The French Revolution instituted the promise of racial equality, a promise that, it could be argued, still goes unfulfilled today. While 'race' clearly features as an important issue in many early nineteenth-century literary works, such as Claire de Duras's Ourika, recent scholarship has been re-examining the significance of 'race' compared with other textual and contextual factors including gender and class. Similar debates have been engaged in relation to other cultural forms such as film and painting.  

Ourika, a short novel by Claire de Duras (née Lechat de Kersaint and later Duchesse de Duras) first published in 1823, is of remarkable appeal today. The first novel set in France with a black heroine, Ourika takes place at the end of the eighteenth-century when the Revolutionary ideals of universalism and human rights were undermined by the restoration of slavery and the disenfranchisement of women. Yet the novel has also been felt to transcend this context to portray the plight of oppressed Blacks and women, indeed of all displaced and marginalized groups. Ourika thus brings to the fore questions of race and gender, genre and context in surprisingly modern ways.

For more information contact: 

Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

Florida State University

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