Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in FrenchBlack Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, and scientific imagination of nineteenth century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety,