Race and Decadence: Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Afro-Asian Ornamentalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Drawing on Black French studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and imperial history, this essay focuses on Charles Baudelaire’s mixed-race lover, Jeanne Duval, in order to ask how racial dynamics shaped one of the earliest versions of the decadent aesthetic gaze in nineteenth-century Europe. I analyze Baudelaire’s racial-ized engagements with visual culture and a small sample of poems that he wrote about Duval in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857), concentrating in particular on how he perceives Blackness and what Anne Anlin Cheng has theorized as “ornamentalism.” I conclude by reflecting on Duval’s fate once Les Fleurs circulated in the British Isles and reached Algernon Charles Swinburne in 1860.