Ideas of beauty have played a significant role, both in the construction of racial difference and in the elaboration of colonial hierarchies. Conversely, our ideas about what is beautiful have themselves been shaped by histories of race and colonialism. Since the eighteenth century, claims about universal aesthetic standards have coexisted uneasily with a fascination for racial and cultural difference. Meanwhile, judgements about bodies, skin, hair and dress have made beauty an important site for the negotiation of racial identities, in art as well as in everyday life. How do we come to find certain bodies beautiful? To what extent are our ideas of beauty entangled with racialised ways of seeing? Can beauty be reappropriated to challenge racial hierarchies and become a means of emancipation? Can we respond to the beauty of difference without objectifying or appropriating it? Moving from the eighteenth century to the present, this course explores these questions through French and francophone literature, aesthetic and racial theory, photography, film, as well as visual and material culture.

The first session examines the relationship between aesthetic theory and race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when aesthetic judgements were invoked as part of the ‘objective’ evidence of racial superiority. This is linked to the neoclassical ideal of a single, universal, standard of beauty. The Romantic movement puts forward a more relativist concept of beauty, but Arthur de Gobineau’s infamous theorisation of racial inequality continues to call on aesthetic arguments. Session two asks how different theorisations of exoticism might help us approach an aesthetics of the other, taking the so-called ‘Jeanne Duval’ poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and looking at them in the light of various approaches in literary criticism, in fiction (Angela Carter), and in art (bande dessinée and illustrations). Session three explores some examples of postcolonial ekphrasis (ekphrasis taken to mean the verbal representation of visual representation), in this case looking at selected Orientalist paintings by Delacroix, Ingres and J.-L. Gérôme, alongside responses by postcolonial writers Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar, as well as later visual artists. Session four turns to Négritude, and particularly Léopold Sedar Senghor and his attempt to formulate a distinctively Black aesthetic. Session five moves to post-independence Africa to explore practices of self-fashioning through dress and photographic portraiture, examining a number of examples from West African studio portraiture and magazines to the transnational fashion phenomenon of la S.A.P.E. The final session brings these questions into the present through the politics of skin, hair and women’s bodies. Exploring contemporary literature and documentary, we will consider practices such as skin-lightening and the politics of Black hair alongside the emergence of Afro-feminist discourses that seek to reclaim beauty and the racialised body as means of self-definition and resistance.