letters

Dear C,

am fascinated by Erika DeFreitas’s encounters with Jeanne Duval’s spectre in . How to approach Duval at all, when she is largely canonized as Baudelaire’s “Black mistress”? She was also a dancer, an actor and, by way of Haiti, she deeply influenced Baudelaire’s writing. DeFreitas is careful not to “recover” or “recuperate” Duval (her marginalia, so caring, rightfully asks: “What does it mean to tell the story (tale?) of someone who hasn’t told it themselves?”). Instead, we see DeFreitas inhabiting and dwelling in Duval’s few traces. At one point, Duval is superimposed onto the figure of the Black maid from Manet’s (the maid, too, offers another Black spectre in the canon). I am compelled by how DeFreitas refuses recuperation, and instead sits with the complicated place of Blackness in art historical canons; consider