The Multiple After Lives of Sartjie Baartman: The Movement of Historical Ideas of Black Womanhood

The research that I have conducted has been an exploration of Sartjie Baartman as reoccurring figure in intellectual/popular interpretations of Black women’s role in popular culture. I am particularly interested in how the idea of Baartman has been utilized as an analytical tool in Black feminist discourses around Black womanhood, consumerism, and dehumanization in mass media. Baartman as the idea “The Venus Hottentot” has been the subject of multiple novels, a feature length film (2011), plays, documentaries, and an edited volume of Black women’s writing entitled The Black Venus (2010). By the mid 1990s Baartman is taken up in Black feminist discourse as both a historical antecedent to the representational politics of Black women in popular culture AND an enduring example of forgotten historical tragedy. In the 21^st century there exist significant anxiety about who can tell her story, what that story truly is, and how her story can and/or should be used as a tool to discuss complex social and political dynamics for Black women. This paper will not answer those questions. Instead it will map the entrance of Sartjie Baartman into discourses about Black women/womanhood in the United States with a focus on how has the idea of the Venus Hottentot shifted over time and for what purpose has this idea been deployed.