Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot.” (review)

It is hard to establish the precise “when” and “where,” but the tragic life of Sarah Baartman, the South African Khoisan woman who was transformed into the Hottentot Venus in the early 1800s, has recently become a larger-than-life illustration of the perilous journey of black women who stake claim to their bodies, their stories, and their spirits. What this illustration signifies is the focus of Deborah Willis’s recently edited book Black Venus 2010: They Call Her “Hottentot.” Willis’s collection brings together original and previously published works in an effort to sketch Baartman’s presence in our collective histories, especially in the imagination of black women artists and performers. Significantly, Baartman’s name does not appear in the title to the collection. Its absence suggests an emphasis on the formation of the fictional image we have come to know as the “Hottentot Venus.” It is this image that has become synonymous with a past of sexual exploitation and lasciviousness, and likewise, that has presented opportunity for ruminating on the phenomenon of young black women playing the roles of “video vixen” or “ghetto chicks.”

Leaps of this historical magnitude can be treacherous, however, for the sweeping terrain covered minimizes contextual differences that suggest the dissimilar extents of sexual agency in the eighteenth century and the present. Critics such as Zine Magubane argue that the literary and cultural fervor which shrouds Baartman’s private and public life has created an academic industry that collapses distinct roles into digestible theoretical tidbits, poststructuralist and feminist tropes that run the risk of grounding a woman in her image rather than her life. One of Magubane’s emphases that should not be lost is the fact that Baartman was not the first “Hottentot Venus”: a number of other South African women likely served as such a symbol before her. Baartman’s sojourn as wife, mother and sexual figure thus presents a more complicated picture of womanhood than first meets the eye.

The structural synergy of Black Venus 2010 appreciates Baartman’s complexity. Willis directs the reader’s attention to the “many faces of Sarah” through the very organization of the collection. One senses the tension in the need to reclaim Sarah’s personal voice from prohibitive and detrimental distortions of her person. Yet most of the essays deal directly with the iconography of the Hottentot Venus and not other facets of Baartman’s personal life. At first glance, the gap seems contradictory. Perhaps this is the reason behind the prologue and introduction that begin the book. Elizabeth Alexander’s well-known poem “The Venus Hottentot” sets the tone for the prying eyes—scientific and critical—we use to understand Baartman’s complex life. Alexander’s poetic voice is poignant, a lyrical evocation of Baartman’s invasive and traumatic dismemberment in death. Like Willis, Alexander switches the order of the usual phrase “Hottentot Venus,” placing more emphasis on the Venus (the symbol of love) than the derogatory descriptor “Hottentot.” In turn, Willis echoes Alexander’s sentiments in her introduction, “The Notion of Venus,” and in a creative gesture names three of the four sections of the book after Baartman. The move offsets our notion of Venus with the flawed ideology of a “Hottentot” spectacle invested with racist fantasies.

In part one, “Sarah Baartman in Context,” Willis places in dialogue essays by Sander Gilman, Robin Mitchell, Zine Magubane, and J. Yolande Daniels to provide historical and contemporary frames of references for Baartman’s reemergence onto the academic stage. Gilman’s and Magubane’s often-cited and often-republished essays provide the necessary groundwork for understanding variations on the Baartman/ Hottentot Venus dichotomy, especially as they pertain to biological essentialism. Daniels’s and Mitchell’s short but innovative essays explore the physiological and psychological thresholds of space in Baartman’s life. Daniels, in particular, explores the architecture of Baartman’s life as the Hottentot Venus, assessing her physical surroundings as she speculates on the cost of exhibition—the physical and psychological toll of...