Author: Angela Carter Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1409042146 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 98
Book Description
Extraordinary and diverse people inhabit this rich, ripe, occasionally raucous collection of short stories. Some are based on real people - Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's handsome and reluctant muse who never asked to be called the Black Venus, trapped in the terminal ennui of the poet's passion, snatching at a little lifesaving respectability against all odds...Edgar Allen Poe, with his face of a actor, demonstrating in every thought and deed how right his friends were when they said 'No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.' And some of these people are totally imaginary. Such as the seventeenth century whore, transported to Virginia for thieving, who turns into a good woman in spite of herself among the Indians, who have nothing worth stealing. And a girl, suckled by wolves, strange and indifferent as nature, who will not tolerate returning to humanity. Angela Carter wonderfully mingles history, fiction, invention, literary criticism, high drama and low comedy in a glorious collection of stories as full of contradictions and surprises as life itself.
Author: Robin Mitchell Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820354333 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
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, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 900440791X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
Tracing the figure of Black Venus in literature and visual arts from different periods and geographies, Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices discusses how aesthetic practices may restore the racialized female body in feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial terms.
Author: Heather Lloyd Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0399592199 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks. “It’s impossible not to root for this strong, willful girl as she finds her place in the world and for her brother as he tries to make sense of it.”—Kirkus Reviews “Charming, touching, and a host of other adjectives not often associated with a murderous thirteen-year-old.”—Booklist Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy—until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’s developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing. More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past. Estranged from her mother, and with her beloved brother still missing, she sets out to make a fresh start in Seattle, skittish and alone. But as new people enter her orbit—including a romantic interest and a young girl who seems like a mirror image of her former lost self—old wounds resurface, and Venus realizes that she can’t find a future while she’s running from her past. In this gripping story, debut novelist Heather Lloyd brilliantly captures ordinary lives thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Told through a constellation of captivating voices, My Name Is Venus Black explores the fluidity of right and wrong, the pain of betrayal, and the meaning of love and family. Praise for My Name Is Venus Black “Fans of realistic coming-of-age fiction will enjoy Lloyd’s fast-paced first novel for the freshly drawn original characters, compelling story line, and beautiful tribute to the healing power of love. It’s bound to have crossover appeal to older YA readers.”—Library Journal “A dark but ultimately uplifting story about family, love, and forgiveness, and how to find your place in the world, My Name Is Venus Black is a powerful debut novel from a fresh voice in fiction.”—New York Times bestselling author Sarah Jio
Author: Janell Hobson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135870969 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Western culture has long been fascinated by black women, but a history of enslavement and colonial conquest has variously labeled black women's bodies as "exotic" and "grotesque." In this remarkable cultural history of black female beauty, Janell Hobson explores the enduring figure of the "Hottentot Venus." In 1810, Saartjie Baartman was taken from South Africa to Europe, where she was put on display at circuses, salons, and museums and universities as the "Hottentot Venus." The subsequent legacy of representations of black women's sexuality-from Josephine Baker to Serena Williams to hip-hop and dancehall videos-continues to refer back to this persistent icon. This book analyzes the history of critical and artistic responses to this iconography by black women in contemporary photography, film, literature, music, and dance.
Author: Rachel Holmes Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1408881519 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
The acclaimed biography of Sarah Baartman, once a slave and later a showgirl 'A significant and timely book ... Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story' Frances Wilson, Literary Review 'Impeccable ... In telling her extraordinary story, Holmes's fascinating book illuminates the forces which dominated her age, and resound in our own' Sunday Telegraph In 1810 the slave turned showgirl Sarah Baartman, London's most famous curiosity, became its legal cause célèbre. Famed for her exquisite physique – in particular her shapely bottom – she was stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed. This talented, tragic young South African woman became a symbol of exploitation, colonialism – and defiance. In this scintillating and vividly written book Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Baartman's extraordinary life for the first time.
Author: Barbara Chase-Riboud Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0307426289 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that will change European science forever. Evoking the grand tradition of such “monster” tales as Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Barbara Chase Riboud, prize-winning author of the classic Sally Hemings, again gives voice to an “invisible” of history. In this powerful saga, Sarah Baartman, for more than 200 years known only as the mysterious lady in the glass cage, comes vividly and unforgettably to life.
Author: Jeanetta Rich Publisher: ISBN: 9781736210420 Category : Languages : en Pages : 62
Book Description
Jeanetta Rich is a mother and poet based in Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the emotional lives of voiceless women, those who have been silenced through poverty and/or lack of education. Her work was recently featured in Texte zur Kunst 30th Anniversary issue, "The Feminist." Black Venus Fly Trap is her debut poetry collection.
Author: Angela Carter
Author: T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Author: Robin Mitchell
Author: Deborah Willis
Author: 
Author: Heather Lloyd
Author: Janell Hobson
Author: Rachel Holmes
Author: Barbara Chase-Riboud
Author: Jeanetta Rich