ABSTRACT
Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, the French sculptor famous for his polychrome works, spent several years in Africa in the mid-nineteenth century on a state mission that had everything to do with colonial ideals of race and the possibility of their preservation as art-an exploration of art’s ethnographic potential. Although produced prior to his 1854-1856 trip, Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851; Figure 9.1) exemplifi es the types of works he would go on to create, sculptures themselves that were types of racialized (and signifi cantly) colonized peoples presumed to be on the verge of extinction or at least amalgamation, precipitated by miscegenation.1 With an awareness of his art as an ethnographic and therefore arguably scientifi c tool, Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851) is interesting in part for what the title promises yet fails to deliver; a failure that in this instance may signal the possibility of meanings that transcended the narrow colonial understandings of black femaleness in nineteenth-century France.
