ABSTRACT
Fanoudh-Siefer, in Le Mythe du negre et de l'Afrique noire dans la litterature francaise, states that French literary texts before 1870 only offered a fragmentary and imprecise vision of black Africa. The large majority of black characters in the Romantic novel represent the African diaspora in the New World, the Indian Ocean, and Europe. This chapter argues that by juxtaposing Claire de Duras's black aristocrat alongside the recurrence of similar figures of Africans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse. It explores about Ourika, a short novel that recounts the life of a Senegalese girl adopted by an aristocratic French family. Ourika also prefigures late colonial and post-colonial conceptualizations of racial identity. To be sure, it would be erroneous to claim that Ourika's blackness is just a structural variation within the master plots of sentimental and Romantic alienation, one that could be easily replaced with "class" or "sexuality.".
