(Re)membering Sara Baartman, Venus, and Aphrodite

Abstract

This article analyses the Black diasporic reception of Venus in the figure of Sara Baartman, a South African woman who performed under the name ‘Hottentot Venus’ in the early nineteenth century, and her theatrical persona in Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus [1990] (1997). Through her sophisticated characterization of Sara Baartman, Parks provides insight into the complex performativity of Black femalehood in conjunction with an overwritten Greco-Roman divinity. Parks’s play presents Sara Baartman as a person who forces her audiences, both theatrical and historical, to contend with their own complicit role in her objectification. More broadly, this crosscultural dialogue attempts to recuperate the Black female subject from lopsided archives. It also contributes to a larger dismantling of the perceived boundaries between Greco-Roman art, African history, and African American literature.