Prologue: Citizens of the World An obscure nineteenth-century French portrait of two women of color has recently enjoyed some newfound popularity, even though its full story remains elusive. 1 The simple title of the drawing alone is intriguing: “Signare et negresse de Saint-Louis en toilette.” Even those who do not read French can pick out the word “negresse” and guess that it is a reference to the black or “Negro” woman standing with her head tossed back and to the side. But what was a signare? The viewer might guess correctly that the term “signare” refers to the fair-skinned woman seated at the focal point of the drawing. Solving the rest of the puzzle requires more specialized knowledge about foreign places and French terms. Saint-Louis is not a reference to the mid-western American city, but the name of an island just off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. The phrase “en toilette” translates as “full dress.” But who were these women, and why would they have been portrayed in this extravagant clothing that made use of European and African styles to create something more, at the same time? Fueling the mystery, scholars debate who the women in the image were, or at least who the signare was. A signare (“lady”; derived from the Portuguese word senhora) was an elite woman of African descent from the region of Senegal and neighboring coastal regions. The “Negro woman” would have been a servant or, more likely, a formerly enslaved woman, recently freed in the aftermath of the 1848 French Revolution and emancipation decree. 2 The portrait was an engraving that first appeared in a travel magazine in 1861, but it was itself a copy of a drawing, based on a watercolor, believed to have been painted in Paris around 1849. One scholar has argued that the seated woman, the signare, was Mary de Saint-Jean, the wife of Barthélémy Durand Valantin, a free man of color, who in 1848 was the first man elected from Senegal to the French Chamber of Deputies. 3 In fact, Mary de Saint-Jean’s own compelling background and biography make her an attractive candidate as the unnamed signare at the center of the image. 3 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316181669.002 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 3.235.21.12, on 21 May 2020 at 05:03:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms