...Deborah Willis; Carla Williams This essay surveys art, critical writings, and poetry on and around the subject of Sarah, or Saartjie, Baartman, a South African Khoi or San woman exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus” from 1810 to 1815 in Europe. The essay shares the authors’ research methods and ideas...

.... and Surrealists, for example, the celebra• presentation to create its impact during the A prime example of this forced exhibi• tion of such qualities was part of their Black Power era. The performative persona tionism is the Hottentot Venus who, while anti...

... in the nineteenth century was paraded by her owner as an oddity, for profit. The women of her people called the Khoisan or "Hottentots," were considered...

... pathbreaking work on the iconography of the Hottentot Venus and early nine- Wteenth-century racial scientific inquiry into black female sexuality, he was accused...

...• to multiple readings.7 Musa's Venus de la Mer du gest a playful reconstruction of the images that Japon (carte) (Venus hottentote) (2002) presents create cultural identities. the figure and sexual organs of Saartjie Baartman A series of paintings on preprinted...

.... like? Can it be shown? In seeming response As Lisa Gail Collins also observes, “Contemporary to such uncertainties, artists Renée Green, artists frequently point to the saga of ‘the Hottentot HSatch Hoyt, and Sheila Pree Bright forwent repre- Venus’ as a defining moment in the representation...

.... We can see this were painted white, with a dark color Here again we see a reference to the work as an allusion to Saartje Baart- evocative of mold seeping through political violence visited on (black) man, the so-­called Hottentot Venus, a at the bottoms. Another work...

... bringing to mind Saartjie Baartman, the barely indignity of exploitation. clad South African woman exhibited as “Hottentot The New York Times broke the story on Venus” until her death in 1815.8 Hornaday said he September 9, 1906, and over the next three weeks planned to keep...

... (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 377-399. 1 Elizabeth Alexander, "A Poem for Nelson Mandela," in The Venus Hottentot (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 10 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions 1990), p. 52...

... in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 251. cous, sensuous body of the Venus Hottentot, whom 7 Jennifer Law, “Knowledge Is Made for Printing: Joscelyn Gardner’s audiences fetishized and Georges Cuvier dissected Creole Portraits Series,” in Bleeding and Breeding: Joscelyn...

... was missing sexual organ."14 In Lorna Simpson's hom• abundant and worn in elaborate designs, as part of age to Saartje Baartman, Unavailable For headdresses, clothing accessories, and body Comment, 1993, the ghost of the famed Hottentot adornments. Indeed it was this overstated opu...

... and politically generating a young Khoikhoi (“Hottentot”) girl, Krotoa, into his own kind of photographic archive. their home for a number of years. Even as a child On the mezzanine level of the Nichols Gal- and young woman, Krotoa, who learned Dutch, lery Lyle Ashton Harris’s 2002 series of large...

..., including onto a large, painted, multicolored wooden screen, Mobutu, Sarah Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus which he crafted on site, in order to push the slave ships, money changers, and nongovernmental boundaries of painting and film. The result was an organizations. The juxtapositions suggest...

... postapartheid play• Saartjie Baartman (aka the Hottentot Venus), who is hanged ground, the sense of personal freedom and authority that is now with a tie, rises to heaven, becomes a winged angel, then is trans• owned by the social and political body allows the artistic one...

... 2004), p. 88. from across the continent as a whole, it would be ^ Cheryl Finley, "To Travel in Her Shoes," in They Called Her fascinating in future to explore the beginnings of Hottentot: The Art, Science and Fiction of Sarah Baartman, ed...

..., Service, and Company, 1913). 28 Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 29 Raymond Corbey, Ethnographic Showcases, 1870 1930, Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 3 (1993): 338 69; Sander L. Gilman...

...- distance. A quiet grandeur permeates a scene such as gationism” of the first half of the twentieth century, Bushmen Hottentots Armed for an Expedition (1804), piecemeal and partial in its manifestations, was in which human inhabitants and natural setting replaced by a systematic...