Representation and Black Womanhood

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp

   1. Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp

      • Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

      Pages 1-14

3. The Archive: Disrupting the Colonial Narrative

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15

      PDF

   2. “Body” of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman and the Archive

      • Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

      Pages 17-30

   3. “My Tongue Softens On That Other Name”: Poetry, People, and Plants in Sarah Bartmann’s Natural World

      • Yvette Abrahams, Khib Omsis

      Pages 31-46

   4. “Rude” Performances: Theorizing Agency

      • Hershini Bhana Young

      Pages 47-63

   5. Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure that Has Been Looked at Too Much?

      • Gabeba Baderoon

      Pages 65-83

   6. Placing and Replacing “The Venus Hottentot”: An Archeology of Pornography, Race, and Power

      • Sheila Smith McKoy

      Pages 85-97

4. Troubling the “Truth”: Corporeal Representations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 99-99

      PDF

   2. Writing Baartman’s Agency: History, Biography, and the Imbroglios of Truth

      • Desiree Lewis

      Pages 101-119

   3. “I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

      • Ilaria Oddenino

      Pages 121-135

   4. “Just Ask the Scientists”: Troubling the “Hottentot” and Scientific Racism in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

      • Z’étoile Imma

      Pages 137-145

   5. Staging the Body of the (M)other: The “Hottentot Venus” and the “Wild Dancing Bushman”

      • Karlien van der Schyff

      Pages 147-163

   6. Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of Michelle Obama in the Twenty-First Century

      • Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

      Pages 165-180

5. Back Matter

   Pages 181-207

   PDF

Sarah Baartman's iconic status as the "Hottentot Venus" - as "victimized" African woman, "Mother" of the new South Africa, and ancestral spirit to countless women of the African Diaspora - has led to an outpouring of essays, biographies, films, interviews, art installations, and centers, comprising a virtual archive that seeks to find some meaning in her persona. Yet even those with the best intentions, fighting to give Baartman agency, a voice, a personhood, continue to service the general narratives of European documentation of her life without asking "What if we looked at Baartman through another lens?" This collection is the first of its kind to offer a space for international scholars, cultural activists, and visual artists to examine the legacy of Baartman's life anew, specifically finding an alternative Africanist rendering of a person whose life has left a profound impact on the ways in which Black women are displayed and represented the world over.

• Africa
• Narrative
• poetry
• space
• women

"Apart from examining archives on Sarah Baartman, the book functions as an archive itself. The inclusion of poetry, song, visual art, and building projects lend a depth to the articles by solidifying the idea of Sarah Baartman as being more than a subject of scholarly research. This book is important in that it affords the opportunity to look back, not only at Sarah Baartman, but at social and political traditions that characterise human behaviour, the discourses employed to make sense of it, and aspects of our various pasts that were found wanting, and in this way, chart the path forward to new discourses and understandings. The text is as much about a figure long departed as it is about those that are currently living." - Nwabisa Bangeni, Lecturer, Department of English, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
"Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman is a provocative and timely collection of essays on Sarah Baartman. At the same time, this is a collection that has much to say about enduring discourses on Black women that find circulation today. Gordon-Chipembere and her contributors engage and expand the registers used to speak about Black women’s bodies and subjectivities across epochs. It is a conversation on the discourses on Black women by scholars from across the globe, connecting areas of Black feminist scholarship that often speak past each other rather than in exchange." - Pumla Dineo Gqola, PhD, author of What is slavery to me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa
"Apart from examining archives on Sarah Baartman, the book functions as an archive itself. The inclusion of poetry, song, visual art, and building projects lend a depth to the articles by solidifying the idea of Sarah Baartman as being more than a subject of scholarly research. This book is important in that it affords the opportunity to look back, not only at Sarah Baartman, but at social and political traditions that characterise human behaviour, the discourses employed to make sense of it, and aspects of our various pasts that were found wanting, and in this way, chart the path forward to new discourses and understandings. The text is as much about a figure long departed as it is about those that are currently living." - Nwabisa Bangeni, Lecturer, Department of English, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

"Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman is a provocative and timely collection of essays on Sarah Baartman. At the same time, this is acollection that has much to say about enduring discourses on Black women that find circulation today. Gordon-Chipembere and her contributors engage and expand the registers used to speak about Black women's bodies and subjectivities across epochs. It is a conversation on the discourses on Black women by scholars from across the globe, connecting areas of Black feminist scholarship that often speak past each other rather than in exchange." - Pumla Dineo Gqola, PhD, author of What is slavery to me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York.

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