Date of Award
1-12-2022
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
French Impressionism emerged as a radical movement that offered slice-of-life glimpses into the urban culture of nineteenth-century Paris. Contemporaneous commentators and subsequent scholarship have generally positioned Impressionists in opposition to Orientalists and those who looked outwards to the larger empire and the world. The purpose of this study is to reveal the Impressionist entanglements with exoticism and racial embodiments in a Haussmannized metropolis. I argue that the Impressionists were socially conditioned through the various spaces and boulevard institutions of Paris, which in itself was a microcosm of the French empire and the colonial mission. Through direct and implicit representations of the foreign “Other,” the Impressionists grappled with defining a modern French personhood. In doing so, their art demonstrated the practices of inclusions and exclusions inherent in the ideology of republican universalism. Each of the four case studies presented here examines the collisions of bodies and spaces: the migrant Black presence in the social spaces of Paris; the figure of the Parisienne as vehicle of cultural encounters through the commercial spaces of fashion; the displacement and dominion over Oriental bodies through the possession of decorative objects displayed in the bourgeois home; and the disruption of Eurocentric middle-class values through the display of Degas’ Little Dancer. What is at stake is an art historical discourse of Impressionism that recognizes and elucidates the structures of race, like class and gender, that underpin French modernity.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Elizabeth Childs
Recommended Citation
Zahra, Orin, "Race and Space in Impressionist Paris" (2022). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3245.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3245