(Re)membering Sara Baartman, Venus, and Aphrodite

AbstractThis 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 cross-cultural 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.