations of France. The image of France as the land of liberty for African Americans dates back to the early nineteenth century. According to Michel Fabre in From Harlem to Paris, The French of the Revolutionary period and Abb Grgoires Socit des Amis des Noirs were supporters of the rst African-American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, as slave. For them her writing was concrete proof that the Negro was endowed with creative intelligence (1). In contradistinction to inuential American Revolutionary gures like Thomas Jefferson, who claimed that Wheatleys poetry was below the dignity of criticism (140), many French Jacobins heralded Wheatleys writing as a testament of racial equality. In the mid-nineteenth century, due to its earlier ambivalence about slavery and its benevolent welcome of African American abolitionist writers like William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, France further solidied its role as the racial counterpart to antebellum America. As such, for those few African Americans who were able to travel to France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the perception of France as a color-blind country dominated. However, this myth did not fully take hold in the African American imagination until World War I. In direct contrast to their experiences in segregated American military camps, when African American soldiers crossed the Atlantic to ght on behalf of the United States and France in Europe in 1917, they encountered many French ofcials and citizens who openly received them. Not only were many French people appreciative of the African American soldiers defending them from German invasion, but they also became captivated by the jazz music that these soldiers brought with them from the United States. Because of these friendly racial encounters, many African American soldiers understood France to be a viable alternative to and reprieve from the seeming ubiquity of American racism. Moreover, while the vast majority of soldiers returned home at the end of the war, many African American soldiers either vowed to return to or stayed in France. By the 1920s, as the black soldiers formed the bedrock of the African American expatriate community in Montmartre, Paris, the rising popularity of jazz on both sides of the Atlantic enabled notable musicians like Eugene Bullard and Ada Louise Bricktop Smith to emigrate to France. Paralleling New York, Paris became a seminal meeting-place for African American writers and visual artists throughout the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Dissimilar to their racial experiences in the United States, writers such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, and Claude McKay regarded France as a place that afforded them a level of success and recognition denied to them in their native country. During the interwar period, while most African American intellectuals and artists were aware of Frances colonial practices abroad, they primarily comprehended their experiences in France through the lens of American race relations and therefore believed France as substantively more liberal than their native country. By the 1950s due to heightening racial conicts (which would later spawn the Civil Rights Movement) in the American South, signicant numbers of African Americans once again turned to France as refuge from their second-class citizenship in the United States. Most remarkably, Paris received so many prominent African American writers during this time that it was second only to the celebrated Jazz Age as the height of African American cultural productivity in France. Similar to Pariss Jazz Montmartre com937

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munity, Pariss Left Bank became a haven for black intellectuals, such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ollie Harrington, Beauford Delaney, and Chester Himes. As maintained by Stovall, for the early part of the twentieth century, the contrast between an overtly racist America and a tolerant and accepting French capital had dominated the life of the expatriate community in Paris. Even those who did not consciously identify themselves as exiles took advantage of the greater opportunities offered them by Paris than by their native land (Paris Noir 217). Surprisingly, while many African Americans considered France to be the symbol of a color-blind nation, the French government continually increased its policies of racial discrimination in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. During the height of African American expatriation to France in both the 1920s and the 1950s, one way that French colonial exploitation occurred was through the mutual recruitment of African soldiers to ght on behalf of France and the refusal to guarantee French citizenship and residency to these same soldiers and other colonial subjects. So, as France fashioned itself as the land of liberty in opposition to the United States during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it simultaneously invoked racial difference in order to segregate the metropole from the empire. Moreover, despite protestations of no slavery existing in France, these practices of racial exploitation did not begin in the Napoleonic era but date back to the proliferation of Caribbean slave societies during the ancien rgime. In the subsequent Revolutionary era, the Constituent Assembly originally resisted abolishing slavery in the colonies because, as historian Robin Blackburn suggests, the colonial system of Frances ancien rgime was one of its most splendid achievements. Governments, colonists, and merchants had built the most diversied, technically advanced and well-fortied slave plantations in the New World (163). So, in contrast to its republican myth of liberty, France, much like the United States, premised its nationhood on a series of complex and contradictory racial practices. Because France initially directed the majority of its racial policies towards enslaved blacks from the Caribbean and later towards their colonized subjects from North and sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, African Americans who were so used to occupying the bottom of the American social hierarchy suddenly found a haven from racism. Not only were African Americans hypervalorized as exotic as exemplied in the Jazz age and with Josephine Baker, but they often received special treatment because of their unique and conicted status as both American and black.1 To quote Stovall again: [T]he intense French interest in African-American culture during much of the twentieth century derived from the contradictory perspectives of both blackness and America. From primitivism in the 1920s to anti-Americanism after World War II, African-Americans served as a powerful barometer for how the French viewed the world, and by extension, themselves. (Paris Noir xiv) Instead of upholding its image of racial equality through its fair treatment of its enslaved and later colonial subjects, more often than not, Frances national myth of color-blindness stems from its rhetoric of republic universalism and its rejection of American racist attitudes towards African Americans. Resultantly, many African American expatriates perceived French racism as minimal or non-existent. 938

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Taking this idea a step further, when the community of African American expatriates continued to, as described by Brent Edwards, bask in its own vanguardist myths as it employed the putative universality of French Rights of Man to decry U.S. racism(6), they simultaneously projected a myth of, what I understand to be, African American exceptionalism. As used here, African American exceptionalism describes an interpretative process and ideological project in which African Americans map their unique history of American slavery, segregation, and post-Civil Rights racism onto the racial histories of non-United-States subjects. In the case of many African American expatriates, by limiting their understanding of French racial politics through their experiences in the United States, they often regarded France, to paraphrase Richard Wright, as absent of race hate. While Claude McKays Banjo (1928), James Baldwins Equal in Paris (1955), William Garner Smiths The Stone Face (1963), and, as I later argue, Barbara Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus all challenge the myopia of African American exceptionalism by questioning and criticizing French racism in the metropole and the colonies, the vast majority of African American expatriates perpetuated and beneted from the rhetoric of French universalism and racial equality. And while Chase-Riboud never relinquished her American citizenship, much like her literary predecessors of the 1950s, Chase-Riboud moved to Paris in the early 1960s and did not return to the United States because of American racial attitudes. Fabre quotes Chase-Riboud as saying in 1969, I could easily go back to America and nd my place politically because black people are ghting. When I left in 1961 it seemed that if you were militant you were all alone (267). Countering the conservatism of pre-Civil-Rights American race relations, France presented Chase-Riboud an unfettered opportunity to be both an artist and activist. And while she would later question this initial romanticism, Chase-Ribouds rst perceptions of French race relations form the backdrop of Sally Hemings. For much like the young Chase-Riboud who found a racial liberalism in Paris that was unimaginable in her home of Philadelphia, her protagonist Sally Hemings always remembers France as both the country that guarantees her freedom from slavery and as the only place in which (antebellum) blacks can transcend race. In direct contrast to the silences and omissions of Sally Hemings within Jefferson biographies and American historiography and African American oral history, the story of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison survived only because Sally Hemingss African American descendants orally passed it down to the successive generations. In these African American counter-memories, historian Annette Gordon-Reed notes, the Jefferson-Hemings liaison stands along with the Declaration of Independence as evidence of the deeply conicted nature of American society and African American struggles with the precariousness of their existence in the United States, and in the end the rejection of the Sally Hemings story can be seen as a denial of black ties to the founding of the nation and a rejection of black birthright claims (174). While these oral narratives clearly had the symbolic implication of inserting Hemings into Jeffersons narrative, in the novel Sally Hemings Chase-Riboud reconstructed Sally Hemings as a slave-woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had a thirtynine-year monogamous relationship. In Sally Hemings, the sexual relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson appears to be mutual and romantic. However, for Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings is metonym for American multiracialism and her relationship with Jefferson is proof that the United States has always been a mulatto country (Lewis). By centering the novel on this multiracial heroine, Chase-Riboud admitted in a 939

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Ms. magazine interview in 1980 that she hoped to reveal the hypocrisy of an American national identity that perceives itself as a white mans country, even though this perception has nothing to do with reality (qtd. in McHenry 37). As such, the intimacy between the ctional Jefferson and Hemings warns against forgetting these multiracial origins and suggests that any form of historical amnesia puts American history and national identity at risk. To protect American democracy, Chase-Riboud further attested there comes a time in the life of a nation when certain facts have to be faced and included in the national identity, and that remembering slavery, and even more specically resurrecting Sally Hemings, is not only as a matter of record, but as a matter of survival (37). Unlike the extensive copies of Thomas Jeffersons letters from the period of 1787 to 1789, the only remaining historical records of Sally Hemings during her stay in France are a bill from the boarding house on the Rue Scene, her passport, the ledgers from Jeffersons household on how much he spent on servant clothing, and the 1802 memoir of her son Madison which attested to the fact that she rst became pregnant by Jefferson during this time (Trescott). According to Madison Hemings, once she became pregnant, she had to negotiate the status of her children with Jefferson because Sally Hemings and her future children were free under French law. In exchange for returning to the United States as a slave and forsaking her freedom under French law, Jefferson promised that he would emancipate all of their children at the age of eighteen in Virginia. Because there is scant evidence of Hemingss stay there, Chase-Ribouds novel is primarily a recreation of Hemingss Parisian experiences. As such, even though the historical Hemings only lived in France for two out of her sixty-two years, Chase-Riboud privileges this period of Hemingss life by dedicating a signicant portion (roughly one-fth) of the novel to her ashback scenes in Paris. In Sally Hemings, these ashbacks not only break up the linear chronology of the narrative, but also provide a geographical and social alternative to the Virginia plantation scenes that dominate the book. According to Fabre, Chase-Ribouds best-selling novel Sally Hemings evokes a Paris as a romantic city, but mostly as an architecturally beautiful one in which Sallys memories of the cities of Virginia pale by comparison and in which she feels so free that she forgets her position as a slave (267). Fabre rightfully notes that the architectural elegance of Paris aesthetically pauperizes Jeffersons plantation home of Monticello and in doing so undermines the cultural hegemony of Southern plantocracies. But even more signicant than these aesthetic differences, France affords Sally Hemings a heretofore unknown legal freedom. Upon her immediate arrival in Paris, her brother James exclaims, Slavery is outlawed in France. We are on French soil. That means we are emancipated. Free (89). Referring to Frances Freedom Principle which dated back to the sixteenth century and its maxim that all slaves who set foot on French soil were free upon baptism, James reveals to Sally that French law has manumitted her. Further contrasting slaveholding Virginia with France, James asserts to his disbelieving sister that There are white men in Paris and London and Boston who are working for the freedom of Negro slaves everywhere, but Thomas Jefferson isnt one of them (89). Here, James revels in French political liberties while simultaneously revealing the racial contradictions of Thomas Jefferson, and by extension the hypocrisy of the American Revolution itself. In his limited description, not only are blacks free in France, but white Frenchmen and women are working, alongside the British and white American northerners, to abolish slavery globally. Resultantly, France appears as an always already antislavery nation. 940

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For James Hemings, architects of American Revolution such as Thomas Jefferson might have, as Leon Higginbotham argued, spoke nobly that all men are created equal but they did nevertheless, excluded blacks from the equality promised all (383). However, by presenting France as a country that lacks the racial paradoxes so fundamental to the United States, Sally Hemings upholds the myth of French racial liberalism by disregarding Frances problematic pre-Revolutionary racial discourse and involvement in slave trade between 1789 and 1793. Ironically, James and Sallys exchange about French abolitionism in 1787 occurs during the height of French Caribbean slavery. According to Blackburn, between 1770 and 1790 the slave population of the French Antilles rose from 379,000 to 650,000, while their exports reached 17.5 million livres (9 million) in the year 1789, compared with British West Indian exports of about 5 million, produced by 480,000 slaves; in land area the French islands were twice as large as the British (163). Moreover, while there were inuential written attacks on slavery by French philosophers Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Raynal during the ancien rgime, unlike in England there was never a formidable abolitionist movement in France. Even when the rst antislavery group Les Amis de Noirs instituted a more practical application of abolitionism in 1788, the majority of Frenchmen greeted them with great disinterest or resistance. Given that slavery in the colonies ourished alongside the Freedom Principle in Paris, the image that late-eighteenth-century France was substantially more racially liberal than the United States can only exist by eliding its racial practices in the Caribbean. As a result, Sally Hemings depicts French racial tolerance towards its African American characters as evidence of Frances lack of racism. However, rather than understanding their experiences as proof of less racism, it could suggest racism with differences. While enslaved African Americans were manumitted in France, for many enslaved blacks in the Caribbean, France offered very few opportunities for freedom. They either could not benet from the Freedom Principle because they were unable to visit France or once in France had to go through the legal challenges of suing for their freedom. These discrepancies not only reveal that the myth of a French racial utopia requires a racist American nation-state, but that France has separate racial practices for African Americans and Caribbean blacks. So, even though the narrative of French liberalism as purported by Sally Hemings appears to be the exclusive experience of the African American expatriate, it, in opposition to the United States, enabled France to forget its history of racial contradictions. By doing so, a twin myth of French racial tolerance and African American exceptionalism is born. Even more ironically, during the Revolutionary period many of the public debates about slavery in France resembled those in the United States, for when the French national assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1787 and the dictum All Men are born and remain free and equal in rights, they did not universally apply these principles to the colonies. Instead, most of the deputies felt satised at having obtained liberty, equality, and fraternity for Frenchmen and only gradually came to realize that these principles would drastically affect the Frenchmen across the Atlantic who were either slaves or slave-owners (Quinney 117). So, while the French legislation had an ofcial narrative of racial ambivalence towards the colonies, Sally Hemings portrays the Revolution as the ultimate symbol of freedom for blacks and whites alike. In her ashback to Paris, Sally Hemings remembers:

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The word of the fall of the Bastille had begun to spread over Paris, and, amid gunre, we heard the sound of music. The people of Paris were dancing in the streets. We put James to bed and, despite the bath, the smell of the gunpowder hovered over him. He sat propped up on his pillows grinning. His eyes seemed to say this: This slave from Virginias made history today. This slave ran with the Revolution! His eyes said to me: I am mine. We are going to take ourselves to freedom. If God let me do this, then He will leave us take our freedom without running. Take ourselves, without stealing. We are going to be free. (139) Here, Chase-Riboud brilliantly rewrites the Fall of the Bastille as a moment of interracial freedom, for James not only participates in this historic act, but also sees himself as its direct beneciary. Similar to Jamess assessment of French abolitionism, the signicance of this scene lies in its juxtaposition to the racial conservatism of the American Revolution. While James understands himself to be an American national or from Virginia, he also recognizes that because the American Revolution did not extend its universal freedoms to him, his only recourse in Virginia is to steal his freedom from his master. For instance, when the Virginia statesmen demanded their freedom from King George in their Bill of Rights of June 12, 1776, these revolutionaries believed that all men were by nature equally free and independent and had the right to acquire and possess property, and pursue and obtain happiness and safety. As they drafted their own claims for freedom, they did so, according to Higginbotham, with the understanding that blacks were not human beings within a state of society, and therefore were not free and independent persons with inherent rights (59). Given the racial exclusivity of the Virginia Bill of Rights, James Hemings can only achieve or take his freedom by protesting with the working-class French in the streets of Paris. Furthermore, Jamess euphoria further upholds the image that French color-blindness dates back to the Revolution and its Republican principles (Bleich 167). As Sally Hemings portrays the French Revolution as racially inclusive in both membership and discourse, the novel repeats its insistence that France was always a color-blind state. Clearly, this representation overlooks the series of laws policing race that came about in the metropole in the decade leading up to the French Revolution. And yet, it completely ignores that the colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, forced the French Republic to extend citizenship to its black constituents and to abolish slavery. Consequently, rather than noting that French racial tolerance was often reserved for African Americans rather than Caribbean blacks, Sally Hemings purports a French universalism that subsumes racial difference. However, two contradictory images emerge by contrasting the overly romanticized image of Paris in Sally Hemings against the racial policing during the ancien rgime and the French Revolution. The rst is that of a more racially exible culture than that of the American South; the second is that the treatment of African American expatriates became the gauge to measure French racial liberalism. In both scenarios, the narrative of French racial liberalism requires the ubiquity of the American racist state and its attendant African American victims. In the end, by dening past and present French racial ideologies through the lens of African American exceptionalism, the exclusion of blacks in France and their experiences of racism become tangential and, at times, even antithetical to French national 942

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identity. Unfortunately, this aversion to dealing explicitly with the concomitant practice of French universalism and racial particularism renders its later history of colonization and anti-immigration aberrant and accidental.

Hottentot Venus Coming Home to Roost: Sarah Baartman and the African Immigrant in France I comprehend, but I speak English. I speak Dutch. I speak a little French as well, and languages Monsieur Cuvier will never know have names. Now I am bitter and now I am sick. I eat brown bread, drink rancid broth. I miss good sun. (Alexander 267) In a radical departure from the romantic representation of Paris that drives Sally Hemings, in Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud depicts early-nineteenth-century France as a locus of racial dystopia and colonial expansion. Unlike Sally Hemings, for whom France provided a temporary transition from being Jeffersons American slave to becoming his French wage-earning servant, Sarah Baartman emerged as the most notorious scientic curiosity in Paris. In effect, while Revolutionary France granted Sally Hemings an opportunity for freedom, it became a site of racial subjugation and bodily dismemberment for Sarah Baartman in the Napoleonic post-Revolution era. In addition to highlighting the racial discrepancies that dene the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century France, these shifts in Chase-Ribouds Parisian racial landscapes also reect and critique the external sociopolitical changes that occurred during the intervening years of her publication of these novels to such a large degree that the France that sets the Hottentot Venus (2003) ends up subverting that of Sally Hemings (1979). In an interview for the Los Angeles Times in 1993, Chase-Riboud noted Before, in the 60s and 70s, all of the racial prejudice in France was directed toward North Africans, but that changed when the immigrant population stared to change (qtd. in Drummond). Referring to the inux of immigrants from Francophone Central and West Africa, Chase-Ribouds comments underscore a shift in French racial realities. The wave of sub-Saharan African immigrants to Paris in the 1980s has led to direct critiques of the rhetoric of a French racial utopia by the second generation of African and Arab immigrants who continue to be the dual victims of French institutional racism and of the increased popularity of the French right in the 1990s. Fabre notes another outcome is that the myth of the color-blind France increasingly began to show its rst cracks at the same time that frequent encounters took place between black Americans and Africans (7). As such, within the twenty-four-year span that separates Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus, Frances reputation as a color-blind nation has been called into question. However, rather than suggest that modern-day France is enacting a new racism against its African immigrants, Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus revises her earlier representation of France 943

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not only to reveal the primacy of race in the early French republic, but also to show how this old race consciousness continues to predetermine and dene contemporary French policies and practices of racial discrimination. Much like her reconstruction of Sally Hemings, Chase-Ribouds recuperation of Sarah Baartman in Hottentot Venus as a metonym for the nation is neither arbitrary nor ahistorical. For more than any other black female gure, Sarah Baartman as the Hottentot Venus was the most popular and widely circulated stereotype of black female sexuality in early-nineteenth-century French culture. Biographically-speaking, before her notoriety, Sarah Baartman was born in the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in South Africa as a member of the Khoisan ethnic group in 1789, and later was renamed with the pejorative Saartjie (Dutch for little Sarah) when the Dutch colonized the region. Under a two-year contract with British surgeon, Alexander Dunlop, and Boer Peter Cezar, Baartman went to England in 1810 for the specic purpose of displaying her near-nude Hottentot body in early-nineteenth-century sideshows. There, Baartman as Hottentot Venus became both a spectacle for British carnival-goers and a scandal for British abolitionists. Dressing in tightly-clad and esh-colored body leotards, displaying her ostensibly unusual buttocks, and allegedly hiding the Hottentot Apron or elongated labia, Baartman performed in a cage and was ordered by a keeper to walk, sit, dance, or stand. In response to her harsh working conditions, a British abolitionist group called The African Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa sued her employer, Cezar, on her behalf on November 24, 1810. Accusing Cezar of holding her in involuntary servitude, and that he clandestinely inveigled her from the Cape of Good Hope, the suit demanded that Baartman be freed and returned to South Africa (Kirby 61). Cezar rejoined by presenting a contractual agreement written in Dutch which stipulated that Baartman agreed to display her body in exchange for twelve guineas a year. Even though the courts sided with Cezar and her exhibition continued for another year, Baartmans (now baptized and renamed Sarah) English prominence began to wan. In 1814, Cezar took Baartman to Paris and sold her to an animal trainer named Raux. Even though she was no longer a carnival performer in Paris, Baartman became the subject of satirical cartoons, a one-act vaudeville play, and most notably a scientic oddity for a panel of French scientists and zoologists in the Jardin du Roi for a three-day conference in March 1815. Under the scrutiny of celebrated French scientist Georges Cuvier, Baartman was his specimen during her brief stay in Paris and after her death in 1816. Instead of burying her body, Cuvier dissected her apron and in 1817, included Baartman as the only human in his Notes of the Museum dHistoire Naturelle and Histoire Naturelle des Mammifres. Posthumously, Baartmans skeleton, preserved genitals, and brain remained on display at the Muse de lHomme until 1974. It took another thirty years for the debate about Baartmans remains to gain international currency. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela became the rst black president in post-apartheid South Africa, he formally requested that France repatriate her remains. After legal squabbling and debates in the French National Assembly, France acceded to the request and returned Baartmans remains to the South African government for a formal burial in 2002. At the burial ceremony which hosted more than seven thousand people, South African President Thabo Mbekis eulogy invoked a familiar theme: The story of Sarah Baartman is the story of all African people of our country . . . it is a story of our reduction to the 944

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status of objects that could be owned, used, and disposed by others (qtd. in MacGregor). Ironically, when Mbeki reclaimed Baartman by positing her as a signier for colonized Africa, he drew upon a nineteenth-century trope in which Sarah Baartman as the Hottentot Venus served as the fundamental image of Africa and black female sexuality in Europe. However, unlike Mbeki, who renders Baartman as a victim of European colonial expansion and racism, Tracey Sharpley-Whiting points out that nineteenth-century French spectators and scientists invoked Baartmans alterity to justify existing notions of superiority in France and the inferiority of the Other (37). According to Sander Gilman, the image of the Hottentot Venus appeared in early-nineteenth-century medical, scientic, and literary discourses in order to locate and substantiate claims of racial and sexual difference: The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in the black, and the essential black, the lowest exemplum of mankind on the great chain of being, is the Hottentot. It is indeed in the physical appearance of the Hottentot that the central icon for sexual difference between the European and the black was found (83). Here, Gilman underscores the ways in which European science, literature, and art collectively constructed Baartman, and by extension Africa, as a site of nineteenth-century sexual deviance. While Gilman does not differentiate between British and French representations of the Hottentot Venus, scholars such as Sharpley-Whiting and Anne Fausto-Sterling extend Gilmans assertions by recognizing the unique interpellation of Baartmans image within French cultural and scientic communities. As noted by Fausto-Sterling, French anatomist Georges Cuviers obsession with Sarah Baartman was directly connected to anxieties about French nationhood, for he wished to control the hidden secrets of Africa and the woman by exposing them to scientic daylight . . . Hence, he delved beneath the surface, bringing the interior to light; he extracted the hidden genitalia and dened the hidden Hottentot. Lying on his dissection table, the wild Baartman became the tame, the savage civilized (42). By establishing Baartman as the primitive, bestial, and grotesque corporeal representative of the entire African continent for Napoleons colonial endeavors, Cuvier could prove French cultural and racial supremacy while simultaneously justifying French colonization, enslavement, and disenfranchisement of blacks in both Africa and the New World. Both alive and dead, Baartmans bodily difference was used to validate and reproduce what Sharpley-Whiting notes as the Manichaean world in which the dialectics of superiority (France) and inferiority (Africa) is wholly left intact. The gulf between black and white, between Hottentot and French, between civilization and jungle, is unbridgeable (41). In short, the Hottentot Venus functioned as an empty signier and the perfect specimen against which a fragile nineteenth-century French nation dened and solidied itself. Unlike Sally Hemings, who Chase-Riboud tells Monique Wells is a footnote to American history, a name lost to history because of her color and status and the need to keep the invention of the American identity pure, Chase-Riboud considers Sarah Baartman to be an icon of the invention of raceone of the most powerful and prevalent historical forces that exists. Whereas Sally Hemings is a private yet emblematic anecdote between black and white, Baartman represents the entire relationship between Africa and Europeans (64). Here, Chase-Riboud asserts that Baartman served as a sort of urtext for European racial taxonomies and anxieties. Given the nineteenth-century privileging of the gure of the Hottentot Venus as the antithesis and therefore formative site of French national identity, it comes as no surprise that Chase-Riboud similarly casts Baartman 945

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as a national allegory. However, her critical treatment of Sarah Baartmans life does not uphold nineteenth-century stereotypes of the Hottentot Venus as the French Other, but engages Baartman as an essential and constitutive icon of the French nationalist project. Thus, she reverses what Fausto-Sterling describes as the double troping of Baartman in which her gender and racial difference became quintessential markers of non-normativity in nineteenth-century France. Instead, Chase-Ribouds novel constructs Baartman as the metaphor for racial ideologies and practices that began in the Napoleonic era. Contrary to the French narrative of racial liberalism, Chase-Riboud reveals in her interview with Wells that Baartman is the emblematic mother of Western racism whose travails were of a nation, a whole continent, a whole race of men (65). Although Chase-Ribouds recreation of Sarah Baartman is unique, her novel (as I will later show) is in conversation with African American feminist artists such as Elizabeth Alexander, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Renee Cox, who also situate Baartmans legacy in the larger history of white supremacy and patriarchal desire. However, Chase-Riboud expands these revisionist projects by positing Baartman, much like South African visual artist Willie Bester and poet Diana Ferrus, as a symbol of colonial oppression and post-colonial subjectivity. As such, ChaseRibouds reappropriation of Baartmans story is clearly a Spivakian moment of subaltern articulation and resistance. Quoting Fausto-Sterling again, just as in the nineteenth century [Baartman] became a vehicle for the redenition of our concepts of race, gender, and sexuality, her present recasting occurs in an era in which the bonds of empire have broken apart and the fabric of the cultural systems of the North Atlantic has come under scrutiny (20). Zoe S. Strother puts it another way: the recent global re-distribution of Baartmans image as a late-twentieth century icon for the violence done to women of African descent (37) is part of a more extensive postcolonial project of revision and repatriation. In the specic case of Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus, the recuperation of Baartman not only spotlights the invention of race as a means of justifying the exceptionalism of the nineteenth-century French state and its attendant colonial expansion in Africa, but it also traces the racial particularism that continues to characterize French nationalism in the early twenty-rst century. In the two decades that separate Sally Hemings and Hottentot Venus, the French have been engaged in racialized debates about immigration and the future of French society. More than other European countries, twentieth-century France witnessed an inpour of immigrants from other countries because its postwar policies supported permanent immigration. While post-World War II France had a prior history of mass migration, these immigrants primarily were born in Europe. However, by the mid-1970s, a signicant percentage of migrants no longer came from within Europe as previous generations had, but arrived in France from overseas departments and territories in the Caribbean or from former French colonies in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. This shift in the ethnic makeup of the French immigrant has been so transformative that by the end of the twentieth century, most immigrants are non-white and originate outside of Europe. These immigrant groups, much like African American expatriates, come to France to benet from the French myth of republicanism and race neutrality. According to Manthia Diawaras We Wont Budge, Paris in particular had been held as a mirror, as the symbol of opportunity, progress, and civilization for Africans who wanted to enter modernity (38). Unfortunately, a racially-coded cultural bias undergirds this alluring 946

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French liberalism. Referring to its principles of universalism, French legislation prohibits the labeling, classifying, counting of, and thereby discriminating against French citizens based on racial differences (Calvs 219). Ironically, with the absence of legalized identity politics, French universalism simultaneously promotes a narrative of French cultural homogeneity. By perpetuating a discourse of citizenship and belonging based on the indivisibility of the French republic, the rhetoric of complete cultural assimilation (which is endorsed more often by the French Left than the Right) requires that rst and secondgeneration immigrants reject their non-French heritage and allegiances. In this regard, latetwentieth-century French universalism is merely a repackaging of the cultural and racial supremacy that spawned nineteenth-century French imperialism. In the latter scenario, racial alterity validated French cultural superiority and African inferiority which in turn justied French economic and cultural colonization of Africa and the Caribbean. Today, there is no longer an emphasis on explicit racial difference but racially-coded denitions of culture. Thus, even those who are more likely to favor these new trends in immigration do so by espousing a language of sameness which privileges monolithic French culture. As Leora Auslander and Thomas C. Holt state, instead of promoting the idea that those who come from other places and cultures might have something valuable to contribute to the collective life of France, liberal French immigration policies assume that the only way France can integrate non-European immigrants and survive as a nation is for all to be alike (172). On the other hand, the most visceral and visible responses to the appearance of large numbers of non-white immigrants have been: the politicization of immigration issues; the criminalization of the immigrant; the creation of new racial stereotypes such as the le sans-papiers; the popularity of Jean-Marie Le Pens extreme-right Front National in the 1990s; and the increased restrictions on legal immigration ows with the passage of the Pasqua Law in 1993. Unlike the French Lefts interpretation of a French universalism to which everyone can and should assimilate, the prevailing anti-immigration position renders Arab and African immigrants to be an inassimilable racial substratum of society and thereby incapable of successfully integrating themselves into the French state (Stovall, From Red Belt 354). Breaking away from the acculturation model, the New Right in France has been placing emphasis on difference in its doctrine since 1979. Insisting that rst-generation Arab and African immigrants and their French-born children have the right to maintain their cultural differences, anti-immigrationists simultaneously contend that the presence of such difference compromises the purity of French culture. Thus, in response to the decisive presidential victory of socialist Francois Mitterand in 1981, and the increasing numbers of African and Arab immigrants, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front National and declared, We have not only the right but also the duty to defend our national personality and also our right to be different. By 1987, Le Pen encased his antiimmigration ideology in a pro-France bombast: I love North Africans, but their place is in the Maghreb . . . I am not a racist, but a national . . . For a nation to be harmonious, it must have a certain ethnic and spiritual homogeneity. It is therefore necessary to resolve, to Frances benet, the immigration problem, by the peaceful, organized return of the immigrants (qtd. in Taguieff 11819). While Le Pens doctrine originally appeared at odds with the myth of French racial liberalism, his ideas gained so much traction by 2002 that he not only beat the main left candidate, Lionel Jospin, but came in second in 947

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the presidential election. Signicantly, by framing the anti-immigration sentiment in the cloak of national security and cultural purity, the French right has been able to draw on class tensions and the nancial depression that began plaguing the French economy in the 1970s. The most obvious results of these class conicts and anti-immigration sentiments have been three-fold: rst, a series of violent clashes or riots between nonwhite youth, whites, and police in the suburbs that began in the 1980s and reached a peak in 2005; second, the passage of the Pasqua law of 19932; and third, a mainstreaming of Le Pens racist anti-immigration ideology into the centrist-right governing party of the Union for a Popular Movement and the election of its leader Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France in 2007. Unfortunately, a direct consequence of the Pasqua law and the popularization of anti-immigration discourse have been the criminalization and further racial Othering of the French immigrant and their French-born children. Better stated by Manthia Diawara: The Pasqua law dramatizes the crime of illegal immigration and creates an atmosphere of fear and suspicion of the immigrant as a threat to the fabric of French society. The crime of the illegal immigrant is thus made to t all the contemporary problems that France is facing: social security, politics of birth, overcrowding of schools, housing, medical care, unemployment, and the defense of family values, as well as serious crimes like murder, terrorism, kidnapping, burglary, money laundering, and drug trafcking. By linking les sans-papiers to all these issues and crimes, the Pasqua law has constructed the illegal immigrant as Public Enemy Number One. (61) In this passage, Diawara critiques the interrelationship between French legislation and the racialized gure of les sans-papiers. Akin to the American stereotype of the illegal alien, the term le sans-papiers (without papers) not only refers to undocumented African immigrants, but also is applied to French citizens from the Caribbean whose racial identities mark them as foreigners or immigrants (Stovall, From Red Belt 354). Moreover, despite the fact that African immigrants constitute a numerical minority, les sans-papiers are considered to be the ultimate threats to the economic security and cultural supremacy of France. As such, the non-American black in France, whether legal or undocumented, represents both the unwanted and the unassailable Other upon which the modern French state projects its anxiety. However, instead of assuming that the anti-immigration rhetoric and its attendant racial stereotypes originate in the modern French state, Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus examines the historic underpinnings of African or black alterity in France. By revealing nineteenth-century French racial contradictions, Hottentot Venus traces how the earlier conceptions of race generated and continue to inuence the racially-coded immigration debate. In Sally Hemings, Paris enables Sally and her brother James not only to live in the elegant Hotel dLangeac, but also to be free of uniforms and even the semblance of servanthood while they roamed the streets and the grand boulevard crammed with new buildings. American revolutionary ideas were everywhere and they met them in a form hitherto never encountered by either of them: the newspaper and the broadside (109). Here, Sally and James eschew their symbols of servitude and revel in both the intellectual and architectural novelty brought about by the French Revolution. Moreover, the fact 948

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that the rhetoric of the American Revolution now inuences and shapes their freedoms in Paris while it simultaneously upholds their slave status in Virginia reinstates the trope of France as a racial utopia. Conversely, for Sarah Baartman in Hottentot Venus, Paris is a site of decay and racial subjugation. In the rst few pages of the novel, Baartman immediately provides a counternarrative of Paris by juxtaposing her physical deterioration to the post-Revolution Parisian urban degeneration. As the fatally ill Baartman lies in the bathtub and reminisces about her travels in France, she recalls: I had been sick for a long time before Alice noticed. Longer than I could remember. It probably started in the spring, around the time I had been examined for three days in the Kings Botanical Gardens. The Cour des Fontaines was not a place to be in bad health. Les Fontaines were the water reservoirs for the waterworks and gardens of the Kings Palais Royal. The entire Quarter extended from the Palais Royals vaulted archways, with their galleries and shops, and food stands and cafes . . . to Les Halles, the meat district, the stomach of Paris, not only its stomach, but its internal organsits heart, liver, intestines, its shit. The slickest, fastest, largest, most brazen rats ruled our quarter. . . . The district was a maze of alleys and narrow streets and culs-de-sac lined with dozens of theater, music halls, circuses, bars, and coffeehouses, restaurants, exhibition halls, casinos, taverns, and whorehouses. All kinds of animals, human and otherwise, lived here, on exhibit: elephants, giraffes and camels, tigers, snakes and parrots, and all the parasites they brought: eas, ticks, lice, and mice. This was where I lived. (8) For Baartman, Paris is neither a romantic nor an architecturally beautiful city, but is a place in which elegance merely shrouds urban debris. Instead of being able to move about the streets of Paris with the radical ease of Sally and James Hemings, the animal trainer Raux and the naturalist Georges Cuvier conne her to either the Parisian circus cage or scientic stage. So, like in Sally Hemings, the architecture of Paris becomes a symbol for race relations. However, in Hottentot Venus, the new buildings that greet Sarah literally lead to the moral decay of exhibition halls, casinos, taverns, and whorehouses and the environmental waste of eas, ticks, lice, and mice. Here, Chase-Riboud not only negates her prior equation that the French aesthetic includes racial liberalism, but reveals that African immigrants, such as Baartman, lived outside these architectural paragons in the nineteenth century because of their perceived racial difference. As such, Baartmans lamentation does not naively celebrate Paris as a place of bodily and political freedom for blacks, but represents Parisian squalor as a dangerous contaminate for African immigrants. When Sally Hemings casts Paris as the only place that Hemings and Jefferson could be in an open interracial romantic relationship, it does so in order to contrast French racial liberalism to the racism of American anti-miscegenation laws. However, when Hottentot Venus characterizes Baartmans Parisian spectators as a people more dened by their repulsion and vilication of interracial coupling than their desire and adulation of it, the text further challenges the myth of the racially tolerant French state. Through its depiction of the sexualized but non-romantic relationship between Sarah Baartman and Georges Cuvier,

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Hottentot Venus upsets the narrative of France as a safe space for interracial sexual unions by representing it as the ultimate site of interracial conict. Ironically, by reconstructing France as the locus of coercive interracial sexual exchanges, Chase-Riboud also deviates from the earlier invocations of Sarah Baartman in Elizabeth Alexanders poem titled The Venus Hottentot (1825) (1989) and Suzan-Lori Parkss Venus: A Play (1997). In the novel Hottentot Venus, Sarah Baartman has two sexually romantic relationships. The rst is in South Africa with her Khoisan husband, Kxau, and the second one is in England with her British owner-employer, Alexander Dunlop. Even though Dunlop nancially exploits her throughout the entire novel, Baartman consistently imagines their relationship as mutually romantic. As Baartman describes their travels from South Africa to England, she reminisces: I made love to Master Dunlop, my future husband, Khoekhoe style (84). In England, Baartman eventually falls in love with Dunlop and unknowingly participates in a sham wedding ceremony. Despite the fact that they are not legally married, ChaseRiboud represents England as a country that provides Baartman with the possibility of interracial romance. When the wastrel Dunlop sells her to the animal trainer, Raux, in order to pay off his gambling debts, Baartman ends up moving to France where she loses the limited sexual agency that she asserted in England. In France, Raux prostitutes her to Cuvier for whom she becomes the paramount sexual and scientic object. Unlike Suzan-Lori Parkss play, Venus, which reconstructs Baartman as sexually desirous of Cuvier in order to grant Baartman sexual subjectivity and authority, in Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud refuses to characterize the exchange between Baartman and Cuvier as reciprocal or romantic. In Venus, the titular character Venus begs Cuviers character, the Baron Docteur, to touch me down there (104) because she wants to sexually climax. Contrastively, Cuvier not only repels Baartman in Hottentot Venus, but his patriarchal and somewhat necrophiliac sexuality inhibits any possibility for a mutual sexual exchange. Instead of coveting Cuviers attention, Baartman castigates him for deriving sexual pleasure from his postmortem domination of her body. As he dissects her labia, Baartmans ghost comments: The baron had arrived at last at the place in Africa he wanted to be, most wanted to possess. Not the Congo nor Ethiopia, not Sierra Leone or Sudan or even Egypt, but Cape Table. I listened to him murmuring like the litany Liberty, equality, fraternity, the litany Prepuce, pubes, pudendum, lavishing the skill of the sculptor and the heart of a butcher to excise the mysterious apron he was now free to explore without my consent. Over my dead body. . . . His hands probed deep into my uncharted cadaver while uttering the sighs of a man in the throes of overwhelming passion. (281) Once he completes his dissection and supposedly uncovers The Great Chain of Being of the Hottentot Apron, Cuvier then ejaculates on Baartmans dead body. Here, Chase-Riboud underscores the intimate connection of what Sharpley-Whiting refers to as the desire to master or know difference and the production of eroticized/exoticized narratives of truth (7). Cuviers excitement about his discovery of the missing link between humans and animals demonstrates how Baartmans body served as a simultaneous scientic and sexual conquest for a fragile French nation. In order to justify the claims of French 950

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supremacy on which French imperialism rested, Cuvier, as Napoleons surgeon-general, rendered Africa as inferior by proving the bestiality of black female sexuality. Here, Cuviers invention of Baartmans anatomical difference not only cures his impotency, but also establishes Baartmans racial and sexual alterity as innate and therefore unassimilable into a politically-anxious French state. Much like Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus, Elizabeth Alexanders poem The Venus Hottentot (1825) represents Cuvier as a monstrous gure who abuses Baartman, for the poem ends with Baartman declaring in evocative detail: If he were to let me rise up from this table, Id spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science uid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in the whites mans museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural. (268) While Alexanders Cuvier clearly refers to the historical gure, he symbolizes the hardness of scientic racism. However, instead of differentiating between British and French understanding of race and their corollary representations of the Venus Hottentot, Alexanders poem assumes what Zine Magubane theorizes to be a uniformed and unvaried European response to Baartman (818. For example, when Baartmans character begins the poem with There is an unexpected sun today / in London she locates herself in England; however, as the poem progresses, she seamlessly transports herself to France and to The Ball of Duchess DuBarry. By overlooking the differences between the British and French reception of Baartman, The Venus Hottentot undervalues the interplay between geographical specicity and the diverse constructions of Baartmans racial alterity. Contrastingly, Chase-Riboud structures the ve sections of Hottentot Venus around Baartmans travels to South Africa, England, and France in order to highlight the important discrepancies between their past and present uses of Baartmans legacy. Moreover, by privileging Baartmans encounters in these different structural locations, the novel creates a hierarchy of racial liberalism based on geography. In this hierarchy, France is not posited against the United States, but is compared to colonial and post-apartheid South Africa and to nineteenth-century England. While colonial South Africa represents Baartmans abandoned and racially-segregated home, the return of her body to South Africa in the late-twentieth century is supposed to embody the racial possibilities of post-apartheid South Africa. As South Africa appears as a mythical homeland, England and France serve as sites of contestation and foreignness. However, by giving sympathetic portrayals of the British actor James Kemble, writer Jane Austen, and the creation of Baartmans maidservant, Anne, and by featuring the suit against Baartmans employer, Dunlop, by the British abolitionist group in great detail, Hottentot Venus reveals how Englands antislavery movement directly challenged the commodication of Baartmans body in the public sphere. France, on the other hand, which had no formidable abolitionist movement, 951

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appears to be the ultimate place of racial animus for there are no viable alternatives to the rise of scientic racism, Napoleons colonial enterprises, and Baartmans dehumanization. France is no longer the epitome of an antislavery nation as in Sally Hemings, but a country bearing its own particular and rather ordinary brand of racism. In the end, Hottentot Venus reveals how France has never been race-neutral. Instead, France appears to be a place in which fabrications of blackness remain salient, relevant, and therefore predetermined by the weight of history.

Diasporic Vision I have come to take you home where the ancient mountains shout your name. I have made your bed at the foot of the hill, your blankets are covered in buchu and mint, the proteas stand in yellow and white I have come to take you home where I will sing for you for you have brought me peace. (Ferrus 3) In addition to reecting the rising racial tensions of modern France, the differences in these novels reveal fundamental changes in African American perceptions of France. While Sally Hemings historicizes and challenges the racial strife of (post) Civil Rights America by privileging France as a site of racial liberalism, in Hottentot Venus Chase-Riboud reverses this image of France in order to expose and contextualize the historic origins of contemporary racial tensions in France. By doing so, she not only revises the former invocation of Hemings and Baartman as black female Others, but also troubles the image of the African American expatriate who whole-heartedly upholds the myth of France as a colorblind nation. By giving these two nineteenth-century muted black women gures, Sally and Sarah, the nal word in her novels, we not only recognize the racial foundation upon which the United States and France were built, but gain a more nuanced understanding of the prospects and disappointments that continue to dene black life in France. In lieu of either the United States or France serving as sites of racial equality, Hottentot Venus ends with the peaceful return of Baartmans body and spirit to South Africa. Much like Mbekis invocation of Baartman as the metonym of post-colonial South Africa, ChaseRiboud reclaims South Africa as the site of racial reconciliation and a viable racial alternative to the West. In fact, even though South Africa is a country fraught with a tumultuous racial past, unlike the United States or France this modern state originates in a rejection of racism and celebration of universalism. As Baartmans ghost reects on her repatriation, we better understand the African-Diasporic vision that Chase-Riboud endorses: An African breeze lifted my ashes and scattered them like wings upon the sea whose depths drank them. . . . With a click of my tongue, I commanded a million women to rise up and bear witness to my agony by wearing red gloves in honor of Sarah Baartman. Then all was still (317). Through reconguring Baartman, Chase-Riboud forgoes the lens of African 952

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American exceptionalism for a narrative of transnational racial solidarity in which the post-colonial subjects reject their alterity and reestablish their humanity.

NOTES 1. See Auslander and Holt 169. 2. The Pasqua law of 1993, named after French interior minister Charles Pasqua, sought to stem the remaining legal ows in a variety of ways: by prohibiting foreign graduates from accepting job offers by French employers and denying them a stable residence status, by increasing the waiting period for family reunication from one to two years, and by denying residency permits to foreign spouses who had been illegally in the country prior to marrying.

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