ABSTRACT

There is an indelible mark in my memories of my undergraduate education as a student of western Art History in Canada. If I had been given a penny for every time a professor had lectured on Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863; Figure 7.1) only to refuse to discuss the conspicuous presence of the black maid, I would be quite a wealthy woman today. Noting the historical compulsion to erase her presence, Lorraine O’Grady has argued that:

She is chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the “femininity” of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight.1