Harriet Walker
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Abstract
As part of the vast control mechanism of colonialism over much of the world including Africa , Orientalism was designed to justify European dominance. Cultural ideas about European racial superiority were intimately tied to the control over women's bodies, and were perpetuated through cultural media that reinforced beliefs in the superiority of Europeans and the backwardness of non-Europeans. In this paper, I am interested in exploring how racial hierarchy, primitivism, and desire generated racial distinctions between women. I will focus on three nineteenth century photographs of black and racially mixed women in order to examine how photography contributed to racial and sexual social constructs of difference.
Because photographs appear to depict “reality,” they played a central role in shaping the ideology of Empire and providing “evidence” for the primitive sexual appetite of African women. In this way, the attitudes about black women as racial and sexual Other became institutionalized within imperial structures in Europe and the African colonies as well as in the American colonies where Africans had been transported as slaves. In French erotic photographs and paintings, prostitution was conflated with the sexuality of African women. Colonial experiences, while part of a larger Oriental discourse of racial and sexual domination were localized, politicized and partial so that there were different levels of domination. Yet, a general aspect of colonial experiences was the exploitation of African and mixed race women, justified by the stereotypes of racial and sexual superiority that shaped the ideology of Empire.