Abstract
The burial of Sara Baartman’s remains on August 9, 2002 in Hankey in the Eastern Cape, near where she was born, was a signal event in South African and world history. The story of Baartman’s life has often been recounted, yet below I consider a little discussed aspect of the negotiations over the return of her remains from France and propose a theory of the private based on an analysis of Baartman’s life and her contemporary meanings.
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Notes
Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the “Hottentot Venus” A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 80.
Gould, Stephen Jay, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985), 296.
Colette Colligan, “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture,” International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 76.
Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 12.
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© 2011 Natasha Gordon-Chipembere
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Baderoon, G. (2011). Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure that Has Been Looked at Too Much?. In: Gordon-Chipembere, N. (eds) Representation and Black Womanhood. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339262_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339262_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29798-6
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