| I hesitate to re-post this entry.
When I opened the Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog vault, I saw that this entry was affixed with a big yellow sticky note reminding me that last time I posted it I was innundated with Google searchers looking for...adult content. Then followed months and months of prolific comment spam advertising "blue" products and services. Well, hopefully with UThink's recent software upgrades, this time around this blog will not suffer the same fate. But just in case, let me say this outright for those of you arriving here hoping for more bawdy content: Although this post was inspired by the media hoopla over "Nipplegate," it is actually a (I hope) scholarly collection of resources on a particular historical instance of public fascination with Black sexuality. (Side note: As I, myself, was Googling to see if there was anything new on the topic I came across this Onion parody from last year. Yeah, it pokes fun at us child and family scholars and clinicians, but it still is funny. You must scroll down to see the artwork drawn by the "traumatized children.") In my (relative) down time between proposal completion and meeting, I have been reading Dorothy Roberts' Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. The book is very relevant to this post's topic as well as to my wider scholarly interest in reproduction, adoption, and parenting. Hopefully I will have more to say about the book later in the year. (In the meantime, hear a recent NPR piece featuring Roberts on abortion rights here.) Anyway, the book made me think back to Ms. Baartman and conclude that a revisit to this post might be informative. (Updated resources added below. Originally posted February 1, 2005) |
Well, I was all set to begin the first official day of Black History Month with an appropriately reverent post all about the theme of this year's observance. I have the draft of that post all set, just needed to look up and add a couple of URL links, upload an image--
But that will have to wait until tomorrow.
On my way onto campus this morning I tuned into one of the radio morning shows and was treated to a more recent moment in Black History: The One-Year Anniversary of the (In)Famous Superbowl Halftime "Wardrobe Malfunction." If you somehow were on the space station at this time last year and missed this whole little episode and its fallout, then you'll just have to Google "breast" and "nipple" and "Janet Jackson" and "Superbowl" and research this yourself as no links will be provided by me.
So today, to kick off Black History Month 2005, I would like to direct you to an earlier episode of Western fascination with the Black female body, in the form of Saarjite ("Sarah") Baartman.
Otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus.
From the Postcolonial Studies at Emory Web Site:
Saarjite Baartman, a young Khosian woman from Southern Africa whose body was the main attraction at public spectacles in both England and France for over five years, is perhaps the most infamous case of a Khosian body on display. Baartman, who became known as the Hottentot Venus, was brought to Europe from Cape Town in 1810 by an English ship's surgeon who wished to publicly exhibit the woman's steatopygia, her enlarged buttocks. Her physique, particularly her steatopygic appendage, became the object of popular fascination when Baartman was exhibited naked in a cage at Piccadilly, England. When abolitionists mobilized to put an end Baartman's public display, she informed them that she participated in the spectacles of her own volition. She even shared in profits with her exhibitor.
The spectacle of Baartman's body, however, continued even after her death at the age of twenty-six. Pseudo-scientists interested in investigating "primitive sexuality" dissected and cast her genitals in wax. Baartman, as far as we know, was the first person of Khosian-descent to be dismembered and displayed in this manner. Anatomist Georges Curvier presented Baartman's dissected labia before the Academie Royale de Medecine, in order to allow them "to see the nature of the labia" (Gilman 235). Curvier and his contemporaries concluded that Baartman's oversized primitive genitalia was physical proof of the African women's "primitive sexual appetite." Baartman's genitalia continued to be exhibited at La Musee de l'Homme, the institution to which Curvier belonged, long after her death.
This introduction to the history of human displays of people of color demonstrates that cultural difference and "otherness" were visually observed on the "native" body, whether in live human exhibitions or in dissected body parts on public display. Both forms of spectacle often served to promote Western colonial domination by configuring non-white cultures as being in need of discipline, civilization, and industry.
Other Web Resources:
A 2003 Washington Post article about Suzan-Lori Parks, whose play "Venus" won the 1996 Obie for Best New American Play. (Also see this excellent U of M "Voices from the Gaps" entry about Parks.)
A BBC article about the return of Baartman's remains to her native South Africa
A Smith College site where you can read the poem, "The Venus Hottentot" by Elizabeth Alexander
Assembled web resources by Kristin Koptiuch, an anthropology prof at Arizona State University West: http://www.west.asu.edu/koptiuch/HV_links.html
Novel based on Bartman, "Hottentot Venus" by: Barbara Chase-Riboud
The Life and Times of Sara Baartman "The Hottentot Venus" -- A Film by Zola Maseko, and
The Return of Sara Baartman -- A Film by Zola Maseko
Photos of a sculpture of Sarah Baartman by artist Willie Bester from the V Gallery in South Africa
A 2004 History of Science journal article, DISPLAYING SARA BAARTMAN, THE ‘HOTTENTOT VENUS’ (pdf) by Sadiah Qureshi
A handful of doctoral dissertations, including Beauty, difference, and the Hottentot Venus: Black feminist revisions in performance and aesthetics, 1810 to the present (2001), Janell Coreen Hobson, Emory University
A 2005 book by Dr. Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture
Posted by perry032 at February 1, 2006 06:44 AM | TrackBack
My advisor teaches a graduate class on Black women in which she always shows the Hottentot Venus film by Maseko on the first day of class. I think it is such a powerful work and I appreciate your additional references and thoughtful discussion here.
Posted by: Mon at February 1, 2006 08:33 PM