Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture

Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture
By
Rozanne McGrew Stringer
Submitted to the graduate degree program in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
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The Dissertation Committee for Rozanne McGrew Stringer
certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:
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Abstract
In this study, I examine images of the black female and black male body and the female
Spanish Gypsy by four artists – Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec – that articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to
racialized populations by French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1862
and 1900. Notably, whiteness – made visible and raced – is also implicated in some of the images I
analyze. I look closely at the visual stereotype of the seductive, dark-skinned female Spanish Gypsy
and the primitive and debased black male, as well as at representations of the abject black female
body. I also consider the construction of “whiteness” as an unfixed and complex notion of French
identity, particularly as it applies to the bourgeois white female body.
I analyze images in which representations of racial identity seem unproblematic, but I show
that these images articulate a host of uncertainties. I contextualize each image through analyses of
nineteenth-century French representations of the black person and Spanish Gypsy by modernist and
academic artists, nineteenth-century racialist science, French fiction and periodicals, and
entertainment spectacles such as the circus and human zoos. My methodology draws primarily on
formalism, social history, and postcolonial and feminist theory.
In my examination of representations of racial difference in late nineteenth-century French
visual culture, I investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a
term employed by nineteenth-century biologists and natural scientists to define the intermixing of
races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the
discourses on racial hierarchies and classifications. I explore nineteenth-century notions of racial
hybridity through the emerging science of anthropology, but I also expand my study to interrogate
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hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultures and identity. I consider how these images expand and
problematize the meaning of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial purity. I also demonstrate
the paradoxical correspondence and oscillation between the racial stereotype and the culturally
dominant power responsible for the stereotype’s creation and perpetuation. My study seeks to
illuminate what I see as the hybridity and heterogeneity of racial identity, for the person of color as
well as for the “white” European, discretely and subtly disclosed in these images.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank a number of individuals and institutions whose support greatly
contributed to the completion of this dissertation. I am indebted to the Kress Foundation
Department of Art History and the Humanities and Western Civilization Program at the
University of Kansas for teaching appointments while I pursued my degree. The University of
Kansas also provided funding for research in France and at museums in the United States. I am
extremely grateful to the Kress Foundation Department of Art History for the Tim Mitchell
Memorial Art History Award; the Hall Center for the Humanities for the Andrew Debicki
International Travel Scholarship in the Humanities; and the Humanities and Western Civilization
Program for the Ted Johnson Interrelations of the Humanities and the Arts Award.
My research was facilitated by the gracious assistance of the curatorial and library staffs
of the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Princeton
University Art Museum; the Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Rare Book Library, Jane Voorhees
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University; the Département des Estampes et de la photographie
and Département des Arts du spectacle, Bibliothéque nationale de France; and the Musée
d’Orsay, Paris.
I wish to thank these museums for their generosity in providing me the right to reproduce
images from their collections: the Art Institute of Chicago; Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection,
Zurich; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery.
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My dissertation committee provided insightful analysis of my work at critical points. I am
grateful to Marni R. Kessler, Marilyn R. Brown, David Cateforis, Amy McNair, and James
Woelfel for their thoughtful and discerning consideration of my work and the beneficial
suggestions they offered. I was fortunate to work with Marilyn R. Brown whose scholarship on
the Gypsy and bohemian in nineteenth-century French visual and literary culture was and
continues to be an invaluable resource for me. During my doctoral studies at the University of
Kansas, I benefited greatly from coursework with David Cateforis, Amy McNair, and Linda
Stone-Ferrier. Their seminars were intellectually enriching and shaped my critical thinking. I
thank them for their continuing interest in my work and progress. My teaching appointment in
the Humanities and Western Civilization Program, directed by James Woelfel, provided me with
the opportunity to work with faculty in philosophy, history, European studies, and religious
studies as well as with graduate instructors from a number of disciplines. I profited immensely
from these exchanges.
I am profoundly indebted to Marni R. Kessler who advised and directed my dissertation.
Her teaching and scholarship remain models for my work. I appreciated her enthusiastic support
for my dissertation topic and our conversations guided me to formulate the questions and issues
that have been the focus of my project. Her advice on ways to approach the complexities and
ambiguities associated with the images I selected for the dissertation helped me move my
inquiries from abstract concepts to fully realized chapters. I am also very grateful for her
perceptive analysis of my written work and the constructive feedback that helped me strengthen
my arguments. I am a better researcher and writer because of her attention to all aspects of my
work.
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Family and friends played a large role in keeping me focused and motivated. The
friendship of MaryAnn Cameron, Ursula Clark, Margaret Garrison, Ann Hager, Glenda Koch,
Jeff Mack, Ginny Olson, Ruby Shade, and Doretha Williams kept me going throughout the
phases of this project. My parents, Pauline and Charles McGrew, my sisters, Diane, Paula,
Karen, and Sue, and my brother, Chuck McGrew, always cheered me on and cheered me up and
I am very grateful for their love and encouragement. Throughout this journey, my husband, Dave
Stringer, offered unwavering support and love. I dedicate this work to him with my enduring
respect and affection.
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Table of Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 Chapter One: Mme Camus’s Shadow: Degas and Racial Consciousness 17 Chapter Two: Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette: Unfixing the Racial Stereotype 74 Chapter Three: Beholding Beauty: The Black Female Body in Frédéric Bazille’s
Late Oeuvre 132 Chapter Four: Masculinity and the Object of Desire in Toulouse-Lautrec’s
Chocolat dansant dans un bar 192 Conclusion 242 Bibliography 247 Illustrations 277
1
Introduction
The juxtaposition of a black woman and white woman in Frédéric Bazille’s canvas, La
Toilette [Figure 1], 1870, at first glance seems to uphold normative nineteenth-century
conceptions about the separation and hierarchization of the races. The semi-nude kneeling black
woman, attired only in a headscarf and multi-colored striped skirt, attends to the seated light-
skinned female nude who is placed at the center of the composition. Standing to the left of the
seated nude is a second female servant with dark eyes and hair, and a sallow complexion.
Surprisingly, it is the interchange between the kneeling and seated women that especially
commands the viewer’s attention. While one might expect to see the white woman depicted as
the principal focus of the pairing, her body is rendered as a limp and generalized form. Yet, the
body of the black woman is depicted with specificity and not reduced to a racialized type.
Indeed, the skin coloration of the seated female nude in Bazille’s image could be characterized as
“blank” whiteness1 while Bazille imparts an unexpected radiance to the black woman’s skin.
Bazille composed the flesh tones of the seated nude woman from a palette of analogous icy
whites which contrasts markedly with the array of luminous hues – warm browns, copper,
orange, pink, and plum – with which he painted the black woman’s skin. In formal terms, Bazille
painted the image of a black woman that was at odds with established social and pictorial
traditions by suggesting an aestheticized and a particularized black female body.
Bazille’s image of the black female body in La Toilette is situated at an intersection
between mid- to late nineteenth-century French scientific models that established the strategies
1 This term is used by Steven Connor in The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 161, to
describe the dichotomous qualities of ‘pure’ white skin. He writes: “Words like ‘blank’ and ‘bland’ which derive from the French ‘blanc’, evoke a skin which is both present and absent, in the field of vision, yet featureless, visible as invisible …”
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of defining racial and hierarchical difference and the visual representation of race. Certainly,
artists employed multiple strategies for visualizing racial difference during the second half of the
nineteenth century, but many producers of visual culture subscribed to the ideology that essential
differences separated the human races. In this dissertation, I will show how signs of racial
difference in images by Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Henri Toulouse-
Lautrec evoke ambivalence toward racial identity. I explore how fluid notions of race in late
nineteenth-century France are unexpectedly disclosed in these works.
In my examination of representations of constructions of race2 in late nineteenth-century
French visual culture, I have chosen to investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through
the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists, natural scientists, and most
notably by contemporary cultural historian and postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha to define the
intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly
dominated the nineteenth-century discourse about racial hierarchies and classifications. The images I
have selected expand and problematize the notion of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial
purity. “Hybridity … makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way
that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different,”3 writes Robert J.
2 In the nineteenth century, the concept of race was understood to signify separate and distinct groups of human
beings who shared similar physical characteristics. For much of the century, racial theorists and scientists attempted to sustain the claim that separate and pure races existed, but after the middle of the century, anthropologists conceded that the physical evidence could not support that assertion. French anthropologist Paul Topinard (1830- 1911) suggested that the term “type” was more relevant than “race” because all human races had experienced intermixing. See Topinard, Anthropology, translation of L’anthropologie, 1876, trans. Robert T. H. Bartley (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), 442-447. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1-20, explores the myriad racial metaphors in literary studies. Gates writes “Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application” (5). Of course, I agree with Gates that the definition of “race” has been/is subjective. However, in my dissertation, I primarily use the term “race” as it was applied by nineteenth-century French racial science to classify human beings according to biological distinctions.
3 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 26. Young is among postcolonial theorists who have expressed disagreement with Bhabha’s theorization of hybridization and have criticized Bhabha for his a-historical and Utopian approach. In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 187, Young writes: “Bhabha does not in any sense offer a
3
C. Young in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Young distinguishes
biological hybridity – inter-racial mixing that produces heterogeneous offspring – from cultural
hybridity, which he argues is transformative and irrevocably alters the physical, spatial, and
metaphorical separation of two discrete entities. I will explore the concept of hybrid zones as sites
where boundaries between absolute difference and sameness are effaced, and contact and
interaction result in shifts of identity that dismantle the sense of racial or cultural exclusivity and
authenticity.
In this study, I employ both the literal and metaphorical notions of hybridity. Since the
requisite for biological hybridity is the intermixing of distinct “races,” my dissertation focuses on
racialized populations with which the French had significant contact in the nineteenth century:
Negroes4 and Gypsies.5 I also interrogate what constituted “whiteness” for the French in the second
half of the nineteenth century and how visual culture inscribed, indeed participated in creating,
unstable and fluid designations of racial difference for populations of color as well for the “white”
European. My dissertation examines images of the black female and black male body and the female
history of colonial discourse, nor even a simple historical account of it – for such historicization marks the very basis of the Europeanizing claims he is trying to invert.” Also see David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 2006), 149-169, for critical responses to Bhabha’s theory of hybridization and colonial discourse.
4 While this term is rarely used in American English or applied to American blacks today, I employ it because of its widespread usage and meaning during the nineteenth century. In the nomenclature of race, noir designated a free black person, while nègre was associated with French colonial slaves. Pierre Larousse in the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle defined Nègre as “strictly spoken of blacks of African origin, and associated with the idea of color are servitude, forced labor, [and] an almost savage state.” (“Nègre se dit proprement des noirs originaires de l’Afrique, et il ajoute ordinairement à l’idée de couleur celle de la servitude, du travail forcé, de l’état presque sauvage.”) See Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle t. 16 (1860-1890, repr., Nimes, Gard: C. Lacour, 1990), 903. Larousse, t. 16, p. 1052, does not explicitly refer to slavery when defining the noir. He concisely describes the noir as “[t]hose who belong to the Negro race.” (“Qui appartient à la race nègres.”) Within my dissertation, I will use Negro/nègre interchangeably with black, African-Caribbean and North and West African. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are mine.
5 The term “Gypsy” has been employed as a racialized category since the seventeenth century to define dark- skinned populations who speak the Romani language. A mostly fictitious and romantic history was created to explain the origins of the Gypsies and their arrival in Europe. Forced into exile from India because of their pariah caste sometime between the fifth and tenth centuries CE, Gypsies made their way westward to Europe via two routes. A northern route led from India to Central Europe and the region known as Bohemia. A second group of Indian Pariahs traveled to the Mediterranean and ultimately settled in Egypt and North Africa from where, in the fifteenth century, they migrated to Spain. My dissertation will focus on the Spanish Gypsy, the Gitano/a.
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Spanish Gypsy by Degas, Manet, Bazille, and Toulouse-Lautrec that expose the unreliability of racist
ideologies and articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized
populations by many French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1860 and
1900. I investigate nineteenth-century notions about racial hybridity through the lens of biology
and ethnology, but I also expand my study to interrogate hybridity as the cross-fertilization of
cultures and identity.
I examine how French representations of the African Caribbean, North and West African
black, and Spanish Gypsies visually expressed the anxieties about and fascination with the growing
numbers of non-white populations living in France. Colonial expansion in the West Indies and Africa
resulted in unions between French colonists and colonized women and the offspring of these inter-
racial relationships elicited concerns about the degradation of the white race and civilization. Within
their nation’s borders, the French viewed immigrant populations of blacks from their colonies and
itinerant Spanish Gypsies – deemed ethnically distinct from Europeans – with suspicion, derision,
and desire. The Negro and Gypsy were simultaneously marked as overtly sexual, primitive, and
intellectually inferior. Although the French established a racial hierarchy that affirmed Europeans
superior to non-white races, colonialism and immigration inevitably contributed to the dissolution of
precise racial boundaries. My dissertation considers the areas where the dominant culture and its
perceived inferior intersect and how artists represented those “in-between”6 states of racial and
cultural identity.
6 I borrow a term used by Homi K. Bhabha in “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial
Prerogative,” The Location of Culture (1994; repr., London: Routledge Classics, 2004), 85: “However, what is implicit in … concepts of the subaltern, as I read it, is a strategy of ambivalence in the structure of identification that occurs precisely in the elliptical in-between, where the shadow of the other falls upon the self.”
5
Throughout the nineteenth century, France’s relationship with its colonized populations
and slaves can be characterized as contradictory and conflicted. Early in the century, France’s
imperial aspirations turned from the West Indies to Africa. Algeria was conquered in 1830, and
after 1871, France’s imperial designs for expansion were directed at regions of North, West, and
equatorial Africa. France rationalized its economic and political gains at the expense of its
oppressive treatment of indigenous colonial populations and the African slaves that were sold as
agricultural laborers to colonial plantation owners in the West Indies. Alice L. Conklin argues
that colonialism was justified on moral grounds as an effort to civilize colonial populations and
emancipate them from internal despotism. 7 France also assuaged its culpability in the slave trade
by proclaiming that slavery was not condoned in France, it was only sanctioned in French
colonies.8 Reasoned, pragmatic, and compassionate arguments advocating for the abolition of the
French slave trade and slavery in French colonies were voiced between the French Revolution
and 1848, when after earlier attempts, slavery was abolished once and for all in the French
empire. Thus France was no longer hindered by the moral debate over abolition.9 With
developments in ethnology and, particularly, physical anthropology after mid-century, the
subsequent discourses on the status and treatment of former slaves and people of color in France
and French colonies shifted decidedly from humanitarian concerns and the legacy of
7 Alice L. Conklin, “Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West
Africa, 1895-1914,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (April 1998): 419-442. 8 For an analysis of this irony, see Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race
and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 9 William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1980). Cohen’s book remains a standard text on the scientific, cultural, and socio-historical contexts for racial theory that culminated during the Third Republic. On slavery, see “The Issue of Slavery,” 130- 154, and “The Nineteenth Century Confronts Slavery,” 181-209.
6
Enlightenment humanism and universalism10 – the belief that all human beings possessed the
potential for improvement – to the determinism of “racial science.”11
Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, monogenism, the belief that human beings
shared a common origin, prevailed in Western natural history. Physical differences among races were
frequently attributed…