Journal article
Race and Decadence: Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Afro-Asian Ornamentalism in the Global Nineteenth Century
Victorian studies, Vol.66(3), pp.466-478
09/01/2024
DOI: 10.2979/vic.00164
Abstract
Drawing on Black French studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and imperial history, this essay focuses on Charles Baudelaire's mixed-race lover, Jeanne Duval, in order to ask how racial dynamics shaped one of the earliest versions of the decadent aesthetic gaze in nineteenth-century Europe. I analyze Baudelaire's racialized engagements with visual culture and a small sample of poems that he wrote about Duval in Les Fleurs du Mal ( Flowers of Evil ) (1857), concentrating in particular on how he perceives Blackness and what Anne Anlin Cheng has theorized as "ornamentalism." I conclude by reflecting on Duval's fate once Les Fleurs circulated in the British Isles and reached Algernon Charles Swinburne in 1860.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Race and Decadence: Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Afro-Asian Ornamentalism in the Global Nineteenth Century
- Creators
- Cherrie Kwok
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Victorian studies, Vol.66(3), pp.466-478
- DOI
- 10.2979/vic.00164
- ISSN
- 1527-2052
- eISSN
- 1527-2052
- Number of pages
- 13
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 09/01/2024
- Academic Unit
- English; Center for Social Science Innovation
- Record Identifier
- 9984945143302771
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