‘Ourika mania’: interrogating race, class, space, and place in early nineteenth-century France

ABSTRACT

The Duchess de Duras heard about a little black girl who had, in 1788, been purchased as a house pet by the Governor of Senegal and given to his uncle, Monsieur de Beauvau. In 1820, the Duchess began writing a novel about the child (creating the first black female protagonist in European literature). Fifty anonymous copies of ‘Ourika’ were privately published in 1823, but the copies did not remain in the shadows for long. This essay examines how and why this black girl became such a potent representation, so popular that she inspired a brief but important period of hyper-visibility in Paris: ‘Ourika Mania.’ What interrogations of categories and spaces in early nineteenth-century Paris open up through our investigation of both the real and fictional ‘Ourikas?’ The dilemmas sparked by representations of Ourika reiterated that no matter how ‘proper’ the body, blackness precluded inclusion into definitions of Frenchness.

KEYWORDS:

• Ourika
• Frenchness
• blacks in France
• racial categories
• class
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Emphasis mine. Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Translating Slavery, 189.

2. In fact, there are multiple French identities. What I am arguing is that returning French émigrés and colonial refugees highlighted differences that were the source of much tension. Those tensions were around their differences from white French men and women that had remained in France. This also illuminates that those in France believed there were ‘proper’ ways to be French.

3. Art historians such as Grigsby (2002), Extremities and James Smalls have often been better than historians in seeing the importance of race.

4. Bourika (modified slang for ‘bourique’) is also slang for ‘donkey’. So in a sense, they combined and conflated ‘Ourika’ and ‘donkey’.

5. Lawton (2007) was neither French, nor did he live in the time of Ourika Mania in France. He was hardly a scholar; his work reads more like gossip about Balzac than a history of his life. His overstatement about Ourika further strengthens my assessment.

6. It is also curious that Ourika is applied to an African man.