I am working with Robin Mitchell’s Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France. The problem Mitchell is describing is that black women became a cultural commodity within France during this time period. Mitchell approaches this by describing the experimental procedures that were performed on these women. Mitchell writes, “The story of Sarah Baartmann allows us to further explore how a black woman became such a potent cultural commodity. Baartmann was unique for the way in which her body became a scientific artifact, providing multiple benefits for white Frenchmen and -women: author- itative European male expertise; an opportunity for returning émigrés, colonial refugees, and commoners to observe anti-Frenchness via the spectacle of Baartmann and shore up their own identities; and the ele- vation of European womanhood through the demotion of the black fe- male body”(Mitchell 2020). By describing the story of Sarah Baartmann, Mitchell opens up the idea that these women’s bodies were nothing more than something to make money off of, thus why it took so long for Sarah Baartmann’s body to be returned home for a proper burial. Mitchell also focuses on the historical events leading up to that time. These events made France much more vulnerable economically, which is why they had such luck with parading these women around for their “exoticness”. Napoleon’s invasion started the thought process that black people, more specifically black women, were provocative and different from the rest of the French people (Mitchell 2020). Napoleon’s dictatorship survived off of labor performed by enslaved African Americans, which brings in the Marxist perspective of the alienation of labor (the labor being performed is not their own). This idea is true due to the forced production of goods and services which benefited Napoleon and France’s economic status within the global stage. By looking at the cultural commodification of black female bodies through Mitchell’s lense, we as readers understand how forced labor overly sexualized and dehumanized these women as a whole.