To examine the recent body of literature on stereotypes is to see the wisdom of Roland Barthes' statement that stereotypes are everywhere.[1] Barthes' observation pertains to many arenas, from popular culture to modern academia to history itself. The ever-growing corpus on stereotypes presents a dizzying array of 'others': women, Irish, Native-Americans, Blacks, Jews, Arabs, Japanese, homosexuals, people-with-AIDS, homeless, Kurds, and athletes. A book by a Senegalese priest, Ésquisses Sénégalaises, first published in 1853, provides the opportunity to examine how one African-born man viewed African ethnic groups, and how he presented them to a European audience.[2] David Boilat was a mixed-race African, whose 'creole' ethnic group was known as the habitants. Boilat's book, the Esquisses Sénégalaises, is in many ways typical of the European illustrated travel accounts of the period, with the notable exception that its author was a mixed-race man from the West African trading post of Saint-Louis du Sénégal. In the center of his book, a series of 'portraits' highlight the ethnic groups of the Senegal River valley. By looking at Boilat's pictures, I shall argue that stereotyping can be an attempt to know. It was not always something Europeans did to Africans, but was sometimes a process of identification, collective and individual, that Africans themselves participated in.

Recently, stereotypes have interested two academic groups who, not surprisingly, approach the topic very differently: cultural and literary historians on the one hand, and psychologists on the other (and I include most postcolonial writers in the first category). Despite occasional points of agreement, the conclusions of these two groups about stereotypes and their functions are often diametrically opposed. Cultural and literary historians typically view stereotyping as an offense, an aggressive act; through a series of case studies, psychologists are examining how stereotyping is a cognitive process that operates differently in different situations. Examples of the former are many, and typically they share the attitude that stereotyping is a hostile action of one group against another.[3] Anti-stereotype writings are often politically motivated, and openly seek to challenge, to eliminate or to undo stereotypes.[4] In Declining the Stereotype, Mireille Rosello seeks to dismantle the stereotypes the French have about the non-French.[5] Author bell hooks, looking at the stereotypes white Americans have of black Americans, acknowledges that stereotyping is a kind of knowledge, but she asserts that it is a lazy kind of knowledge, a failure to know.[6] Both hooks and Rosello, in their desire to move 'beyond' stereotypes, seek a world where stereotypes no longer exist. They seek, and actively do their part to create a world beyond binary categories where alternate and better means exist to know and think about groups of people. This is a goal, which E. Ann Kaplan skeptically feels is 'nebulous and distant':

A utopian postmodernism involves a movement of culture and texts beyond oppressive binary categories . . . This sort of postmodernism has been central to some strands of feminism in its envisioning of texts that radically decenter the subject, its insistence on a series of different spectator positionalities, and its focus on texts where discourses are not hierarchically ordered.[7]

The ancients certainly stereotyped (although their behavior predates the term by millennia).[8] Aristotle's Physiognomonica introduced several topics which remain salient in today's stereotyping debate: its analysis of people's facial and bodily characteristics, their perceived similarity to animals, and the belief that humans shared character traits with animals.[9] By the eighteenth century, the interest in the relationship between human form and character was an obsession that permeated all disciplines, from art to science to literature and philosophy (the word 'stereotype' itself still did not exist). Two of the leading figures in the discussion of bodily form and meaning were Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) and Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801). Blumenbach was a German physiologist and anthropologist; much of his work is what today is called comparative anatomy. One of the major accomplishments of Blumenbach's career was his classification of humanity into five distinct races.[10] Lavater was Swiss, and he wrote Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschen Kenntnis und Menschenliebe. [11] This was translated into English, and published in 1817 as Essays on Physiognomy.[12] It is not known if Boilat was familiar with their works, although it is possible that he read them when he studied in Paris, or that their books were in libraries in Saint-Louis.

For Lavater and Blumenbach, studying the relationship between bodily appearance and mental reality was their life's work. The finest thinkers of the time, however, jumped into the physiognomic fray, a list that included Goethe, Lessing, Lichtenberg, Montaigne, Montesquieu and Winckelmann.[13] The range of professions represented by these men demonstrates that the interest in Blumenbach's and Lavater's work ranged well outside the field of science, and figured prominently in the field of art. One of the most significant features of eighteenth-century art, specifically with portraiture, was the relationship between physical appearance and character. For our interest in stereotyping, the appearance/character conundrum is most important when it concerns collective, rather than individual traits, traits that characterize nationality, ethnicity and race.

If we anachronistically judge Blumenbach and Lavater by today's standards, there is little doubt that they exhibited what could be called prejudices, and they were definitely Euro-centric. Nonetheless, they were educated and learned men who spent their entire careers wrestling with the relationship between human form and mental content, and the ramifications of their findings.

The fascination with appearance and character coincided with the eighteenth-century passion to classify. By the late nineteenth century, with certain authors, these interests turned into a truly reprehensible project that had little to do with science or art and everything to do with twisting and fabricating evidence to promote blatant racial prejudices. With nineteenth-century physiognomists such as Samuel R. Wells (1820-1875) and Joseph Simms (1833-1920), the erudition and occasional subtlety of Lavater and Blumenbach was lost. In his particularly nefarious work, Wells wrote:

The more cultivated and advanced the race, the finer the nose. Compare, in this particular, the Ethiopian and the Mongolian with the Caucasian. It will be seen that the noses of the first two, . . . agree in being both compressed and shortened, in comparison with the last; approaching in this respect, the snouts of the lower animals.[14]

It is important to underscore that modern writers who condemn stereotyping are specifically condemning the kind promoted by Wells, Simms & Frey, and their ideological ancestors.[18] The concerted efforts by many to discredit the pseudo-science of Wells and Simms, and the pseudo-objectivity of Frey, was warranted and necessary. A tireless warrior against stereotypes is bell hooks. hooks is generally meticulous about audience, and carefully distinguishes black from white, and male from female. Nonetheless, stereotype for hooks is a cultural process, and not a psychological one. Most literary and cultural works limit themselves to stereotypes held by the 'dominant' culture, which is frequently described as white, male, Western, and heterosexual. Art historian Babatunde Lawal's article is a rare scholarly work that examines the stereotypes Nigerians had of Europeans.[19]

This raises a question: is the process of stereotyping itself evil, or is it a neutral cognitive process that can be put to evil purposes? Much of the scholarship on stereotypes seeks to disallow the validity of the hegemonic power to speak for all humanity in its richness and variety. Along those same anti-hegemonic lines, it seems then that we should not give the human process of stereotyping a power that it does not have; that is, we should not say that stereotyping operates in one way in all situations. How Romans and Sicilians think of each other is not the same process as how French colonials and Africans thought about each other in the eighteenth century.

I seek to approach the issue of stereotyping in a way different than most postcolonial scholars have, to not just dismiss stereotyping as a simple equivalent of a reprehensible prejudice (even if it sometimes is that) but as a cognitive process that operates within specific contexts. One method to do so is to use recent work from the field of psychology to shed light on how some West Africans, specifically Boilat and his circle, conceptualized other West Africans. It is not possible to review all the recent literature on stereotyping, nor to do it justice, but I do want to present some of the concepts and terms that pertain to the issue at hand, the role of portraiture and representation in the colonial world.[20] Nor do I suggest that all psychologists are of the same opinion, for indeed the richness of the recent literature derives from their respectful yet lively points of disagreement. What most psychologists do seem to agree upon, however, is that stereotyping is one of the mind's ways to generalize. As Ryan, Park and Judd wrote:

human beings have a limited capacity for processing information. Stereotypes serve to organize and simplify a complex social world and thus are often likely to take the form of overgeneralizations.[21]

Two types of knowledge are at play here: one, how an individual knows other individuals, and two, how an individual (or group of people) knows and understands other groups of people. Interactions between people on an individual basis often avoid the pitfalls that occur when people generalize about groups of people. Jussim, McCauley and Lee acknowledged that even highly prejudiced people are aware that not all members of a group fit the stereotype, and that very few if any individuals fit all parts of a stereotype.

This brings up a point, which despite being obvious is rarely discussed in literary works: that how stereotypes function depends on their audience. Specifically, who is stereotyping whom. As defined by psychologists, the group doing the stereotyping is the ingroup or perceiver, the group being stereotyped is the outgroup or target.[23] 'Ingroup' and 'outgroup' are useful as broad-brush terms, but it should be noted that how people define themselves in relation to other groups is a culturally specific process.[24]

When looking at the work of the abbé Boilat, it must be kept in mind, who was stereotyping whom (and for whom). Published in 1853, the Esquisses Sénégalaises is notable for its intimate portraits of the many ethnic groups that lived in the Senegal river valley, and for its detailed attention to each group's culture and history. Prior to Boilat, several Europeans had written about the area, Adanson, Durand, Park, et al.[25] With Boilat, however, we get a history that is clearly African in both its outlook and its sources.

Many of the positions taken in the Esquisses can be attributed to the specific circumstances of its author, the abbé David Boilat. A mixed-race African from Saint-Louis du Sénégal, a habitant, he was an author, an artist and a priest. In addition, he can quite fairly be called a snob. A self-avowed francophile, educated in France, he made no bones about championing French culture. A priest, he openly promoted Catholicism, was frequently critical of certain Islamic and indigenous religious practices, and his portrait of a signare, his own ethnic group, is particularly pious; she might be holding a prayer book [fig. 1]. (The habitant women called themselves signares, a word of Portuguese derivation that came to mean wealthy mixed-race women who frequently married French traders and administrators). Boilat was by no means only Euro-centered, for he indefatigably promoted the superiority of the many peoples of Senegal over other Africans.

His book, the Esquisses Sénégalaises, included a series of twenty-four plates with accompanying descriptions, which show the different ethnic groups of West Africa [fig. 1, 2 & 3]. The plates also related to the larger text of the book itself, and were made from sketches done by Boilat himself. When he described the various ethnic groups, he followed a process that can only be called stereotyping. He mentioned facial features like foreheads 'la mâchoire prolongée des noirs', skin color and intelligence, beauty, manners of dress, religious convictions, propensity towards violence, professional aptitudes, and industriousness or idleness.

The Esquisses Sénégalaises is a fascinating book, as it was one African response to the many travel accounts of Africa written by Europeans. Boilat was not alone in this; many non-European authors around the globe started writing about their own countries during the nineteenth century.[26] The existence of these works in itself is a comment on the European travel accounts. Authors such as Boilat clearly felt that there was a need to write about their respective places from their own viewpoints. In a recent book on travel writing and imperialism, Mary Louis Pratt warned against simplistically taking their works as 'authentic' when authors like Boilat operated 'within the idiom of the conqueror'.[27] I question her suggestion that modern readers must approach Boilat with an undue amount of suspicion. Additionally, her stance suggests that Boilat's engagement with a European form of writing, the illustrated travel account, necessarily invalidates its claim to be 'African'. One could argue that Boilat did what any author (or modern scholar, for that matter) ideally does. He familiarized himself with a particular genre, the illustrated travel account, and mastered its tenets and forms. But most importantly, he shifted it in a different direction and helped create a sub-genre: the travel account written by native authors and which relied on sources unavailable to Europeans, namely local traditions and oral histories. None of this is to blindly accept his work as fact, but to state that it is no more inauthentic or authentic than other books of the time, and that the specific position of its creation and reception should be studied and interpreted. This was a book aimed at European audiences, but written from an African perspective.

Boilat, ever the apt observer, is invaluable on a variety of fronts, in addition to being a historian and early ethnographer. History bequeaths us artworks and books, but less frequently do we get traces of how they were received, and particularly how ordinary people received them. From Boilat we get not just his book and its pictures, but a recording of how it was made, that is its production and process, and how it was read and looked at, that is its reception. From him we have not just a text, but a material book that was written, whose pictures were sketched and reproduced, and that once created was handled, traded about, and looked at.

Boilat made an important observation: the people represented in his book showed their representations to their friends and relatives. All of the books, which had images of the people of Gorée and Saint-Louis, by Adanson, Durand, Park, and others, were in several private libraries in Senegal. They were not just representations of "others" that circulated in Europe, although they functioned in that way too. People owned these books, and looked at them and showed them to their families and friends. Boilat noted that illiterate people looked at the images in his book.[28] He indirectly implies that the people represented saw themselves in his portraits. This underscores that African viewers and readers of the Esquisses saw in Boilat's portraits, textual and visual, something familiar. On the other hand, for Europeans, these pictures were likely their first exposure to people they had never seen.

To better understand the crucial distinction between stereotypes of people known and unknown, familiar and strange, the work of contemporary sociologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, based on the writings of John Dewey, is useful.[29] According to Dewey, viewing that which was familiar was a process of recognition, that which was unfamiliar, was a process of perception. Csikszentmihalyi writes: 'For Dewey, recognition describes a falling back on some previously formed interpretive schema or stereotype when confronted with an object.'[30] When Europeans look at stereotypes of Europeans, of people they already know, they fall back on conventions. Some refer to these conventions as 'pre-fabricated images', where the mental stereotype exists prior to the moment of engagement with the visual stereotype.[31] This appears to be what Boilat described when he discussed how Africans reacted to his portraits; the visual stereotypes matched the pre-existing mental images, and hence the Africans felt that they were accurate.

Visual stereotypes of people who the viewer has never seen, however, activate a very different process. This was the case when French people (the chief audience for his work) looked at Boilat's portraits of West Africans. Boilat's book placed images in front of the eyes for which there were no pre-existing mental images. This is what Dewey referred to as 'perception': 'Perception, on the other hand, involves an active, critical receptivity to the object so that its qualities may modify previously formed habits or interpretive associations. . .'[32] Images actively created knowledge in the viewers mind at the moment of viewing, that is, perception.

The difference between recognition and perception is crucial here, and can radically change what we think about Boilat's images and how they functioned. When people see stereotypes of people they already know, that is, recognize, they agree upon a particular formulation as an adequate representation of reality. But the more active process of perception is mobilized when the viewer (in this case, European) meets a stereotype it does not recognize, of an African.[33] It is significant that many eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific and biological works, for example those of Adanson, Buffon, Linnaeus, often relied upon the dual processes of recognizing the familiar and perceiving the new.[34] The familiar object thus provided the framework for understanding the unfamiliar object. Boilat too, started out with the group most familiar to Europeans, the mixed-race woman in her home [fig. 1].

The discussion so far has examined how stereotypes can and should function as a legitimate cognitive process. This is not always the case. Stereotyping is a useful system of learning when the visual image of the outgroup would be deemed adequate by the persons portrayed; the portrayal would match, to some extent, their conventions of themselves. We can accept Boilat's portraits (and some of those done by European artists as well) because he wrote that Africans looked at them and saw themselves in his sketches. We do not have to accept Simms, Wells, and Frey, because Africans would not have recognized themselves in those false representations. Such images, which Mireille Rosello calls 'violent stereotypes', say more about their creators and not their objects, the people they claim to portray.[35] Without some sort of recognition on the part of the 'objects' portrayed, there is no perception.

This is to argue that the 'objects' portrayed in a stereotype, the out-group, have a voice in determining the accuracy of the stereotype. For example, Boilat's portraits must be looked at in terms of African, not European, concepts of individuality. Boilat carefully titled and described each of the plates. With one exception, all twenty-four plates begin with the same words: 'This plate . . . '[36] Obviously he strove for editorial consistency. Only one plate begins with 'It is . . . '[37] But his word choice is significant because it makes clear his awareness that these were plates in a book within a specific context. In all cases he carefully and consistently makes clear that a plate represents -- but not -- is , the object it portrays. This is in contrast to the French governor, the Chevalier Stanislas de Boufflers, who knowingly said about the Comtesse de Sabran's portrait, 'This thing, it is you'.[38] This is significant, for a charge often hurled against non-Europeans is that they are idolatrous, that they think that an art object is its subject.

Only twice did Boilat use a form of the verb 'to be'. One example of these shows how the simplest of utterances can be revelatory about attitudes of representation: 'this plate is the portrait of a Bambara woman named Sira' [fig. 2].[39] There are four significant elements to the sentence: 'this plate'; 'the portrait'; 'a Bambara woman'; and 'named Sira'. Boilat was aware that the plates in the book that viewers would look at were copies of the original portraits he drew. His statement also implies the awareness of an audience, and that the copies would be more widely distributed than the original. In effect he said: this plate (the copy) is the portrait (the original) of a Bambara woman named Sira (the subject). However, despite Boilat's rigor with the first half of the sentences ('cette planche'), when he says what the plate or the portrait represents, he relies upon many variations. It is the second half of the sentences that indicate what, according to Boilat, a portrait's subject matter was. And it is this aspect of his work that differs strikingly from European attitudes towards portraiture. A portrait, in Boilat's own words, could represent a costume, a named person, a geographic location, a profession, an ethnic identity, a social position, and often several of the above.

Richard Brilliant and Babatunde Lawal have both said that in the most general way, European art highlights the individual and African art the collective or social.[40] This is fine only as a generalization, for as Samba Diop pointed out in his work on the Wolof foundation myth of Njaa Njaajan, it is a mistake to see individual and society as polar opposites; to the Wolof they are related concepts, each one playing off the other.[41] And Boilat made it clear that a representation of an individual also implicates the larger group to which that person belongs. Further, he recognized that his method to portray an idealized ethnic type involved sketching named persons.

Boilat does not view the representation of a named specific individual as an artistic convention that was uniquely European. He consistently stresses the superiority of his own ethnic group, the habitants or signares by emphasizing how European they were. Yet when he writes about the portrait of a signare not only does he not name her as an individual, as a European portrait would, his word choice is very abstract. In spite of the fact that the plate 'signare' is the one that most resembles a European portrait, to Boilat, it represents a 'costume'.[42]

Just as telling is another description which uses a form of the verb 'to be' (rather than 'represents'): 'This plate is the portrait of a Wolof, an inhabitant of the desert, cloth salesman. . . I chose him as a type, because he's racially pure and very well known in Senegal by the name Ndhiay' [fig. 3].[43] Again, the plate is a reproduction of an original portrait, of an ethnic identity (Wolof), geographic location (desert), a profession (cloth salesman), and lastly a named person (Ndhiay). For Boilat, Ndhiay represents the entire Wolof race, but he is also a named individual; clearly these concepts were not mutually exclusive. This is significant because often Western representations of Africans are criticized when they reduce individuals to Ethnic types or stereotypes. In his Voyage au Sénégal, Durand's classificatory gaze seamlessly moved from rocks to shells to human beings. It is still appropriate to find this move distasteful, but the historic context in which this occurred must also be considered.

Malek Alloula was outraged that French photographers reduced Algerian people to ethnic stereotypes, a process that, in his mind, makes the image itself a reprehensible object, a violation against those it claims to represent.[44] In Boilat's work, in the context of mid-nineteenth century Senegal, we see that the colonial project of ethnic stereotyping reflected aspects of the local inhabitants own feelings of identity, both collective and individual. The representation of a stereotype did not bother local inhabitants because it was an ideological move they made themselves. A corporate identity to them was not one that excluded individuals, but included them. This is speaking ideologically. Speaking practically, it means that if a person such as Boilat, or any of the European artists who visited Senegal, expressed the desire to represent a range of ethnicities, this project was likely accepted by the local inhabitants, and even considered logical. (Capturing a likeness with a brush or a pencil involves the approval of the subject, or at least gives him or her the time to walk away; a sketch involves a different set of dynamics than does a photograph.)

The discussion thus far has presented not the one African view of stereotypes, but the use of stereotypes by one mixed-race African man, Boilat, although it certainly may have larger implications. It is well known that ethnic identity and nationality are very important to Africans, and Africans often ascribe a particular set of traits to ethnic groups, in a process that can only be called stereotyping.

I have two purposes here: to restore validity to some kinds of stereotyping, and to place the stereotyping that occurred in published travel accounts within a specific West African context. The desire to generalize, even concerning people, is not of itself an inherently evil project, and in many instances is a constitutive way for people to make sense out of the chaos of the world. Using the case of one mixed-race African man, David Boilat, is a way to re-position the subject of stereotyping. Stereotyping was not something done by Europeans to passive Africans. It occurred within a complicated social context in which Africans considered themselves as both individuals, and as members of groups.

[1] The title of this paper derives from a rhetorical question of Roland Barthes: 'What is to be done if the stereotype goes left?'. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes. NY: Hill & Wang, 1977. Barthes discusses stereotypes at several points in his autobiography. pp.68, 89, 150, 160 & 162.

[2] David Boilat. Esquisses Sénégalaises. Paris: Karthala, 1984 [1853].

[3] There is no need to list all of them here, but most of the post-colonial authors, directly or indirectly, seek to 'un-do' stereotypes: Gayatri Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography', in Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi, 1985) 332; Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

[4] Barthes writes 'he must denature the stereotype.' 89.

[5] Mireille Rosello, Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity & Representation in French Cultures. Hanover: Univ. of New England Press, 1998.

[6] bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

[7] E. Ann Kaplan, Postmodernism & Its Discontents: Theories, Practices. London: Verso, 1988. 4-5.

[8] Just one example is Megan Cifarelli's article, "Gesture and Alterity in the Art of Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria." Art Bulletin LXXX (June 1998), pp.210-228.

[9] Aristotle. Physiognomonica. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

[10] Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. The Institutions of Physiology . Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner, 1817.

[11] Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschen Kenntnis und Menschenliebe. Winterthur: Heinrich Steiners, 1783.

[12] Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy. New York: Van Winkle & Wiley, 1817.

[13] The interest this exalted group had in Lavater's work is addressed in a book edited by Ellis Shookman, The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater. Columbia: Camden House, 1993.

[14] Samuel R. Wells, New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character . NY: SR Wells, 1868. p.189.

[15] Joseph Simms. Physiognomy Illustrated: or, Nature's Revelations of Character. NY: Murray Hill, 1891, p.282.

[16] Simms, p.403.

[17] Colonel Frey. Côte Occidentale d'Afrique: vues, scènes, croquis. Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1890.

[18] An example of the latter would be Richard J. Herrnstein, and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence & Class Structure in American Life. NY: Free Press, 1994.

[19] Babatunde Lawal, Oyibo: Representations of the Colonialist Other in Yoruba Art, 1826-1960. Boston: African Humanities Program, 1993, p.10.

[20] Some of the recent works on stereotyping: David Hamilton, ed. Cognitive Processes in Stereotyping and Intergroup Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erbaum Associates, 1981. Hans Werner Bierhoff. Person Perception and Attribution. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989. Diane Mackie, ed. Affect, Cognition and Stereotyping: Interactive Processes in Group Perception. San Diego: Academic Press, 1993; Yueh-Ting Lee, et al, eds, Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1995; Penelope J. Oakes, et al. Stereotyping and Social Reality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

[21] Ryan, Park & Judd. "Assessing Stereotype Accuracy: Implications for Understanding the Stereotyping Process", from MaCrae, Stangor, & Hewstone, eds. Stereotypes & Stereotyping. NY: Guilford Press, 1996. p.122-123.

[22] See Stangor & Schaller, "Stereotypes as Individual and Collective Representations", and Ryan, Park, & Judd, "Assessing Stereotype Accuracy", in Macrae, Stangor, & Hewstone.

[23] Yueh-Ting Lee, pp.190 & 267.

[24] See Harry Triandis, "The Self and Social Behavior in Differing Cultural Contexts", Psychological Review 96 (1989), p.509.

[25] Michel Adanson (1727-1806), Histoire général du Sénégal. Paris: Claude J.B. Bouche, 1757; Jean Baptiste Léonard Durand (1712-1812), Voyage au Sénégal, 1785-1786 . 2 vols. Paris: Agasse, 1802; & Mungo Park (1771-1806), The journal of a mission to the Interior of Africa, in the year 1805. London: 1805.

[26] Mary Louise Pratt, refers to this sub-genre as ' autoethnography'. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. p.7.

[27] Pratt, ' autoethnography involves partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror.' Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. p.7.

[28] Roger Chartier discusses the importance of published images for illiterate people. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994.

[29] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols & the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981.

[30] Csikszentmihalyi, p.177.

[31] Ruth Amossy, ' Il est l'image préfabriquée', Les idées reçues: sémiologie du stéréotype. Paris: Nathan, 1991. 21. Barthes makes a similar statement, p.68.

[32] Dewey, in Csikszentmihalyi, p.181.

[33] Barbara Stafford refers to a similar process, "willed seeing". Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984. p.3-7

[34] Stafford, pp.347-396.

[35] Mireille Rosello. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1998, pp.1 & 17.

[36] Boilat, 'cette planche', plates I-XXI, XXIII-XXIV.

[37] Boilat, 'C'est . . . ', plate XXII.

[38] 'Cette chose; c'est toi.' Chevalier Stanislas de Boufflers (1738-1815), Correspondance Inédite de la Comtesse de Sabran et de Chevalier de Boufflers. Paris: Plon et Cie, 1875. p.372

[39] 'Cette planche c'est le portrait d'une femme Bambara, nommée Sira', Boilat, plate XXIV.

[40] Richard Brilliant. Portraiture . Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991; Brilliant, from Jean Borgatti. Likeness and Beyond: Portraiture from Africa and the World. New York: Center for African Art, 1990; Babatunde Lawal. Oyibo: Representations of the Colonialist Other in Yoruba Art, 1826-1960. Boston: African Humanities Program, 1993.

[41] Samba Diop. The Oral History & Literature of the Wolof People of Waalo, Northern Senegal: the Master of the Word (Griot) in the Wolof Tradition: Performance of the Epic Tale of the Waalo Kingdom. Thesis, Univ. of Calif, Berkeley, 1993.

[42] Boilat, plate I.

[43] Boilat, plate VIII.

[44] Malek Alloula. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1986.