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Author : Deborah Willis
Release : 2010-01-08
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 062/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Black Venus 2010 by : Deborah Willis
Download or read book Black Venus 2010 written by Deborah Willis. This book was released on 2010-01-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing contemporaneous and contemporary works that re-imagine the "Hottentot Venus."
Author : Rachel Holmes
Release : 2016-05-19
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 519/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Hottentot Venus by : Rachel Holmes
Download or read book The Hottentot Venus written by Rachel Holmes. This book was released on 2016-05-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed biography of Sarah Baartman, once a slave and later a showgirl 'A significant and timely book ... Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story' Frances Wilson, Literary Review 'Impeccable ... In telling her extraordinary story, Holmes's fascinating book illuminates the forces which dominated her age, and resound in our own' Sunday Telegraph In 1810 the slave turned showgirl Sarah Baartman, London's most famous curiosity, became its legal cause célèbre. Famed for her exquisite physique – in particular her shapely bottom – she was stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed. This talented, tragic young South African woman became a symbol of exploitation, colonialism – and defiance. In this scintillating and vividly written book Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Baartman's extraordinary life for the first time.
Author : Rachel Holmes
Release : 2009-03-25
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 735/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis African Queen by : Rachel Holmes
Download or read book African Queen written by Rachel Holmes. This book was released on 2009-03-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saartjie Baartman was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks, the striking African beauty was the talk of the social season of 1810–hailed as “the Hottentot Venus” for her exquisite physique and suggestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lightning rod for late Georgian and Napoleonic attitudes toward sex and race, exploitation and colonialism, prurience and science. In African Queen, Rachel Holmes recounts the luminous, heartbreaking story of one woman’s journey from slavery to stardom. Born into a herding tribe known as the Eastern Cape Khoisan, Saartjie was barely out of her teens when she was orphaned and widowed by colonial war and forced aboard a ship bound for England. A pair of clever, unscrupulous showmen dressed her up in a body stocking with a suggestive fringe and put her on the London stage as a “specimen” of African beauty and sexuality. The Hottentot Venus was an overnight sensation. But celebrity brought unexpected consequences. Abolitionists initiated a lawsuit to win Saartjie’s freedom, a case that electrified the English public. In Paris, a team of scientists subjected her to a humiliating public inspection as they probed the mystery of her sexual allure. Stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped, and ridiculed, Saartjie came to symbolize the erotic obsession at the heart of colonialism. But beneath the costumes and the glare of publicity, this young Khoisan woman was a person who had been torn from her own culture and sacrificed to the whims of fashionable Europe. Nearly two centuries after her death, Saartjie made headlines once again when Nelson Mandela launched a campaign to have her remains returned to the land of her birth. In this brilliant, vividly written book, Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Saartjie’s extraordinary story–a story of race, eros, oppression, and fame that resonates powerfully today.
Author : Suzan-Lori Parks
Release : 2012-12-15
Genre : Drama
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 385/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Venus by : Suzan-Lori Parks
Download or read book Venus written by Suzan-Lori Parks. This book was released on 2012-12-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suzan-Lori Parks continues her examination of black people in history and stage through the life of the so-called "Hottentot Venus," an African woman displayed semi-nude throughout Europe due to her extraordinary physiognomy; in particular, her enormous buttocks. She was befriended, bought and bedded by a doctor who advanced his scientific career through his anatomical measurements of her after her premature death.
Author : Robin Mitchell
Release : 2020-02-15
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 333/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Vénus Noire by : Robin Mitchell
Download or read book Vénus Noire written by Robin Mitchell. This book was released on 2020-02-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
