عنوان

At the Center of the Globe:

Number

TLpq2404002028

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

At the Center of the Globe:

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Mephokee, Hoyon

Title Proper by Another Author

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Fontaine Des Quatre-Parties-Du-Monde, 1867-74

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Bellow, Juliet

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

American University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2020

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

75

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

M.A.

Body granting the degree

American University

Text preceding or following the note

2020

Text of Note

Commissioned in 1867 and installed in 1874, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's (1827-1875) Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere), also referred to as the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde (Fountain of the Four Parts of the World), is a public sculpture that adorns a fountain at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The monument sits on the axis between the Luxembourg Palace and the Paris Observatory and depicts four nude female figures who support a celestial sphere, and who represent the four continents-Europe, America, Africa, and Asia-through their distinct physiognomic features. This thesis interrogates the work's racial iconography and spatial relationship to sites that embodied French political and scientific authority during the Second French Empire. Reading the monument's iconography in relation to its placement in the charged space of Haussmannized Paris, I suggest that Napoléon III intended Carpeaux's work to affirm his right to govern and his need to unite a divided French nation. The Fontaine embodied the contradictions of Napoléon III's political messaging, as his regime outwardly championed progressive ideals, while it built and sustained itself on imperial and racial conservatism and French racial and political superiority.

Colonialism

Haussmannization

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

Napoléon III

Paris Meridian

Paris Observatory

Bellow, Juliet

Mephokee, Hoyon

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y