Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices 9004395202, 9789004395206

Table of contents :
Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices
Copyright
Contents
1 Refiguring Black Venus: Preliminary Considerations
Part 1: Histories
2 Venus from A to Z in Beryl Gilroy's Inkle and Yarico
3 H.C. Andersen's Black Venus Fairy Tale: “The Marsh King’s Daughter” and the Aftermath of Danish Colonialism
4 The Finger That Mocks the World: Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby and Images of African American Womanhood
5 The Italian Gaze on Black Venus
6 The Voice of Venus: Angela Carter’s “Black Venus” and the Democratization of Literature
Part 2: Epistemologies
7 Epic Theatre and the Culture of Spectacle: Aesthetic Figuration of Body and Race in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus
8 The Wild Woman, the Little Mistress, the Hottentot Venus, and the Pedestal Monster: Living Curiosities and Their Counter-spaces in Two Texts by Charles Baudelaire
9 Colonial Bodies in Display Cases and Spectating Bodies: A Contemporary Art Critique
10 Gazes, Faces, Hands: Othering Objectification and Spectatorial Surrender in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Vénus noire and Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Index

Citation preview

Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Cross/Cultures Readings In Post/Colonial Literatures And Cultures In English

Edited by Bénédicte Ledent and Delphine Munos Co-founding Editors Gordon Collier Geoffrey Davis† Hena Maes-Jelinek† Advisory Board David Callahan (University of Aveira) – Stephen Clingman (University of Massachusetts) – Marc Delrez (Université de Liège) – Gaurav Desai (University of Michigan) – Russell McDougall (University of New England) – John McLeod (University of Leeds) – Irikidzayi Manase (University of the Free State) – Caryl Phillips (Yale University) – Diana Brydon (University of Manitoba) – Pilar Cuder-Dominguez (University of Huelva) – Wendy Knepper (Brunel University) – Carine Mardorossian (University of Buffalo) – Maria Olaussen (University of Gothenburg) – Chris Prentice (Otago University) – Cheryl Stobie (University of KwaZulu-Natal) – Daria Tunca (Université de Liège)

volume 210

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cc

Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices Edited by

Jorunn S. Gjerden Kari Jegerstedt Željka Švrljuga

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: “Black Venus” (2005) by Mark Bradford. Mixed media collage. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Bruce White. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0924-1426 ISBN 978-90-04-39520-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-40791-6 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents 1

Refiguring Black Venus Preliminary Considerations Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt and Željka Švrljuga

1

Part 1 Histories 2

Venus from A to Z in Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico Željka Švrljuga

3

H.C. Andersen’s Black Venus Fairy Tale “The Marsh King’s Daughter” and the Aftermath of Danish Colonialism Kjersti Aarstein

4

The Finger That Mocks the World Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby and Images of African American Womanhood Carmen Birkle

5

The Italian Gaze on Black Venus Camilla Erichsen Skalle

6

The Voice of Venus Angela Carter’s “Black Venus” and the Democratization of Literature Kari Jegerstedt

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41

63 89

108

Part 2 Epistemologies 7

Epic Theatre and the Culture of Spectacle Aesthetic Figuration of Body and Race in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus Ljubica Matek

129

vi 8

Contents

The Wild Woman, the Little Mistress, the Hottentot Venus, and the Pedestal Monster Living Curiosities and Their Counter-spaces in Two Texts by Charles Baudelaire Margery Vibe Skagen

9

Colonial Bodies in Display Cases and Spectating Bodies A Contemporary Art Critique Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen

10

Gazes, Faces, Hands Othering Objectification and Spectatorial Surrender in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Vénus noire and Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc Jorunn S. Gjerden



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Index217

Chapter 1

Refiguring Black Venus Preliminary Considerations

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt and Željka Švrljuga The early twenty-first century bears several marks indicating that it stands in the sign of Black Venus. Symbolically apt, the century started out with the 2002 repatriation and subsequent burial of perhaps the most famous Black Venus figure of all, South African Sara Baartman1 – infamously exploited for her steatopygia and the so-called ‘Hottentot Apron’ in early nineteenth-century Europe. Although her story had originally been brought to the general public’s attention by Stephen Gould and Sander L. Gilman in 1985, it was the return of her remains to the newly-formed post-apartheid South Africa – after eight years of diplomatic squabbling with France – that revivified it. The return was invested with high political stakes and surrounded by great publicity. “The story of Sarah Bartmann is the story of the African people,” the then South African president, Thabo Mbeki, said at Baartman’s funeral: It is a story of the loss of our ancient freedom […] a story of our reduction to the status of object that could be owned, used and disposed of by others, who claimed for themselves a manifest destiny “to run the empire of the globe” […]. Our presence at her graveside demands that we act to ensure that what happened to her should never be repeated.2 Since then, an already resurgent interest in the Black Venus figure in popular, academic, and artistic culture has skyrocketed, making her a key symbol in ­current attempts to restore the abjected, racialized female body in feminist, 1 Despite the fact that the historical person in question is known under different names and with various spellings (from Sara, or, its Dutch diminutive, Saartjie Baartman, but also as Sarah Bartmann, according to her baptismal certificate), we adopt Sara Baartman, a neutral version of her name that neither signifies on her tiny stature nor on a church document, whose authenticity is verifiable though not her reasons for taking the sacrament. See “Sarah Bartmann in Manchester: 200 Years on #BlackHistoryMonth” Archives+ (11 October 201) https://manchesterarchiveplus.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/sarah-bartmann-in-manchester200-years-on-blackhistorymonth/ The page is no longer available. 2 Thabo Mbeki, “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August 2002,” http://www.sahistory .org.za/archive/speech-funeral-sarah-bartmann-9-august-2002 (accessed 10 August 2017). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_002

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anti-racist and postcolonial terms. As such, the early twenty-first century can boast a series of high points, not only in relation to the re-figuring of Sara Baartman, but also in the refiguring of the Black Venus figure in general – and not only in its relation to Africa, but in its various manifestations on the global scene. 2010, for instance, saw the premiere of the French film Vénus noire by Abdellatif Kechiche and the South African mini opera Sartjie by Hendrick Hofmeyer, as well as the publication of Deborah Willis’ anthology Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” in the US, one of the first comprehensive collections of articles on Black Venus as representation. Whereas the film and the opera re-imagine Baartman’s life-story from different vantage points, the anthology presents a range of academic, literary and historical contributions written over the two preceding decades, as well as a catalogue of photographs of Baartman-inspired works of art. Willis notes that “Baartman has become a focal point of reference for contemporary black artists, particularly women,”3 presenting works by, among others, Hank Willis Thomas, Roshini Kempadoo, Lorna Simpson, Carla Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, Penny Siopis, Renée Green, Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, Tracey Rose, and Petrushka A. Bazin. The influence of Black Venus is not only noticeable in “high art” but can also be seen in the world of fashion, social media, and reality shows, perhaps in more disturbing terms. In September 2014, for example, thematizing the latest global trends and changing conceptions of female beauty and sex appeal, Vogue declared that “[w]e’re officially in the Era of the big booty.”4 As examples of this trend, journalist Patricia Garcia refers to instances such as Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” rap-video – a feminist remix of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit “Baby Got Back,” which explicitly parodies and redeploys the white fascination with the posterior of Black Venus; images of Kim Kardashian’s much discussed buttocks on Instagram, generating up to a million likes; and the CrossFit movement’s recent obsession with squats, designed to enlarge and tone the butt muscles. While Garcia might have overlooked the racialized implications of her discussion, they were not lost on her readers, who comment online: “Get over yourself, Vogue. Black women are the reason why white women are suddenly obsessed with large asses. […] You want our lips, our asses, our breasts, our music, OUR EVERYTHING.”5 Simultaneously, on an internet message board, 3 Deborah Willis, Introduction, in Black Venus 2010. They Called Her “Hottentot,” ed. Deborah Willis (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2010): 3. 4 Patricia Garcia, “We’re officially in the era of the big booty” Vogue (9 September 2014) http://www.vogue.com/1342927/booty-in-pop-culture-jennifer-lopez-iggy-azalea/ (This page is no longer available). 5 Emma Akberain, “Vogue under fire for ‘Big Booty’ article,” Independent (15 September 2014) http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/vogue-under-fire-for-big -booty-article-9734218.html (accessed 18 March 2016). Moreover, an article entitled “Vogue

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anonymous Norwegian posters approached this current global fixation on female posteriors in a thread entitled “Large butts everywhere!”6 The starter of the thread asks: “Why has this become a phenomenon? Is it because African women are now considered as sex symbols more than they used to be?”7 More than signalling something new, the above-mentioned examples testify to a longstanding fascination with the black female body within colonial (and postcolonial) history where the figure of Black Venus has been the object of sexual desire, envy, anxiety, and disgust. In many ways, then, not much seems to have changed. Whereas Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video can be read as a feminist, self-assertive, funny and exuberant re-appropriation of Sir Mix-aLot’s anti-racist yet disturbingly masculinist redeployment of the Black Venus trope, the Norwegian commentators uncannily echo the very racialist reactions that his video parodies.8 Trading hyperlinks to photos and videos that document the trend, posters go on to speculate as to whether the said bodily feature (“my fat ass,” to quote Minaj) – that challenges the white woman’s body as the epitome of female beauty – can be anything but the result of plastic surgery. In fact, when the participants in the exchange use expressions like “unnatural and terrifying,” “deformed and weird,” “horse-like,” or a “baboon’s ass,”9 their underlying assumptions about feminine beauty and its repulsive yet enticing borders are strangely reminiscent of French naturalist and z­ oologist George Cuvier’s autopsy report on Sara Baartman, “la Vénus Hottentote”

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under fire for ‘Big Booty’ article” published in the Independent a few days later shows that these commentators were not the only ones to react in this way to the Vogue article. The Independent journalist reports, for instance, that shortly after the publication of Garcia’s article, the hashtag #VogueArticles was created specifically on Twitter to sarcastically mock the racialized subtext of her assertions. “Svære rumper overalt!” Kvinneguiden Forum (29 September 2014), http://forum.kvinneguiden.no/topic/874404-sv%C3%A6re-rumper-overalt/ (accessed 18 March 2016). “Hvorfor har dette blitt et fenomen? Er det fordi afrikanske kvinner i større grad oppfattes som sex-symboler nå enn før?” “Svære rumper overalt!” Kvinneguiden Forum (29 September 2014), http://forum.kvinneguiden.no/topic/874404-sv%C3%A6re-rumper-overalt/ (accessed 18 March 2016). The video opens with two white girls staring at and commenting on a black woman who turns on a pedestal, showing off her features: “Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt /It is so big, she looks like/One of those rap guys’ girlfriends/But, ya know, who understands those rap guys? /They only talk to her, because, /She looks like a total prostitute, ‘kay? /I mean, her butt, is just so big /I can’t believe it’s just so round, it’s like out there/I mean gross, look/ She’s just so, black.” Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Baby Got Back,” YouTube (3 February 2010), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=_JphDdGV2TU. The scene is reminiscent of early nineteenth-­century caricature drawings of Hottentot Venus and her audience. Our translation of “unaturlig og skremmende,” “vanskapt[e] og rar[e],” “som en hest,” and “bavian-rumpe.” In “Svære rumper overalt!” Kvinneguiden Forum (29 September 2014), http:// forum.kvinneguiden.no/topic/874404-sv%C3%A6re-rumper-overalt/ (accessed 18 March 2016).

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(1817).10 Cuvier’s report aimed to create a ‘scientific’ underpinning for the myth of a racial hierarchy. In key passages of the document, critically considered by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting as “the master text on the black female body,”11 Cuvier likens Baartman’s body to that of different apes (orangutans, mandrills) and to bestial features in general, based precisely on a thorough analysis of the shape of her behind – which he characterizes as “excessively protuberant,” “really monstrous,” “bizarre,” and “extraordinary.”12 In particular (not unlike the Norwegian message board debaters), he is eager to establish whether her bodily appearance can in fact be a work of nature, or whether it must be understood as a “product of art.”13 The present collection of articles ventures into a selection of globally traceable explorations of the Black Venus figure from the vantage point that she, indeed, is a figure – a node in which a rhetorical figure, or trope, and the shape of a female body converge – and thus a true “product of art.” The nine contributions to this volume – that come from the fields of art history, literature, film studies, and gender studies – focus on the way in which the colonial archive has preserved, impacted, and refigured Black Venus in art, cinema, literature, 10

11 12

13

Mae G. Henderson has also pointed out the role of hip-hop culture and rap music videos for “marking a transition from a western aesthetic of the female body that emphasizes the breasts as the principal signifier of femininity, to one fashioned by the ‘bootification’ of the female body” that valorizes “the glorified and vilified nature of a sometimes oppositional black female body aesthetic” (160). Establishing parallels between the performances of the contemporary video vixen and those of her “forebears,” Sara Baartman and Josephine Baker, Henderson discusses how this emerging “booty revolution” in the Western imaginary pertains to the dilemmas of revising/repeating stereotypes: “Do contemporary female video models subversively parody a hegemonic Euro-American white male stereotype of the black female body or do such performances embrace an ambiguously non-hegemonic African American male aesthetic of the female body? Do these performances simply reinscribe the historical stereotypes of black women as sexually available, perverse, or excessive—or do they function to deconstruct dominant and hegemonic notions of femininity represented by the thin (anorexic) esthete images still predominant among supermodels (black, white, and Other) on the world’s leading runways?” See Mae G. Henderson, “About Face, or, What Is This ‘Back’ in B(l)ack Popular Culture?  From  Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie,” in Understanding Blackness through Performance, ed. A. Crémieux, x. Lemoine & J.P. Rocchi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 163. T. Denean Sharpley–Whiting. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1999): 24. “L’énorme protubérance de ses fesses,” “un accroissement vraiment monstrueux,” “cette confirmation assez bizarre,” and “cette surcharge extraordinaire,” in Georges Cuvier, “Extrait d’observations faites sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentote.” (Mémoires d’Histoire natuelle 3. Paris: G Doufour, 1817): 263–69. “Extrait d’observations faites sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentote,” 268.

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theatre, and performing arts from different periods and geographies. The move towards aesthetics entails a change in focus from the historically regarded anomaly as pathology to a differently coded alterity that sexuality in the field of vision, focalization and representation attributes to the Black Venus figure at large. An important endeavor is to explore the viable political and ethical significance of these constructions, not only in their respective historical and geographical contexts, but also in relation to the way in which they open for new figurations of Black Venus in our contemporary political and aesthetic settings. To what extent do aesthetic practices aim to underscore colonial ideologies? To what extent do they try to break with them? And if they do, in what specific ways can aesthetic practices develop in order to revise the colonial gaze on Black Venus without repeating the gesture or simply re-appropriating the figure for new ideological discourses? As/in art, the meaning of the figure is, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has noted, “undecidable.” Yet, she continues, “we must attempt to dis-figure it, read the logic of the metaphor. We know that the figure can and will be literalized in yet other ways.”14 To read the figure, to dis-figure it, is a means to both trace and precipitate change. As Sharpley-Whiting writes with regard to Cuvier’s autopsy report – the “master text” on the black female body – the figure he envisions is nested in a paradoxical desire torn between eroticism and repulsion by what he considers “an overdevelopment of female sexuality, a gross exaggeration of normalcy.”15 Thus Cuvier’s autopsy report seems to capture an essential paradox prevalent in the colonial attraction to the figure of Black Venus. This paradox takes center stage in the various figurations that this study explores in art works from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, ranging from the American to the Scandinavian contexts. Yet we know that the figure can also signify – or literalize – otherwise. Several specimens of an elegantly wrought statue have been collected in the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research: these depict a black woman as “the supreme example of the female form,” ­circulated in sixteenth-century Netherlands.16 Perhaps the recent interest in re- or dis-figuring Black Venus, although problematic, testifies to yet a new era to come in the history of her signification. Another high point in the ever-growing fascination with Black Venus in the twenty-first century is the presentation of the 2015 National Book Award for 14 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2005): 71. 15 Sharpley–Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, 26. 16 The Root, in collaboration with The Image of the Black Archive & Library, http://www .theroot.com/when-black-venus-was-the-ideal-standard-of-beauty-1790876439 (accessed 10 August 2017).

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poetry to Robin Coste Lewis for her Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems. Lewis’ highly experimental title poem may exemplify a new direction in the politics of Black Venus aesthetics, exploring the parameters of and opportunities for both telling and showing. Reclaiming the black female body in a gesture of homage, the seventy-nine-page-long poem – the collection’s ­centerpiece – is, as Lewis states in its prologue, a narrative poem “comprised solely and ­entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 bce to the present.”17 While the poetic whole is put together out of the original wording fragments in an effort to forge new meanings, their punctuation is changed and their recently ‘sanitized’ racial(ized) markers have been restored. This sutured and ­repackaged history of the white representation and readings of the black body is a kind of ‘return to sender’ – as lettering, missive, and belles-lettres. Refusing to acknowledge the white man’s blindness to the color and origin of the cradle of the Greco–Egyptian civilization, Voyage of the Sable Venus deploys, for instance, a clever spelling maneuver to bring misgivings to the fore: the Greek goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite, is rendered as “Aphro / Dite,” with a clear homophonic allusion to “Afro,” and thus Africa; and the Egyptian g­ oddess of marriage and guardian of nature and the oppressed, Isis, figures as “I Sis” (56), suggesting sororal solidarity by way of paronomasia. Thus, the poem rearranges and repackages Western institutions’ logocentric and nomothetic tendencies as regards the reading of artwork, its presentation, and language. Body parts as ‘fragments of history’ uncannily ­become damaged artifacts: Heads and Busts Headless – Footless – Armless But with a Strongly Incised Vaginal Opening: (41) The lines allude to the wounded and mutilated body as per poetic experience of maimed, cut-up verse and language: “Anonymous fragment. Frag / Ment. Pavement (Detail). Pain t // On tin …” (40, italics in the original). Thus, Lewis’ poetic figuration brings to mind Sander Gilman’s work: not his oft-quoted reference 17

Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2016): 35. Subsequent page references are provided in the main text.

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to “the Hottentot [as] the central nineteenth-century icon for sexual difference between the European and the black,”18 but to his near-compulsive record of Sara Baartman’s intimate parts – from the reprinted drawings to a photographic image of her chemically preserved genitalia in the Musée de l’homme in Paris – the George Cuvier legacy in nuce.19 By suturing fragments into an ­allusive, elusive, and at times illusive narrative whole, the poem launches a critique of the institutions of the colony and slavery, never losing sight of the museum as an institution and its politics of representation and display. For Lewis, art historian and poet, museums are centers of exhibition, conservation, research and, last but not least, inspiration. Her work testifies to the centrality of the archive for the imagination, weaving together visuality and textuality to create a space for a feminine shape that forever welds art and life together. At the same time, she broadens the gamut of representations of the black female body to include prehistoric figurines as well as Black Madonna figures in her poetic gallery of curios. Lewis’ prime concerns – the travel motif, history, and different geographies – echo the concerns of this volume. Black Venus cannot claim any degree of stability, either visually or textually. The figure is linked to different geographies, since she is bound to travel, and to a variety of shades of skin color – amber, black, bronze, copper, dusky, sable, saffron, swarthy, tawny, yellow, and many hues in between – depending on her origin and different traditions of seeing. The world of art is perhaps the space in which such diversity speaks most freely and most suggestively. Yet, if the figure in/as art is undecidable, how does this undecidability influence and carry over into ethics and politics? Can art really bring about change? As Molly Anne Rothenberg has pointed out, an artwork always makes use of historically given material, and it is through the “formal reconfiguration of those materials, [that it] exposes the possibility that something could be otherwise.”20 It can only do so, however, if we do not confuse art with politics: it is the illusory character of the artwork that allows for an engagement, an engagement that is suspended from “the ontic qualities of the world,” thereby “creating a formal space for the new to emerge.”21 Art does not first and foremost produce new 18 19 20 21

Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 231. Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History. Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Age of aids (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989): 294. Molly Anne Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (London: Polity, 2010): 180. The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change, 180.

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k­ nowledge. What it teaches us, if anything at all – and only by way of very careful ­readings – is, as Spivak argues, to imagine what we already know, to imagine it differently. That is not to say that the artwork cannot itself be deeply steeped in ideology. Yet, if the artwork has any political and social relevance at all, it is because, through this learning – the learning to imagine differently – desires can be changed. This volume addresses such questions by juxtaposing a longstanding tradition of colonial knowledge production with art as a form of unlearning. The essays that make up the volume are grouped together in two main sections, Histories and Epistemologies, echoing the importance of both textuality and visuality in the archive. However, this study is not the first of its kind. Important contributions to understanding the figure of Black Venus have been made over the last two or three decades, particularly in the scholarship focusing on the aforementioned Sara Baartman alias Hottentot Venus (Gould 1985; Gilman 1985, 1989; Sharpley-Whiting 1999; Hobson 2005; Netto 2005; Holmes 2007; Crais and Scully 2010; Willis 2010; Gordon-Chipembere 2011; Henderson 2014). Another strand of Black Venus scholarship is embedded in the historiography of Atlantic slavery, with its primary resonance in the US (Hartman 1997, 2008; Tate 2015; Melancon and Braxton 2015). In addition, recent studies on gendered Orientalism in European literature and art provide an important broadening of the focus on Black Venus in terms of including her oriental “bronze” counterparts (Dobie 2001). What constitutes the distinctiveness of this volume is both its meticulous focus on aesthetics and its demonstration of the Black Venus figure’s global presence in a wide-ranging (post)colonial imaginary. 1 Histories The history of Black Venus lies in the histories of her figurations. Thus, the writing of such a history demands meticulous close readings – or dis-­figurations – of a vast number of historically, aesthetically and geo-politically diverse textual and visual materials. Our histories are just a snippet of this diversity, yet even from these few examples a plethora of questions arises. How does a figure travel; how does Black Venus travel – in time as well as in space and through genres? In what ways does a figure signify different things in different historical and geo-political contexts, and how does the act of reading (literature) function in problematizing these different contexts? These are some of the issues that are addressed in the section “Histories,” which focuses on narrative figurations of Black Venus. At the core of each contribution is the analysis both of how the black female body has been typecast in terms of availability and

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c­ oncupiscence, corollary to issues of (post)colonial violence and power structures, and of how more critically attuned narratives make use of aesthetics in order to denounce and deflect the possible perpetuation of gendered and racialized stereotypes. The travel motif is central in the first chapter of this book, “Venus from A to Z in Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico,” in which Željka Švrljuga shows how the intersectionality of race, gender, and desire functions in Gilroy’s rewriting of the semantics of the Venus figure in her praised but understudied 1996 novel. Gilroy takes us on an imaginary journey to the Caribbean islands in the early colonial period, thus tracing the cartography of the European ‘discovery’ of the New World. The travel motif permeates the telling of the story as such, re-­figuring Black Venus through metonymic displacements, metaphoric replacements and supplementation. Most importantly in this regard, the novel deploys the myth of Venus and Adonis as well as Blake’s engraving Europe Supported by Africa and America. Thus, the chapter opens for a thorough exploration of the relationships between critique, narration, aesthetics, and genre. The meaning and potential of literary genres are also at the forefront in Kjersti Aarstein’s chapter “H.C. Andersen’s Black Venus Fairy Tale: ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ and the Aftermath of Danish Colonialism.” Arguing that Andersen exploits the fairy tale’s propensity to generate allegorical readings, Aarstein weaves together references to Denmark, Egypt, the Caribbean, and the figure of Baartman to illuminate the intricate web of the fairy tale’s relationship to Danish–Norwegian colonialism and slave trade. Thus, Aarstein opens the discussion of the figure of Black Venus to the yet uncharted Scandinavian scene. Reading the “The Marsh King’s Daughter” alongside Andersen’s earlier play, The Mulatto (1840), and drawing on diverse historical materials, Aarstein challenges the view that H.C. Andersen was not critical of European imperialism, arguing that the later tale addresses both the history of colonial violence in Denmark and its colonies, and the possibility for healing. With “The Finger that Mocks the World: Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby and Images of African American Womanhood,” Carmen Birkle addresses the issues of historical representation of black womanhood, embodied in Walker’s massive woman-sphinx sugarcoated sculpture. By drawing on parody and the African American concept of “signifyin(g)” – both of which imply repetition with a critical difference, though in slightly different ways – the essay argues how history and the stereotypification of black female sexuality are brought together in the oversexualized Black Venus figure that parodies Jezebel and Black Venus figures’ promiscuity, but also symbolizes black women’s role as Mammy and Aunt Jemima figures in the service of their white masters. With reference to Nicki Minaj’s wax figure and the “Anaconda” rap video, the chapter explores

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how Sugar Baby and Minaj taunt white representations and stigmatization by way of seemingly adopting, yet critically inverting them, reclaiming their sexuality and right to self-representation in the process. In “The Italian Gaze on Black Venus,” Camilla Erichsen Skalle discusses the near-comprehensive presence of Black Venus figures in Italian imperial propaganda during the so-called ‘scramble for Africa.’ Building on the work of Giulietta Stefani, Skalle shows how these figures are crucial in the construction of a virile Italian masculinity that comes, later, to define and dominate the fascist era. Within this construction, Africa serves, paradoxically, as the site for both masculine re- and, possibly, degeneration. Italy has never come to terms with this history, Skalle argues. Focusing on the male and imperial objectifying gaze, she demonstrates how the very same stereotypes structure what have come to be seen as the first novels to critically engage with Italian imperialism and the fascist ideologies of masculinity: Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (1947) and Mario Tobino’s Il deserto di Libya (1951). The last chapter in the “Histories” section, Kari Jegerstedt’s “The Voice of Venus: Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus’ and the Democratization of Literature,” raises the question of how, if at all, it is possible to ‘give voice’ to the abjected, always already erased other, considering the simultaneous world-scattering and wor(l)ding effects of imperialism on writing and (post)colonial regimes of knowledge and subjectivity. Addressing the question from the perspective of the (self)critical white feminist, Jegerstedt revisits Carter’s short story “Black Venus,” lauded by critics for giving voice to Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire’s Caribbean lover. Jegerstedt stresses that the narrator does not simply re-­present Duval but quite explicitly substitutes her own ‘voice’ for Duval’s – thus enacting a similar overwriting of Duval’s voice to the one Baudelaire may be said to do. She goes on to argue that, rather than ‘giving voice,’ the story problematizes the (imperialistic) silencing which is at work in what Jacques Rancière has called the democratic era of literature. At the same time, however, the short story also points to the earlier oral tradition and the fairy tale as alternative narrative venues for establishing global solidarity, thus highlighting again the issue of genre in questions concerning the imagination. 2 Epistemologies While the first part of the volume traces the historical-aesthetic travels of the Black Venus figure through time, the second part examines more closely the ways in which spatial parameters affect the figure and the audiences’ perceptions of her. As its title indicates, this section broadens the discussion of the political and ethical impact of Black Venus figurations by relating them to

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epistemological issues of learning and unlearning, concomitant to the act of seeing in literature, theatre, cinema, and visual arts. Accordingly, epistemologies in this context do not refer to theories of knowledge in a narrow sense of the term, but address processes through which different art forms expose how scientific observation and display have consolidated gendered and racial typecasting and power structures through history. This interdependence between the cognitive and the visual, that allows “the seen body to become the known body,”22 is intrinsic to the European figuration of Black Venus through the nineteenth-century naturalists’ study of Sara Baartman’s body and the conclusions drawn from it, since those studies relied exclusively on the methodology of ocular observation, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes. Thus, the “Epistemologies” section consists of readings that focus on the role of the visual and the spatial for colonial knowledge production, as well as on the potential means for unlearning that aesthetic practices may offer. By considering viewing behaviours associated with the freak show, the brothel, the museum exhibition, theatre and cinema, these chapters highlight the different ways in which literary texts and visual artworks relate critically to ­various forms of ocular appropriation, thus challenging and undermining the presumption that the seen body is the known body. Contributors also discuss how the concrete formal structures of various aesthetic artefacts may expose and bring into play the power dynamics of spectatorship, mobilize the reader’s or viewer’s awareness, participation and (re)action, and thereby open alternative avenues to knowledge through art. This politically motivated mobilization of the viewer is the main theme of Ljubica Matek’s “Epic Theatre and the Culture of Spectacle: Aesthetic Figuration of Body and Race in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus.” In her rewriting of Sara Baartman’s story, Parks deliberately moves away from attempts at historical accuracy in favour of an exploration of the critical potential of theatrical spectacle as form. Matek argues that Parks’ reliance on the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht has yet to be fully recognized. In her interpretation of the correlation between spectatorship, awareness and cognition established in the play, she draws on Brecht’s Verfremdung strategies and references to Victorian freak shows in Parks’ text. By preventing its spectators from unwittingly identifying with the protagonists, and by transforming the (re)construction of history into spectacle, Venus instead invites, or indeed provokes, ­spectators to reflect upon the actions and utterances of the protagonists with regards to r­ acial and sexual typecasting both past and present.

22

Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, 22–23.

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European nineteenth-century freak shows and other forms of display also constitute the starting point of Margery Vibe Skagen’s “The Wild Woman, the Little Mistress, and the Pedestal Monster: Living curiosities and their counterspaces in two texts by Charles Baudelaire.” Drawing on nineteenth-century medicine and natural history, Skagen compares the Hottentot Venus figure in the prose poem “La femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse” with Baudelaire’s dream of a monstrous male counterpart on display in a museum/brothel, which is recounted in his correspondence. The two texts have never previously been explored in relation to the figure of the Hottentot Venus. Both evoke socio-cultural urban spaces associated with different kinds of spectatorship – the fair, the brothel, the freak show, and the museum – as well as the living curiosities or monsters these sites display. With reference to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and thus to his broader denunciation of the conflation of power and knowledge in the history of human sciences, Skagen considers these spaces as “counter-spaces” which express a strong cultural critique that also targets imperialist power structures and enlightenment ideals. Her readings indicate how heterotopias challenge established scientific truths and the existing world order by inverting them. Thus, through a transference of meaning between the different spaces they mirror, Baudelaire’s texts raise questions of race, animality, gender, prostitution and violence, without giving any definite answers. In the following chapter, “Colonial Bodies in Display Cases and Spectating Bodies: A Contemporary Art Critique,” Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen pursues similar strategies of unlearning and their ways of relating to the history of science. Through her readings of artworks by Iranian Fariba Hajamadi, South African Tracey Rose, and Americans Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, she examines how contemporary visual arts have brought into play European museums’ ways of exhibiting the black body as a sign of otherness since the start of colonization. She argues that the traditional museum exhibition requires the viewer to adopt an aesthicizing and exoticizing gaze, closely associated with masculine agency and superiority, and epitomized by the display case. Contemporary visual arts make use of the display case in order to provoke a feeling that the object is looking back at the spectator, and thereby expose and challenge the colonial worldview written into the Western mindset through centuries of education and institutionalization. Thus, Jørgensen’s argument is that the trope of Black Venus is inscribed into the very form of the artworks, through the way in which specific visual and bodily aesthetic practices either enhance or abolish the air-less, time-less bubble that separates the spectating body from the displayed body.

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Finally, Jorunn S. Gjerden’s “Gazes, Faces, Hands: Othering Objectification and Spectatorial Surrender in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Vénus noire and Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” addresses similar viewing behaviour induced by modern cinematography. Her reading relates Kechiche’s critique of the hyper-feminine, over-sexed black female body to the strikingly similar figuration of its Western counterpart – Jeanne d’Arc, the epitome of the androgynous and virginal white woman. Despite this alleged contrast, Gjerden maintains that the protagonists of Dreyer’s La Passion the Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and of Kechiche’s Vénus noire both appear as dehumanised constructs of a white male gaze. The films simultaneously associate this gaze with desire, institutional power abuse and knowledge production, as exemplified by the naturalists’ scrutiny and meticulous documentation of Sara Baartman’s body in Vénus noire. With reference to Gilles Deleuze’s theories of haptic visuality, Gjerden argues that facial close-ups, camera and frame mobility, lightening and kinestethic patterns undermine such objectifying diegetic gazes on the level of reception in both films. Their cinematographic techniques activate the viewer’s response performatively by way of an optical loss of perspective and an increased bodily involvement. Consequently, as in the performances discussed by Jørgensen, it is through its concrete formal structure that Vénus noire challenges the objectifying gaze on Black Venus, replacing the cognitive mastery corollary to Western typecasting with a bodily spectatorship of surrender and immersion. All in all, each of these contributions strives to broach a specific politics of aesthetics that enables its authors to ponder the complexity of the subject matter and its concomitant gender-political, ideological, and ethical lining. Our ambition with this volume is to show a diversity of approaches to the Black Venus figure that allow it to function as a multi-facetted case study: it aims to offer transferable insights into the interplay between politics and aesthetics, in relation to the potential of aesthetic practices to establish, consolidate, challenge, and overturn gendered and racialized power dynamics. Works Cited Akberain, Emma. “Vogue under fire for ‘Big Booty’ article.” Independent (2014). http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/vogue-under-fire-for-bigbooty-article-9734218.html (accessed 18 March 2016). Crais, Clifton & Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2010).

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Cuvier, Georges. “Extrait d’observations faites sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentote,” Mémoires d’Histoire natuelle 3. (Paris: G Doufour, 1817): 259–74. Dobie, Madeleine. Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2001). Garcia, Patricia. “We’re officially in the era of the big booty,” Vogue (2014) http://www .vogue.com/1342927/booty-in-pop-culture-jennifer-lopez-iggy-azalea/ The page is no longer available. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 1 (1985): 204–42. Gilman, Sander L. Sexuality: An Illustrated History. Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Age of AIDS (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989). Gordon-Chipembere. Natasha. ed. Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Gould, Stephen Jay. “The Hottentot Venus,” in The Flamingo Smile (New York: W.W. ­Norton, 1985): 291–305. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997). Hartman, Saidiya V. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12.2. (2008): 1–14. Henderson, Carol E. “AKA: Sarah Baartman, The Hottentot Venus, and Black Women’s Identity,” Women’s Studies 43.7 (2014): 946–59, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2014.938191 (accessed 29 November 2018). Henderson, Mae G. “About Face, or, What Is This ‘Back’ in B(l)ack Popular Culture? From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie,” in Understanding Blackness through Performance, ed. A. Crémieux, X. Lemoine & J.P. Rocchi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 159–79. Hobson, Janelle. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005). Holmes, Rachel. African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (New York: Random House, 2007). Lewis, Robin Coste. Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). Mbeki, Thabo. “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August 2002,” http://www .sahistory.org.za/archive/speech-funeral-sarah-bartmann-9-­august-2002 (accessed 10 August 2017). Melancon, Trimiko & M. Joanne Braxton, ed. Black Female Sexualities, foreword Melissa Harris-Perry (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2015). Minaj, Nicki. “Anaconda,” YouTube (19 August 2014), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs (accessed 16 October 2017).

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Netto, Priscilla. “Reclaiming the Body of the ‘Hottentot’: The Vision and Visuality of the Body Speaking with Vengeance in Venus Hottentot 2002,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 12.2 (2005): 149–63. Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (London: Polity, 2010). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1999). Sir Mix-a-Lot. “Baby Got Back,” YouTube (3 February 2010), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_JphDdGV2TU (accessed 16 October 2017). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). “Svære rumper overalt!” Kvinneguiden Forum (29 September 2014), http://forum .kvinneguiden.no/topic/874404-sv%C3%A6re-rumper-overalt/ (accessed 18 March 2016). Tate, Shirley Anne. Black Women’s Bodies and The Nation: Race, Gender and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The Root, in collaboration with The Image of the Black Archive & Library, http://www .theroot.com/when-black-venus-was-the-ideal-standard-of-beauty-1790876439 (accessed 10 August 2017). Willis, Deborah, ed. Black Venus 2010: They Called her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia PA: Temple UP, 2010).

Part 1 Histories

∵

Chapter 2

Venus from A to Z in Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico Željka Švrljuga Abstract Željka Švrljuga’s reading of Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico explores how the novel’s intersectionality of race, gender and class, and the grammar of desire are deployed in the rewriting of the semantics of the Venus figure. With a starting point in a seventeenth-century footnote in Caribbean history, the novel uses the travel motif as its thematic impulse: from the “discovery” of the New World to its colonization. This, the chapter argues, is reflected on many levels – geographic, historical, narrative – and in the re-figuring of the Venus figure through metonymic displacements, metaphoric replacements, and supplementation. Also, by drawing on the Venus and Adonis myth and William Blake’s engraving Europe Supported by Africa and America, Švrljuga’s analysis opens for a thorough exploration of the relationships between critique, narration, aesthetics, and genre.

…

She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d.1

∵ Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico (1996) is an apocryphal account of a transracial liaison between an English trader and a Carib maiden, two legendary figures that lend their names to the title of the novel. Not only does the account take the reader on an imaginary journey to the Caribbean islands and their early colonial history, but the love plot resembles the popularized affair between Native American Matoaka (Pocahontas) and the Englishman, John Smith, in which the young woman saves the life of her white male protégé. There is, however, a marked difference as regards the two indigenous women’s fate: while 1 William Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis,” in Poems, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966): 25.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_003

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Matoaka marries another white man and moves with him to England, Yarico is betrayed and sold into slavery by her common-law husband Inkle. Yet much more is at stake in Gilroy’s fictional laboratory that relates to the articulation of racial, gender, and class constellations, the grammar of desire, and the semantics of the Venus figure embedded in the institution of the colony. Hence, this chapter explores how gender factors in and sheds light on the colonial enterprise by way of the figure of Venus in general, and of Black Venus in particular. As the Venus figure is embroiled in issues of gender and sexuality, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contention that “the figure of woman is pervasively instrumental in the shifting of the function of discursive systems”2 will serve as a guiding principle in the discussion of the novel. Thus, “Venus from A to Z” in my title stands for prototypical, hypersexualized (‘black’) femininity, reflecting in turn discursive practices whose ideology is as slanted as the reading of the figure of woman in mythical terms. British Guiana-born Gilroy (1924–2001) may herself have experienced racism and its attendant class oppression when, upon completion of a degree in education in the UK, she had to take menial jobs to support herself. Even though Gilroy eventually became the first black school principal in London, a writer, and a practicing psychologist with a PhD in counseling, her personal experience and historical awareness have inspired her to write about the oppression of black women under and after slavery. As self-declared ethnopsychologist, she made it her mission to encourage women of color to assert their sexuality, in contrast to how black women were treated in bondage.3 No wonder, then, that the figure of Black Venus as a racialized and sexualized other plays a key role in Gilroy’s novel as an offshoot of the archive of chattel slavery and sign of the double exploitation of black female bodies qua property. As figures, black women are numbers, price tags, bodies, shapes, and tropes, whose silence invites speech yet portends another potential act of violence that a redress in the form of address can bring about. As unrecorded victims of the ‘abominable institution,’ black women have been construed as the embodiment of concupiscence and alterity, and as objects of pleasure and stigma in the libidinal economy of slavery. Although their destiny is known at the level of the general-historical, it remains lost at the level of the particular. In consequence, Gilroy’s attempt to intervene with an alternative history illustrates her wariness of the limits of the unknowable and the unknown. The 2 Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, Columbia UP, 2003): 74. 3 For Gilroy’s discussion of ethno-psychology and affirmation of black sexuality through a historical prism, see her interview with Roxann Bradshaw, “‘Fact-Fiction’: Through the Lens of the ‘Quiet Old Lady,’” Callaloo 25.2 (Spring 2002): 381–82.

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limits in question involve efforts to evoke a ‘person’ to fill in an historical blank. How to write about Black Venus or a racialized and sexualized female other in the colonial world of slavery without participating in her exploitation in aesthetic and critical terms is a challenge that Inkle and Yarico resolves by way of a gallery of Venus figures, circumlocution, and a male narrative perspective. While, in aesthetic terms, the discussion of Venus figures will reveal their role as characters and tropes, it will also attend to the novel’s exploration of the semantic potentials of and allusions to the Venus figure in general – a figure whose name never appears in the text, yet figuratively haunts it nonetheless. The intention here is to demonstrate how metaphor and metonymy as displacement and replacement mechanisms are not only conjoined in the mythical figure but also bear upon the novel at large, with irony as an ensuing effect. Heedful of the fact that Yarico was no more than a footnote in Barbadian annals and that a Black Venus figure does not exist without her unmarked model of European origin, Gilroy expands the index of the said figure to sketch her version of the mid-1600s with women at the center, albeit mostly as its pawns. While the array of the novel’s characters reflects the era’s population make-up – a mixture of Caribs, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, English, and Irish subjects – the novel’s love plot is nonetheless structured around Venus figures of different hues. The qualifier black – as in Black Venus – is employed in this context as an umbrella term that spells out otherness, regardless of the shade of skin color. However, this does not mean that the author is unaware of differences between the diverse ethnic and racial groups, but simply hints at an ideological reading of blackness that, as the examination of the novel will show, is more nuanced with regard to reading skin color as a variable.4 This is important to keep in mind because of the novel’s time and two-part setting – an imaginary island, which has not yet been ‘discovered,’ claimed, or mapped and Barbados. The fictional island’s ‘exotic’ newcomers – shipwrecked accidental sojourners who warrant the prototype of racial and ethnic mélange – are African-born 4 The novel’s Afterword acknowledges Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1673) – the official source of the Inkle and Yarico story in print – whose relevant extracts regarding the inhabitants of Barbados and its neighboring islands Frank Felsenstein includes in his Inkle and Yarico Reader. For Ligon’s distinction between black Africans, Indians [Caribs] of brown or bright bay skin, and other indentured servants, vis-à-vis the white planter class and artisans, see Frank Felsenstein ed., English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999): 57–78. For a more recent discussion of the population mix in Barbados and the Leward islands, see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, foreword Gary B. Nash (Williamsburg VA: Omohundro Institute and U of North Carolina P, 2000): esp. 69–74; 224–38. ProQuest Ebook (accessed 2 Nov. 2018).

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Chief Tomo, Yarico’s father, and the novel’s character–narrator John Inkle, with his progeny. With this background in mind, the present chapter explores how Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico adopts the Venus trope as a structuring principle of both multiethnic colonial society and the novel’s plot. The novel has received hardly any critical attention, despite a few fleeting, laudatory remarks.5 The analysis demonstrates how the novel’s narrative perspective is a subversive strategy that works by inversion and suggestion: the white planter’s ideology, which rests on the exchange mechanisms that underlie chattel slavery and its constant need for new labour, finds a parallel in the libidinal economy of men and their attitude to women as dispensable commodities. While the politics of gender, race and class (economy) that rests on replacement mechanisms might appear as a well-worn feat, the discussion reveals how the author’s Venus project utilizes conspicuous irony to throw the colonial enterprise into sharp relief by way of the Venus trope and its correlative implications and allusions. 1

From Roots and Routes to Travelling Stories

Inasmuch as the novel’s gamut of Venus figures indicates their different origins and status, it points to travel as one of its major tropes, also when it comes to the Inkle and Yarico story and its three-and-a-half century-long history in print. Published towards the end of her life, Inkle and Yarico follows up on the author’s first historical ‘Black Venus’ novel, Stedman and Joanna (1992), which embarks on a narrative expedition into the eighteenth century and to continental West Indies. Hence, journey and displacement prove to be Gilroy’s prime movers in geographical, inspirational, and aesthetic terms. In order to lay the groundwork for the reading of the novel, a short detour into the different manifestations of these concepts is necessary. The ‘discovery’ of the New World, its riches and potentials, was responsible for European expansionism and colonization from the late 1400s onwards. 5 While Pamela J. Albert’s dedicates an entire chapter to the novel and its relation to Steele’s essay, in Transatlantic Engagement with the British Eighteenth Century (New York & London: Routledge, 2008): 19–47, critics at large offer no explanation for their praise: the novel is simply declared “beautiful” (Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism. Theory, Practice or Process [London: Polity, 2000]: 110), “fine” (Frank Felsenstein, Preface, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World, ed. Frank Felsenstein [Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999]: xii), or “thoughtful, insightful, with delicacy of feeling” (Phyliss Briggs–Emmanuel, “Beryl Gilroy, Inkle and Yarico,” The Caribbean Writer, n.d. https://peepaltreepress.com/books/reviews/inkle-and-yarico-1 [accessed 18 April 2016]).

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Contingent on travel – from exploration, to white settlement, to the triangular slave trade that brought the peoples of African origin to the Americas as labor, and to the settlers’ trade with the Old World – the colonial enterprise was motivated by financial gain, predicated on the exploitation of the new lands and the patriarchal institution of slavery. To the degree that Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico is steeped in the history of the colony, it is also enmeshed in narrative explorations and revisions that rest on metonymic displacement, metaphoric replacements and supplementation, which can account for its genesis. While the author’s first historical novel draws on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), it may also have prompted her to write Inkle and Yarico, given that Stedman refers to the legend of the couple in his own Narrative.6 By appending Richard Steel’s 1711 essay as the novel’s Afterword, Gilroy not only acknowledges her preferred source of inspiration, but also Richard Ligon’s brief note in his 1657 historical memoir – A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes – the official source of the story in print. With the revitalization of this once widely-known, ‘well-travelled,’ but now forgotten story, and the expansion of its gender-political agenda, the novel underscores the convergence of gender and racial politics which ultimately aims at highlighting the colonial venture’s long-lasting impact on the black woman as other.7 The legend’s extensive circulation and adaptations are grounded in its paradigmatic status in the colonial imaginary that rests on the dichotomy that underlies the transatlantic slave trade archive: Old World/New World, culture/nature, civilized ‘man’/(Noble) Savage ‘woman,’ prudishness/sexual freedom. Nor is it surprising that Gilroy adopts the novel format,8 first and only to date, indirectly supporting Linda 6 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes for a brief comparison between Yarico and Joanna, in Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992): 100. 7 According to Frank Felsenstein’s cautious estimate, the story and its spinoffs of different generic inflections have existed in over ten languages and in more than sixty “discreet versions” and translations (Introduction, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World): 2. 8 In her review of the book, Adele S. Newson refers to it as a “historical romance” due to its combination of historical characters and an adventure story (“Inkle and Yarico by Beryl Gilroy,” World Literature Today 71.2 [1997]: 435). While the romance element suggests “legendary heroes and marvelous events,” the romance genre transforms history into legend, which can be said to be the case with the Inkle and Yarico story (Gregg Crane, The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American Novel [New York: Cambridge UP, 2007]: 32; 22). Nonetheless, the designation ‘novel’ is more appropriate since the work resists allegorical implications, expands the known plot, and moderately delves into the psychology of the protagonist–narrator.

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Orr’s argument that the novel “is the most consistent critique of history.”9 Or, more precisely, the novel (and fiction in general) translates “what happened” with “what could have happened,” following Jacques Rancière’s credo that “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.”10 Although the notion of ‘the real’ or history may be on shaky ground with regard to the legend of Inkle and Yarico, it is still part of the novel’s Black Atlantic ethos, which the Venus trope foregrounds. 2

Venus Figures: Postures of Alignment

The legend’s trajectory as geographical and generic displacements, and its colonial plot bring together different populations with the different versions of the Venus figure. Here too, Stedman’s Narrative and William Blake’s accompanying illustrations are vital, especially Blake’s engraving, Europe Supported by Africa and America. This iconic image of the Three Graces, or Venus figures, appears to have inspired the fashioning of some of the novel’s central female characters; their appearance and degree of modesty indicate their different ethnic and cultural origins. The figures might also be said to symbolize the Caribbean islands’ population mix, with the three Venuses as prototypes of the hierarchical structure of the early colonial period, with Europe at its center and her African and Caribbean sisters supporting her. However, with historical hindsight in mind, one might have hoped for the obverse: Europe supporting her sisters of color. As the discussion of the novel’s Venus figures will show, this is part of the novel’s larger historical–political agenda. Blake’s engraving, which is visually saturate with what Stedman’s Narrative states, provides another impetus to Gilroy’s novelistic project with its clear racism and sexism. Anne K. Mellor’s appraisal of Blake’s print deliberates how the three female figures are patterned on the Occidental beauty ideal of Venus de Medici, which either reflects the creative artist’s neoclassical training or is an artistic attempt to ‘refine’ the women of color. Last but not least, Blake’s gesture of making African and Amerindian women look European may be seen as the artist’s attempt to erase cultural difference.11 In fact, what Mellor finds ‘wanting’ in terms of morphological or phenotypic variations is present in the 9 10 11

Linda Orr, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18.1 (1986): 19. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, tr. and intro. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2012): 38. See Anne K. Mellor, “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wolstonecraft,” William Blake: Images and Texts, ed. Robert N. Essick (San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1997): 82.

Venus from A to Z in Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico

Figure 2.1 William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America, 1792. Collection of Robert N. Essick. © 2018 William Blake Archive.

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color of the skin, hair style and texture, as well as in the degree of modesty expressed by the averted eyes/the challenging gaze – all of which contribute to placing the three nudes in an unambiguous hierarchy. With her downcast eyes and her left arm holding one end of a twisted garland around America’s shoulders, the fair-haired Venus pudica clutches Africa’s hand and the other end of the garland with her right hand, as if signaling a close bond between the Charites. The way the etching spells out the pecking order is evident in the central figure’s body contact with her two foils and its underlying symbolism. The supportive gesture feigns a ‘natural’ link between the three women that, upon a closer scrutiny, appears to be a metonym for a chain, which the armbands around the Black Venuses’ upper arms support. A sanitized symbol of shackles, the armbands and the garland allude to slavery and racial and cultural difference: Africa, by way of her short curly hair, darker skin, and an impudent way of regarding the viewer, finds in America’s long dark hair, lighter skin color, and a less bold look an ‘enhanced’ version of herself. Thus, the alignment of the Venus figures is grounded in Western stereotypes of beauty and diffidence. The Black Venuses’ responding gaze – challenging, enticing, and seductive – epitomizes the stereotypes of black female sexuality by evoking lewdness and promiscuity with what reads as a ‘come hither’ glance. Blake’s stylized image of the three nudes offers invaluable insight into the staging of female sexuality for the male viewer, who may find what he sees pleasing to his eye and gratifying to his sexual appetite. Ways of seeing that the engraved image suggests hardly relate to how the depicted women see or want themselves to be seen; rather, the engraving underscores a convention wherein the viewing subject projects his own fantasy onto the object of his gaze, as if claiming exclusive rights to her body and sexuality. Just as the female body is a converging narrative focus, so too is the novel’s focalization key to the reading of the different representations of this body. With the white man Thomas Inkle as narrator, and central emotive, ideological and moral consciousness, the novel deploys a strategy that evokes Rancière’s concept of “the distribution of the sensible,” and thus “the system of self-evident facts of sense-perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”12 The novel’s array of Venus figures, which embodies different types of femininity and sexuality, also indicates a series of characters in the novel – from Alice to Zeze, with Yarico as its narrative and titular axis – and, concomitantly, the different origins, cultures, ideologies, and journeys that the Caribbean 12

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum, 2012): 12.

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“contact zone” brings together.13 The female body literally represents this contact zone, for it is in and through this sexual body that cultures meet and amalgamate, and its figuration unsettles and disturbs dominant discourses, striving for change. What better way to expose a dominant discursive system than by an astute narrative stratagem which bleeds colonial ideology through a male focalizer, allowing the white man’s prejudice and stereotypification to seep through the narrative texture and set the Black Venus figure in relief. Mindful of the pitfalls of representation and its double signification – speaking for (as a political gesture) and speaking about (as in artistic practices) – Gilroy’s choice of a male protagonist–narrator inverts erstwhile writers’ deployment of Yarico as the subject of utterance and experience in ‘her’ imaginary “epistles,” “laments,” or “addresses” to her white lover, which were primarily penned by white male authors.14 Consequently, the writer not only seems to adopt Spivak’s above cited dictum but, with tongue in cheek, turns it around to exemplify the colonial project, as if suggesting that the shifting out of women is pervasively instrumental in the figuration of (or attempt to preserve) the discursive systems of power. 3

Gilroy’s Venus Abecedarium

Inkle and Yarico charts an aesthetic-political re-vision of the legend, so much so that it in fact embraces more than the title announces: twenty-year-old Inkle is sent to Barbados to manage the family plantation with a promise of ­Alice’s hand upon his return. Shipwrecked on an uncharted island, he is the only survivor of the Black Caribs’ attack on the stranded crew. Saved by a native nymph, Yarico, Inkle is adopted by her tribe, and the couple eventually escapes to Barbados. To compensate for his seven-year sojourn among the Caribs, which he sees as a waste of time and money, Inkle sells his Carib wife and their son, finding in the local woman of pleasure, Delvina, sexual recompense, suggestive of his previous physical passion for his Carib lover Zeze, Yarico’s slave. In the course of events, he meets Alice by chance; she crossed the A ­ tlantic in search 13

14

I adopt Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” to refer to “social spaces” where cultures intersect, interact, struggle, or come to terms with one another and hierarchies are played out, tested and contested (Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation [London and New York: Routledge, 1992]: 4). Frank Felsenstein’s reader, among other generic inflections, provides excerpts from seven epistles, two laments, Yarico’s four addresses to Inkle, a play and an opera to illustrate the variety of genres that grant Yarico voice (Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World).

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of him, and found a husband along the way, whom she joined in his abolitionist pursuit. Fearing the couple’s insurgent campaign, Inkle sets up an ambush, ends up critically wounded, and remains crippled for life. Without Alice and Delvina, who dies in childbirth, he enters into a relationship with Anne, with whom Inkle returns to England and the novel comes full circle to its narrative, cultural, and geographical beginnings. A quick run-through of the novel’s plot indicates the alphabetic signposts that mark the key female characters. Even though nothing is said about their Venus status, let alone their commodification, the novel’s focalization makes this obvious time and again. The reader cannot overlook the symbolic value of the first letter of the alphabet, thus firstness and social status, as well as that of the novel’s cultural and geographical starting point and end station. Although he leaves England and Alice at the beginning of the novel, Inkle never leaves behind his Anglo-Saxonism, although at times he truly enjoys his stay among the Caribs. His appreciation of their community grows with his acceptance into it, his need to belong, and his gradually-acquired ability to read and value nature. A cultural “neophyte,” Inkle undergoes an initiation rite, a test of his manhood and his ability to adapt to an indigenous culture that he considers inferior to his own.15 Although troubled and incomplete, his rite of passage gives rise to psychological and moral dilemmas that linger with him, albeit latently and sporadically. In turn, his semi-conversion to ‘otherness’ reads as an attempt to stave off parody and modify the novel’s critique of the ideological premise of whiteness, striving towards vraisemblance. Concomitantly, the novel allows social and political vectors to lace the narrator’s self-portrait with authorial irony, turning it into arrogance. Socialized to believe in his eminence, the narrator–protagonist is the self-declared “Adonis of the family.”16 This self-proclamation silently spells out “Venus” on the first page of the novel, thus opening up the narrative space for a series of figures that serve as corollaries to the textual proposition “Adonis.” Like the archetypal symbol of male youth and beauty and Venus’ defiant lover, the novel’s Adonis 15

16

This entire section of the novel reads like a novelistic rendition of Victor Turner’s discussion of Arnold van Gennep’s concept of rites de passage – from separation, to a liminal period (“betwixt and between”), and finally to the completed passage – that would bring Inkle from “structural invisibility” to social or tribal acceptance. Although he never leaves the liminal stage, the narrator–protagonist’s rite of passage steers his understanding of gender, sexuality and race, and is vital for the novel’s fashioning of the male protagonist, and thus the Venus project at large. See Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forests of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca NY & London: Cornell UP, 1967): 93–99. Beryl Gilroy, Inkle and Yarico (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1996). Further page references are in the main text.

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is a hunter, predator, and a self-proclaimed prey, with Yarico – an embodiment of love, nature, nurture, and sexuality – as his temptress, victim, and savior. By way of a gallery of Venus figures – Black Venuses like Yarico, Zeze, and, implicitly, Delvina – and hegemonic masculinity, the novel appears to claim the Venus and Adonis myth’s relevance in the Caribbean context. Although tempted by the local beauties already en route to Barbados, Inkle abstains from all intimacy, haunted by the image of his betrothed until he eventually ‘surrenders’ to Yarico. Accordingly, the Black Venus figure requires comparison to establish the shift in her status – from beauty incarnate to carnal love – with the measuring rod of masculinity as judge. The class A Aphrodite (Venus’s Greek counterpart) – the novel’s beautiful, blonde, and chaste Venus – is Alice. Conveniently, she also stands for pecuniary gain that boosts her Venus qualities and marriageability. Accordingly, ­Inkle’s father’s rationale and the novel’s narrative repeat this refrain in various ­inflections – to “always think of [his] advantage” (8; 46; 79; 82; 131) – spelling out a mercantile philosophy that the son adopts also in matters amorous and sexual. A haunting presence in daydreams and in challenging moments that relate to sexuality, Alice is also recalled as a cultural barometer of “delicacy of constitution” (35), which is lacking in a pre-modern culture like that of the Caribs. The novel’s critique of the upper echelons of society, including Alice and her need to rest after her daily ride, is clear when compared to Carib women who never cease working. What is also clear is that “refinement and good breeding” (35) – associated with white upper-class femininity – reflect the needs of those in power to restrict women’s rights and freedom. Class dictates stand for signs of control that encourage passivity, ensuring a status quo in social and gender matters. The constancy that is expected of the white Venus does not seem to apply to Adonis. While Alice’s shadow wanes with time, her unexpected return rekindles Inkle’s passion in vain. Her married status places her “beyond Eros” (122), and thus past her Venus standing and out of Inkle’s amorous reach. What also makes her less attractive is her change “from a frail girl into an adventurous woman with a cause” (127). This cause is identified as abolitionism that presents a threat to Inkle’s prosperity as planter, at the same time as it signals a radical change in gender performance: from an initially compliant demeanor to political activism. Though the primary aim with his revenge plot is to expose Alice and her husband’s insurrectionist politics and have the couple evicted from Barbados, Inkle’s unmasked cruelty as a tyrannical planter and Alice’s righteousness turn his rage into unbridled desire. In Inkle’s attempted rape of his former fiancé, the novel showcases a hunter/ victim or predator/prey scenario. Following his father’s earlier cited doctrine, the son’s resolve – “I would have my way. I would… I would.” (149) – echoes his

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earlier claim to Zeze – “I would have her” (65) – indicating his inclination to power abuse and licentiousness with regard to Venus figures. By no means the product of a moment, the protagonist’s unrestrained sexual craving is born while spying on the naked Yarico swimming in a creek, a scene that intimates a sensual embrace in and with the water out of which the Black Venus figure is born. Rapt away, I enjoyed her splendid physique. She was buxom, above the middle height and well proportioned, the first living naked woman I had ever seen. I feasted my young eyes upon a truly surprising work of nature, voluptuous and yet tantalizing at the same time. I looked unashamedly at her and was astonished that, though black, all her parts were as those in the pictures in the hands of the gamekeeper’s lads. (17; emphasis added). While the white male gaze explores and delights in the young woman’s body, registering among other features her color, the observer’s desire sees no difference between her figure and those of naked white women whose images he recalls seeing in his youth. The ekphrastic quality of the cited lines aside, there is little doubt that the object of the male gaze, the image itself, draws its energy from the above-mentioned Blake’s engraving. The reference to the young woman’s hair highlights this in its “adulteration with the woolen hair of Africans” (17; emphasis added), making her mestiza origin explicit. A daughter of a shipwrecked African slave and an Arawak mother, Yarico is an early product of ethnic and cultural creolization that colors the voyeur’s experience of the object of his gaze. The sudden switch from attraction to distaste that the mention of the woman’s hair brings about reflects the narrator–protagonist’s ambivalence, which is triggered by his biased view of her cultural background as the flipside of his own: “About her there was a certain lack of finesse, unfamiliarity with modesty as I knew it. It was that most of all which set her apart in my mind as being of a civilization inferior to my own” (18; emphasis in original). Accordingly, the fascination/revulsion nexus signals the observer’s ambivalence that colors the entire narrative in terms of ethnic makeup, cultural practices, belief systems, institutions, and sexual mores. The ironically named island, No Man’s Land,17 on which Inkle comes ashore after the shipwreck, is home to indigenous peoples who are linked in ­intricate 17

Gilroy’s choice of the name for the island is no doubt associated with its Latin correlative, terra nullius, or what Stephen Greenblatt, in a different context, considers “emptying out the category of the other” (Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New

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ways through marital bonds and slavery. These two institutions, the novel ­suggests, may be closely related since raids on neighboring settlements provide native groups with female hands for tilling the land in a society that relies on a gendered division of labor: whilst women do the fieldwork, men are hunters. The bottom line is that even though slavery exists among the Caribs, Carib slavery is not ostensibly based on violence. It is uncertain, however, what impact slavery has on the destiny of captive women, like Yarico’s mother, for example, who conceived her daughter on the day of her capture. The degree to which her parents’ relationship is predicated on mutual consent, or coercion and submission, is unclear; what is clear, however, is that her mother returns to her people who, allegedly, could not bear her loss, leaving Yarico for her father to raise – with which the novel challenges the Western concept of family and motherhood. With an African father and an Arawak mother, Yarico is a product of ethnic blending and power relations, which explains her African, tightly coiled hair (her father’s legacy) and the Arawak dress (a pearled loincloth traditional to her mother’s culture).18 A work of a slightly later date than the historical present of the novel, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) provides a comparable example in terms of assessment of both the beauty of Caribbean women and their beaded and finely woven “aprons.”19 The latter plays a crucial role in the Inkle and Yarico first encounter: Inkle relinquishes Yarico’s intimate garment, which she has left behind after her swim and returns to collect, thereby initiating a series of exchanges.20 Signifying on sexuality as displacement for ­genitalia, World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988): 60). Obviously, both refer to the white man’s dismissal of the native populations’ righteous claim to the land of their origin and habitation. 18 Here, too, the reader cannot fail to notice another link to Stedman’s Narrative, this time to its 1796 illustration – Indian Female of the Arrowauka Nation, which contains many elements that the Yarico figure embodies: a beautiful young woman with a parrot perched on her hand, holding a bow and arrow – whose image figures on the title page of the novel. 19 Afra Behn, Oroonoko (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997): 9. Declared Black Venus and many white men’s object of desire, Prince Oroonoko’s intended Imoinda, like many Indian Maids, is an embodiment of beauty and female decorum. What lessens her attractiveness is her “Colour, which is a reddish Yellow; or after a new Oiling […] the color of a new Brick” (Behn, Oroonoko, 9), indicating, as it were, the fluidity of the Black Venus concept both in terms of color, immodesty, and uncouthness. 20 The reader familiar with the figure of the Hottentot Venus will no doubt notice a similarity in dress between the Black Carib and certain representations of the Khoisan woman. The latter, however, can aver a natural appendage, the so-called Hottentot apron, or the hypertrophied labia, fallaciously taken for a sign of excessive and ‘primitive’ black sexuality. Gilroy diverts the male gaze away from the Black Venus genitalia – the primary sexual characteristic – and focuses instead on her secondary sexual attributes: breasts and buttocks.

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the pearled raiment inspires interaction and eventually sexual contact, in which process the traditional roles of agent and object, captor and captive are outwardly reversed. While Inkle’s survival depends on Black Caribs’ goodwill, which in turn is contingent on Yarico’s interest in the strange creature that she finds in the woods, the reliability of the narrative voice is tested in numerous references to his status as prisoner. As a Venus figure proper, Yarico is as much an epitome of love as she loves – Inkle, nature, and sexual pleasure. Proclaimed “an Eve in Eden” (17), “pure instinct, […] one with Nature’s rhythms” (20), and “an amiable child of nature” (18) in its many variants, this Black Venus is nevertheless associated with the primitive and the savage: the aboriginal is the tail, and white culture the head, of the ideological coin. Asserting women’s right to affirm their sexuality, which Gilroy encouraged in her practice as psychologist, the author challenges the white man’s condemnation of (black) women’s sexual agency and pleasure that her narrator–protagonist deems unwholesome and immoral. In order to unpack the coercion/submission dilemma that the text gives voice to, Gilroy brings into play the issue of compliance and self-representation: the narrator–protagonist’s self-reference as an “ideal, strange and obliging lover” (20) says more about his character than his oft-repeated regrets over the loss of and longings for Alice indicate. The “obliging lover” locution suggests closeness and intimacy, and may be difficult to accept as it is the result of a coercive act. By virtue of her role as the novel’s Black Venus, Yarico is sexuality in the flesh with Inkle as her alleged property, prisoner, treasure, and sexual toy (19). A clever narrative subterfuge, the list of his roles as object seemingly exculpates the man from accepting the temptress’ advances and steers the attention away from his lust. Aware of the danger of exploiting the Black Venus figure, Gilroy circumvents sexual graphics and, instead of lovemaking scenes, inserts erotic verses from the book of poetry that, like Inkle himself, has survived the shipwreck. This strategy of displacement and replacement in no way diminishes the sexual aspect that it ostensibly screens. What it does do is to shield the Black Venus’ body from voyeurism, and thus from second-hand sexual exploitation, as if declaring that the female sexual agent should value her sexuality regardless of her color. The quotation marks that embrace the lines in the original erase the sexualized woman cum ‘race’ from the novel’s agenda, allowing the verses to work by allusion. She needeth no instruction in the art Of using woman’s ways to win man’s heart. The lily’s scarlet stamens grew untaugtht, The bee came freely, wishing to be caught. (19)

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Not only does the stanza reveal the lovers’ complicity, it also exposes its attendant pleasure. From the initial “language of the heart” (20) that the lovers adopt – amorous whispers and exchanges – Inkle’s love of Yarico is eventually declared the result “not from the heart, nor from the soul, but from the cursedly devilish flesh” (36). Moreover, the man’s pragmatic, egocentric, and licentious attitude to Venus figures validates William Shakespeare’s line – “She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d” – that serves as this chapter’s epigraph. No matter how much the novel’s Venus figures love their Adonis, when all the facts are considered, he loves none; not even Alice whose image haunts him until they meet again. My earlier advanced assertion that Caribbean islands and female bodies are cultural contact zones finds one manifestation in Yarico’s origin, and another in Inkle and Yarico’s two sons who bear different phenotypical traits: “the murky creature, […] dark-skinned and dark-haired, with a pudding-bowl of a face” (52); and “the child, blond-haired, blue-eyed and very pale in coloring. He was my son all right” (82). The paternal preference is obvious in the declared love for his effigy, which the novel underscores with the act of naming: while, in line with his looks, his first-born Waiyo carries a Carib name, the younger son remains nameless, even if Inkle considers naming him Adam, after his older brother. However, the infant is left unnamed, following the father’s decision to sell him into slavery together with the mother, who then drowns the child, refusing to see him turned into a slave. With this narrative gesture, the text suggests that there is no future for the child of a traitor of his flesh, and if the boy were to be a Caribbean Adam, it would simply be on account of the fact that he is the fruit of the womb of an equally betrayed “Eve in Eden.” Guilty of his two sons’ deaths (by unwittingly poisoning the older and selling the younger into slavery), Inkle is equally guilty of the loss of his third son with his paramour Delvina. His dismissal of the child prior to its birth, questioning its paternity, as well as his intention to make him “belong to the plantation” (142), moves the dying mother to give the baby to Alice for adoption. Delvina’s last words – “Keep him from Inkle. Keep him and call him Christian” (153) – are a plea and a declaration of trust to the woman whose religious and emancipationist convictions she has seen voiced at the meeting with Inkle’s slaves. In turn, the same declaration is not only a sign of female bonding, but points to a sorority of like-minded and exploited women. Concurrently, the dying woman’s act undermines the patriarchal nomothetical father-function as law- and name-giver, highlighting with the proposed name the man’s unscrupulous conduct. In the novel’s gamut of Venus figures, Delvina holds a special place as an Irish, indentured servant, and prostitute to boot. As a member of “the Irish race” (111), her whiteness is considered degenerate and inferior, which her

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i­ ndentured servitude italicizes through class.21 According to her own account, her indenture is a matter of accident since she was late in disembarking while helping her preacher–employer and his family settle onboard the ship bound for Barbados. Allegedly, she is driven into prostitution by the same employer to cover the expenses of her passage and upkeep, with which the novel seems to critique the hypocrisy of the men of the cloth towards subjects of a different faith. It is precisely on account of her religion and Irishness that white “women of rank, quality and bourgeois expectations” (104) brand her a “papist,” a pariah figure, and an opportunist, seeking betterment “through scheming and concubinage” (111), and thus an unsuitable match for Inkle. With the character of Delvina, the novel brings in another sexualized version of the Venus figure according to which white women of pleasure are associated with black women with regard to “sexual availability.”22 These women are either former indentured servants, trying to make a living, or light-skin ‘mustees’ or ‘mulatto’ beauties rented out by their masters to whoever requests their s­ ervices – regardless of their race or class – provided that they are pleasing in appearance or demeanor. With Alice, Yarico, and Zeze out of his life, Inkle draws upon another of his father’s teachings – “If you cannot have what you want, then want what you have” (110). If, as a rhetorical figure, chiasmus is parallel in syntax but reversed in the order of the words, the novel’s Venus figures are ‘parallel in terms of gender’ although ‘different’ as regards their origin, sexual mores, and use value. Like words, these female figures are interchangeable and expendable as objects of replacement, the narrator–protagonist maintains, until his choice is exhausted, and he ends up with the woman he least desires. Even though professional harlots are objects of consumption, the narrative abstains from exposing Delvina’s body to sexual scrutiny and focuses instead on her dark hair, physiognomy, and easygoing laughter, as well as Inkle’s sexual experience with her. To what extent the listed characteristics catalogue a 21

22

In their exploration of blackness as an ideological construct, Zine Magubane and Felicity A. Nussbaum address the Irish/Celtic race and its historical association with the Black race. While Magubane refers to the nineteenth-century view of the Celtic population’s blackness as a matter of color, genetics, and biology, Nussbaum adds the concept of class, referring to lower classes, to the stigma of racial inferiority. See Zine Magubane “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15.6 (2001): 823–24, and Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Forms of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 151. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 221.

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­ rostitute’s traits is dubious; what is certain, however, is that the scarlet womp an stands for “disease as well as passion,” as Sander L. Gilman claims in his oft-quoted essay.23 While Delvina’s Irishness and status as prostitute imply her polluted whiteness, her disreputable profession makes her the carrier of venereal disease – gonorrhea, or the scourge of Venus – which she unwittingly transmits to her lover. Not only does he keep her on his plantation as his concubine; he proposes to marry her off to his overseer, to enjoy her himself at leisure, a degrading proposal she turns down with scorn. When, after the fated injury following Inkle’s attempted rape of Alice, Inkle demands to be nursed by Delvina and learns of her death, he mourns what he has lost in her more than the woman herself: “With Delvina I had been able to be young again, share in fantasy and act out my life among the Caribs. Nudity did not agitate her. With her, the body was an instrument of pleasure like the violin or the flute” (153). If the memory of Delvina brings Inkle’s Carib experience back again, this is due to his “youthful delight,” Zeze (113) – Yarico’s fourteen-year-old slave whom Inkle had seduced, committing what he admits would have been a pedophilic offense in England. As in Yarico’s initial presentation, the sensual approach to the girl and sexuality is clad in verse from Inkle’s book of poems: She is lovely. She is tender And her waist is sleek and slender. She is sweet, modest her glances And my heart she quite entrances. (65) Spellbound by her beauty and desirous of her body, Inkle gets his way under the pretext that Zeze is a woman in the Carib culture, thereby available to the desiring men, forgetting, however, that he is per definition Yarico’s property and therewith unable to take another partner without her permission. When he takes her into the bush, Zeze understands his intentions and walks like a lamb to the slaughter (67), with which the narrative spells out ‘rape,’ dressing it in an erotic guise, as if to attenuate the gravity of the transgression and the girl as prey and meat to the assailant. The Venus and Adonis myth plays a pivotal role also in aesthetic and narrative terms in the author’s attempt to exhaust its connotational possibilities and attendant imagery to bolster her Venus project. One of the initial associations is with hunting or venery: Inkle’s first step in his initiation rite is to kill a trapped deer and bring it to the hungry community, even though the circumstances of its capture are only disclosed to the reader. Although apparently 23

“Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 221.

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irrelevant, this episode is vital in terms of deer hunting, also in an extended, ­metaphorical sense that relates to Zeze. Literally speaking, not only is the flesh of deer, or venison – with its root in the Latin infinitive vēnāri (“hunt”) – ­related to the figure of Venus (the lover of nature and animals) by way of aural similarity, it is symbolically associated with the sexual-predator instincts of the novel’s Adonis, which guide his conduct towards the novel’s Venus figures. The two most conspicuous examples are the already mentioned attempted rape of Alice and the seduction of the “fawn-like” Zeze (64), in whom several telling elements are linked: a very young doe, the yellow- or red-brown hue that alludes to her skin color, the figure of Black Venus and, by implication, her submissive behavior. With the Zeze figure, the novel explores a new possibility of aesthetic representation by ironically protecting her from a potential voyeurism and focusing instead on her abuse: the narrator–protagonist’s quest for gratification. By associating her with Alice in her innocence and imagining her as “white-skinned and golden-haired” (67), the novel conjoins chastity and whiteness, thus covering up for Inkle’s base desire of her body – “a fragile and precious receptacle for the most rapturous moments of [his] life” (67). When, in the end, Zeze is poisoned on account of her alleged witchcraft, the narrator–protagonist mourns the loss of his source of sexual pleasure and not the person in question – with whom he has never exchanged words, only bodily favors. With the novel’s juvenile Venus figure, Gilroy recurs to an earlier linguistic maneuver whereby “love” (with its declaration of affectionate commitment as per a voiced or fortis consonant, suggesting profound sentiment in nonlinguistic terms) is replaced by its euphemistic near-synonym “laugh” (via an unvoiced lenis) – implying often unspoken sexual exchange. In the novel’s lexicon, “laughing” is part and parcel of sexualized Black Venus figures – Yarico, Zeze, and Delvina – though it disappears from the vocabulary with the entrance of Anne, Inkle’s unsought though devoted partner at the end of his Caribbean journey. Her “unselfishness, […] goodness, […] and charity” as well as “rigid narrow-mindedness” (119) inspire no tender sentiments, yet when all the Venus figures are gone and Inkle ends as cripple, Anne fills the role he has intended for Delvina: “to take care of [him] and love [him] as a woman should” (152). With her entry onto the stage as a possible replacement for Alice, the novel completes, or abandons, its Venus project, allowing the maimed Adonis to survive thanks to the antidote that his now half-mad Yarico cum Spirit Woman administers to him and saves his life. The novel’s end – which brings Alice and Anne together as “facets of [Inkle’s] country, loyalty, honor, conviction, and patriotism” (157) – harks back, on the one hand, to the narrator–protagonist’s ideological and narrative premise, which

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stands for the colonial project and its attendant economics of ­slavery, in which he finds support in Anne. On the other hand, Alice, a declared a­ bolitionist, challenges the discursive system of power with an appeal to Inkle’s illiterate slaves to re-present their torture in images. Although symbolic, Alice’s gesture speaks to the legal system of the metropole and the bondsmen’s interdiction to speak up before the law by replacing the verbal rhetoric with the pictorial. It might also be seen as the novel’s attempt to engage in a silent conversation with the different editions of Stedman’s Narrative and their many illustrations of torture, drawn by the author himself, William Blake, or other white artists. What is most significant, however, is the fact that the commissioned drawings, like the slave narratives of a century or two later, represent authentic ‘accounts’ by the subjects of experience, even though they are no more than instruments in the hands of abolitionists. Hence, the novel’s Alice plays an alternative role to that of Blake’s Europe; unlike his shy Venus, she supports the exploited, revealing in the process that she “contained matter that had crystallised into causes, beliefs and convictions: resentment of injustice and hatred of slavery” (128). By staging her radical change in character from an innocent and submissive young woman to an agent and activist, the novel dismantles the Venus myth and the figure’s established attributes (love, desire, fertility, passivity, and sexuality), insisting instead on her commitment to a political cause and mothering through adoption. Black Venus figures, which are in the end brought together under a generic “she” (153), serve as a trope with which Inkle and Yarico undermines the colony’s moral hypocrisy, including the white man’s arrogance and his rejection of his progeny. This simple narrative gesture brings the Black Venus figures together under the same denominator, confirming my proposition that the figure of woman is both a character and a trope. The discussion has established that, as a character, the Venus figure is replaceable like tradable goods; as a trope, it opens up a wide array of referential possibilities and rhetorical implications, with which the novel explores the figure’s and the word’s semantic and auricular potential. While the substitution mechanism, which serves as the novel’s structuring principle, might appear rather mechanical and its characters flat, it nonetheless facilitates the novel’s project that this chapter has explored: that the shifting out of women is instrumental in an attempt to preserve the status quo of power structures in the colony by way of the Venus plot. Yet while the White Venus comes out whole, the novel apparently offers no hope for Black Venus figures under slavery, which Zeze and Delvina’s deaths and Yarico’s madness confirm. Starting from the premise that the figure of woman – Venus – is instrumental in unsettling the system and the discourse of the colony, this reading has argued that gender is used as a critical instrument in the novel by ­staging

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it  as a dialectical category in line with its attendant stereotypes. The male/ female, white/black, culture/nature, metropole/colony and other resultant ­dichotomies rely on categorical thinking that the novel highlights with its narrative perspective – its staging and reading of femininity – and pragmatic attitude to the other sex that the narrative perspective fosters. The novel’s circular structure with its point of departure and end (London) and the primacy of the letter A as a mark of firstness (Alice, Anne, Aphrodite, and Adonis) contains yet another unmentioned aspect that ironizes the narrator–protagonist’s destiny and the novel’s critique of the colony. The case in point relates to the merchantman Achilles aboard which Inkle sails for Barbados and whose shipwreck he survives. Punning on the ship’s function of transporting cargo, the designation suggests Inkle’s project as a merchant man – in economic and amorous terms. Yet, most importantly, by naming the trading ship after the Greek hero, the novel foreshadows Inkle’s fate: suffering from the wreck, he is saved by Yarico, whose humane gesture the self-proclaimed class A hero never embodies. With her intervention, the novel brings his Caribbean journey to a close and discredits his first-class status, which the narrative voice claims from the start and the narrator–protagonist undermines with his deeds. Thus irony and inversion are the modus operandi of the novel, to which the reader holds the key. Works Cited Albert, Pamela J. Transatlantic Engagement with the British Eighteenth Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2008). Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking. (1688. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Blake, William. Europe Supported by Africa and America. http://www.blakearchive.org/ copy/bb499.1?descId=bb499.1.comeng.17 (accessed 25 October 2018). Bradshaw, Roxann. “‘Fact-Fiction’: Through the Lens of the ‘Quiet Old Lady,’” Callaloo 25.2 (Spring 2002): 381–400. Briggs-Emanuel, Phyliss. “Beryl Gilroy, Inkle and Yarico,” The Caribbean Writer, n.d. https://peepaltreepress.com/books/reviews/inkle-and-yarico-1 (accessed 18 April 2016). Crane, Gregg. The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007). Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, foreword Gary B. Nash (Williamsburg VA: Omohundro Institute and U of North Carolina P, 2000). ProQuest Ebook (accessed 2 Nov. 2018).

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Felsenstein, Frank. Introduction. English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader, ed. Frank Felsenstein (Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999). Gilman, Sander. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 .1 (1985): 204–42. Gilroy, Beryl. Inkle and Yarico (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1996). Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1673), in Frank Felsenstein ed., English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader, ed. Frank Felsenstein (Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999): 57–80. Magubane, Zine. “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15.6 (2001): 816–34. Mellor, Anne K. “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,” William Blake: Images and Texts, ed. Robert N Essick (San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1997): 69–94. Newson, Adele S. “Inkle and Yarico by Beryl Gilroy,” World Literature Today 71.2 (1997): 435–36. Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Limits of the Human: Forms of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). Orr, Linda. “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18.1 (1 October 1986): 1–22. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992). Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism. Theory, Practice or Process (London: Polity Press, 2000). Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, tr. and intro. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2012). Shakespeare, William. “Venus and Adonis,” Poems, ed Ed. J.C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966): 3–44. Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003). Stedman, John Gabriel. Indian Female of the Arrowauka Nation (engraving based on Stedman’s drawing), in Narrative of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the wild coast of South America; from the year 1772, to 1777: elucidating the history of that country, and describing its productions … with an account of the Indians of Guiana, & negroes of Guinea (London: J. Johnson & T. Paine,

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1796): inserted between 196 & 197. https://archive.org/details/­narrativeoffivey02sted (accessed 5 September 2016). Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” The Forests of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. (Ithaca NY and London: Cornell UP, 1967): 93–111.

Chapter 3

H.C. Andersen’s Black Venus Fairy Tale

“The Marsh King’s Daughter” and the Aftermath of Danish Colonialism Kjersti Aarstein Abstract H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale “The Marsh King’s Daughter” (1858) has previously been recognised for its aesthetic complexity and intricate depiction of sexual anxiety. Kjersti Aarstein is the first to address the colonial theme of the story, a theme affiliated with the Black Venus figure. She explores Andersen’s twist on fairy-dale tropes, such as allegory and certain poetic images and formulas, in relation to his Black Venus heroine, who is trying to manoeuvre in a violent, colonial landscape. Reading the “The Marsh King’s Daughter” alongside Andersen’s play The Mulatto (1840), and drawing on diverse historical materials, Aarstein challenges the view that H.C. Andersen was not critical of European imperialism, arguing that the later tale addresses both the history of colonial violence in Denmark and its colonies, and the possibility for healing. Thus, she also opens the discussion of the figure of Black Venus to the yet uncharted Scandinavian scene.

Hans Christian Andersen is “the most significant original creator of fairy tales of the Victorian period,”1 one of the most celebrated Scandinavian authors throughout history, and – according to a recent poll – the greatest Dane of all times.2 With regard to his merits, Elisabeth Oxfeldt warns against the temptation of enlisting the renowned artist for noble causes, such as anti-racism and cross-cultural openness.3 She argues that his oeuvre is rather “embroiled in nineteenth-century economics and politics and may be read as products of, and as contributions to, European imperialism.”4 1 Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time. A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014): 108. 2 The poll was conducted by readers of the renowned Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende in 2004. 3 Elisabeth Oxfeldt, “Discovering His Inner Turk. Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic,” in Journeys from Scandinavia. Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840–2000 (Minneapolis & London: Minnesota UP, 2010): 7. 4 Oxfeldt, “Discovering His Inner Turk. Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic,” 12. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_004

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In this essay, I argue that Andersen’s 1858 fairy tale “The Marsh King’s Daughter” (“Dynd-Kongens Datter”) contradicts Oxfeldt’s otherwise insightful thesis, as it engages with imperialism in critical terms. I explore the fairy-tale’s use of aesthetic means to address Denmark’s and Norway’s colonial history, through an allegorical invocation of the exotic phantasm named ‘Black Venus.’5 Rather than the more or less pronounced aestheticism that is predominant in Andersen’s reception, I advance the thesis that the most important tropes of the fairytale genre – such as allegory, striking contrasts and symbolic nature – enable Andersen to shed light on the theme of colonial phantasm in a Scandinavian context. I take as my starting point the general notion that ‘Black Venus’ is a meta­ phor for African women’s supposedly unrestrained sexuality and affinity with animals, but I also trace references to and similarities with the life and legend of Sarah Baartman. In addition to reading “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” I explore its relation to Andersen’s 1840 play The Mulatto (Mulatten), which may be understood as an early draft of the fairy tale. These texts are quite different with regard to plot and genre, but they share the same set of poetic images, associated with colonial phantasms. The colonial theme is apparent in The Mulatto, but it has not previously been recognised in the reception of the fairy tale, perhaps partly due to a tradition for understating colonial history in the context of Danish and Norwegian national self-representation.6 1

Andersen’s Allegorical Heroine

The main plot of “The Marsh King’s Daughter” starts off with the arrival of an Egyptian princess in Denmark more than a thousand years ago. Betrayed by her traveling companions, the princess is left naked on the moor, where the monstrous Marsh King rapes her at the bottom of a pond. Somewhat 5 I employ the term phantasm in order to emphasise that the “Black Venus” is an ideological – libidinal fantasy that serves to protect the spectator from the exploitation implied. 6 There seems to be an especially striking lack of awareness of colonial history in Norway – a country united with Denmark from 1380 to 1814. Although Copenhagen administered and profited most from triangular trade under the Danish-Norwegian flag, Norwegians were deeply involved in founding it and profited from it, and several Norwegians occupied high positions within the colonial administration. For historical overviews see Thorkild Hansen, Slavernes Skibe (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968), Coast of Slaves, tr. Kari Dako (Accra: SubSaharan Publishers, 2002), Islands of Slaves (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2005), and Maria Lavik, “Small Players in the Big Game – Norwegians and the Slave Trade” (master’s thesis. London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013).

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r­ eminiscent of the historical Sarah Baartman case, the princess travels to Europe with companions who do not have her best interests at heart, and is surrendered to the desire of European men. However, she is hardly the epitome of the colonial idea of savage sexuality, associated with black African women in the nineteenth century. She is not representative of an assumed primitive society, as she arrives in London or at the Parisian heart of European civilization. On the contrary, the fairy tale establishes Egypt as both the cradle and culmination of civilization, while Denmark is depicted as a dark, damp wilderness on the outskirts of a European continent that is in ruins. At first glance, “The Marsh King’s Daughter” does not resemble the story of Sarah Baartman, or indeed the stories of the numerous Africans who appeared in freak shows and/or were exploited by scientists in Europe throughout the nineteenth century.7 Yet, I will argue that the fairy tale invokes what Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting designates as the “Black Venus narrative.”8 My claim is that Andersen exploits the fairy-tale genre’s propensity to generate allegorical readings, and approaches the Black Venus concept, not through the Egyptian princess, but through the allegorical figure of his title character. In such an allegorical reading, the metaphorical interpretation does not simply replace the literal dimension of Andersen’s story, but also enables the two narratives to shed light on each other. Far from embodying the Black Venus concept, the Egyptian princess is an obedient Beauty of the Orient, who – like the protagonist in Mme de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1756) – is ready to sacrifice everything to save her father’s life. The king of Egypt is mortally ill, and can be restored to health by a moor–flower that is only found in Danish marshes. Instead of the flower, the princess encounters the Marsh King, but after a while the bud of a flower surfaces on the pond where he is keeping her prisoner. The bud contains a baby girl, Helga, the offspring of the Marsh King’s violation of the princess. Due  to  the striking differences between her parents, Helga’s character and appearance alter on a regular basis – she is a beautiful savage in the daytime and a  virtuous toad at night. She may be read as an allegorical ‘Black Venus’ – a creature balancing on what Sadiah Qureshi terms “the human/animal 7 According to Kara Reilly, the scientist Georges Cuvier, who dissected Baartman’s corpse in 1816, had 11,436 specimens in his possession by 1822, including “skeletons and skulls of all different ages and races.” The fact that many of Cuvier’s specimens were acquired during Napoleon’s exploration of Egypt may be brought to bear on the story about the Egyptian princess. (“Two Venuses: Historicizing the anatomical female body,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 19.4 [2014]): 115. 8 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, New York: Duke UP, 1999): 12.

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b­ oundary” – although a paradoxical one, since her beauty and soul come from Africa, and her bestial desires are her Nordic inheritance.9 The notion of Black Venus might seem counterintuitive in relation to a fairskinned child who passes for a local resident among Danish Vikings. Helga is certainly not black, and neither was Sarah Baartman, Zine Magubane suggests.10 Helga, however, embodies the problematic combination of an African woman of flesh and blood, and European masculine desire. Thus, when understood as a European fabrication brought to bear upon African women, she comes to embody the concept of Black Venus. But this allegorical ‘Black Venus’ is not intended to shed light on the life of Sarah Baartman who ventured from Cape Town to London in 1810, when Andersen was a five-year-old boy in Odense. Nor is she included to address the British or French colonial and postcolonial contexts in which Baartman’s life was entangled. Rather, the presence of Black Venus contributes to open the fairy tale towards the historical and political context of Danish colonialism. Scholars have commonly read “The Marsh King’s Daughter” in the light of Andersen’s oeuvre of fairy tales, and have highlighted themes related to religion and sexual anxiety.11 Such readings are quite legitimate, but this particular fairy tale contains traces of a different story – a story perhaps too close to home at the time of its publication, and, for modern readers, blurred by the distance of one-and-a-half centuries. I argue that the struggle of Andersen’s mixed-race heroine to reconcile what was negated in the pond of her origin – to create a harmonic relation between sexuality and love – may be read in the light of Denmark and Norway’s history as colonial powers with operations on the African west coast of Guinea (today part of Ghana), the costal colony Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) in India, and the Caribbean islands St. Thomas, St. Jan and St. Croix, i.e. the Danish Virgin Islands, or Danish West Indies. More precisely, I attempt to trace the resonance

9 10

11

Sadiah Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” History of Science 42.2 (2004): 238. Magubane refers to travelers who “made much of the fact that the Khoikhoi were not Black or brown but yellow or tawny and thus differed in important respects from Africans living further North, as well as those on the West Coast” (“Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15.6 [2001]): 822. See Helge Topsøe-Jensen, “Dynd-Kongens Datter,” in Buket til Andersen: Bemærkninger til femogtyve Eventyr (Copenhagen: Gad, 1971): 167; Jytte Grønholdt, “Med dæmonien som drivkraft. Analyse og fortolkning af H.C. Andersens eventyr,” Anderseniania (Odense: H.C. Andersens Hus, 1995): 80; and Aage Jørgensen, “‘What Would the Children Say…?’: ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Revisited,” in H.C. Andersen. Old Problems and New Readings, ed. Steven P. Sondrup (Odense: The H.C. Andersen Center, 2004): 242.

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of a question made urgent by Denmark’s reluctant abolition of slavery in 1848, in “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” published ten years after this event. The question concerns the aftermath of colonialism on Danish territory: what was to become of Denmark’s engagement in areas that were once the treasure troves of Copenhagen and, to a lesser extent, of Norwegian cities like Bergen. This question was both virtually and symbolically epitomised by the often ambiguous status of persons of mixed race, many of whom were the offspring of colonial sexual violence. In a manner typical of Andersen’s oeuvre, “The Marsh King’s Daughter” subtly puts this context into play in a story of women and children – in this case the women and children marked by colonialism. 2

The Mulatto in Relation to “The Marsh King’s Daughter”

The colonial context is a backdrop not previously discussed in critical approaches to “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” but it is in the forefront of discussions of Andersen’s 1840 play The Mulatto. An examination of the ways in which themes, motifs and poetic imagery from The Mulatto reappear in “The Marsh King’s Daughter” reveals that the latter is a descendant of, a refined successor of, or even a confrontation with the former. The similarities between the two texts highlight the colonial theme in “The Marsh King’s Daughter” and put the invocation of the ‘Black Venus’ in perspective, while some of the differences between the two reflect historical change. Before proceeding, I consider The Mulatto briefly, since it is the literary work in which Andersen focuses most explicitly on colonialism. In a sense, The Mulatto anticipated the abolition of slavery on Danish territory while “The Marsh King’s Daughter” reviewed aspects of it. Jens Andersen states that The Mulatto claimed a spot in history since the king of Denmark died at what was supposed to be its opening night, on 3 December, 1839. Two months later, “The Royal Theatre [was brought] back to life with The Mulatto, and, before a large and expectant audience, it marked the beginning of a new royal reign.”12 The new king, Christian viii, to whom the semi-abolitionist play was dedicated, declared in 1847 that he would grant the slaves on the Danish Virgin Islands freedom in another twelve years. Denmark’s slaves, however, won their immediate freedom through a non-violent rebellion in 1848, ten years prior to the publication of “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” 12

“Det Kongelige Teater [bragtes] til live igen med Mulatten, der for en fyldt og forventningsfuld teatersal markerede begyndelsen på en ny kongelig regeringsperiode” (Jens Andersen, Andersen. En biografi [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003], vol. 1: 436).

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The Mulatto is Andersen’s adaption for the theatre of Mme Reybaud’s short story “Les Épaves” (1838), and both stories are set on the Caribbean island of Martinique under French colonial rule. The title character is a free man of colour who, in the course of the plot, is subdued by a jealous white planter and put up for sale at the slave market in accordance with a scheme that he would be flogged to death. The protagonist is saved at the eleventh hour by the female protagonist’s proposal to marry him in order to gain his freedom in accordance with the law. So far, the plot summary applies to both the short story and the play, but Andersen took certain liberties when he rewrote “Les Épaves,” and these liberties seem to anticipate “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” In an essay on folklore, Alan Dundes points out that scholars do well to identify similarities between stories, but further interpretation depends on the delineation of differences: “The first task in studying an item is to show how it is like previously reported items, whereas the second is to show how it differs from previously reported items – and, hopefully, why it differs.”13 These questions of difference are crucial for understanding “The Marsh King’s Daughter” in relation to The Mulatto, as well as for understanding the latter in relation to “Les Épaves,” given that Andersen might have recycled aesthetics and plot elements half-consciously, but would make changes to them for a reason. Mme Reybaud’s “Les Épaves” reveals the protagonist’s family history – the son of a white planter and an Amerindian slave girl – but the Amerindian is nowhere to be found in The Mulatto; Andersen rather presents his title character as the son of a planter and an African princess. This adjustment tightens the relationship to “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” since the princess was abducted by slave traders while taking a bath in a scene akin to the capture of the Egyptian princess by the Marsh King.14 The Egyptian princess in the latter is vulnerable due to the loss of her magic swanskin, while her predecessor, the African princess, leaves a grieving swan behind on an African beach. Bo Grønbech considers the account of the African princess a digression, and deems it “[l]ess fortunate” since it does not contribute to the advancement of the plot.15

13 14

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Alan Dundes, “The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation,” The Meaning of Folklore. The Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes ed. Simon J. Bronner (Logan: Utah UP, 2007): 70. Andersen’s replacement of the Amerindian may have served to adjust the plot to the reality of the Danish West Indies, even though he recycled the name Martinique for his setting. The indigenous Carib population is still present on Martinique, but was chased from St. Thomas, St. Jan and St. Croix in the course of the sixteenth century. “Mindre vellykket” (Bo Grønbech, “Om ‘Mulatten’ og dens franske forlæg,” Anderseniania [Odense: H.C. Andersens Hus, 1978–79]: 50).

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However, the supposed digression serves to emphasise the theme of the transatlantic slave trade – a theme of some urgency in Copenhagen in 1840.16 There are several references to swans, both in The Mulatto and “The Marsh King’s Daughter” – the latter being inspired by the tradition of swan–maiden folklore. Among the many symbolic implications of swans, Hans Biedermann (1993) mentions the dichotomy between black and white, by drawing on Franz Unterkircher’s claim: “In contrast to its snow-white plumage, the swan has quite black flesh.”17 Unterkircher relates this duality to hypocrisy, but it could easily be related to the Egyptian princess who looks white but is associated with blackness through her intertextual kinship with the so-called “negro– princess” in The Mulatto. The swan is one among many symbolic features that is related to the colonial theme in The Mulatto, and many of these symbols reappear with a twist in “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” Their presence in The Mulatto prompts Bo Grønbech to complain that Andersen’s imagery “is derived from every corner of the world,” but the imagery seems less arbitrary when the two texts are read together.18 Grønbech’s main example is the planter’s wife Eleonore’s erotic dream of being old and lonely like a “mummy in the Pyramid of Egypt,” where the attractive mulatto in the form of a sphinx brings her back to life.19 This dream, however, clearly corresponds to the dream recounted by the Egyptian princess in “The Marsh King’s Daughter”:

16

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18 19

The historian Hugh Thomas estimates that Denmark–Norway transported around 50 000 from Africa to America over approximately two hundred years (The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 [London: Phoenix, 2006]: 805). Per O. Hernæs claims the correct number is somewhere between 80 000 and 94 000 Africans, but both assert that a precise number is hard to determine (The Danish Slave Trade from West Africa and Afro-Danish Relations on the 18th-Century Gold Coast [PhD diss., University of Trondheim, 1992]: 79). In 1803 Denmark–Norway officially effected a ban on the slave trade (though not against slavery). Thorkild Hansen claims that the administration in Danish Guinea ignored the ban, and kept on trading in slaves into the 1820s (Hansen, Coast of Slaves, 161, 170, 177). Administrators who wanted to enforce the ban were ill equipped with the means to do so, and “till the beginning of the 1830s […] export of slaves took place practically unhindered in most of the Danish areas” (Coast of Slaves, 198). “Im Gegensatz zu seinem schnee-weißen Gefieder hat der Schwan ganz schwarzes Fleisch” (Franz Unterkircher, Tiere, Glaube, Aberglaube: Die schöensten Miniaturen aus dem Bestiarium [Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1986]: 44). As Unterkircher’s claim  does not refer to an actual fact, it might serve as an analogy to the way Sarah Baartman is often referred to as black, while her skin colour is likely to have been rather fair. “er hentet fra alle verdens hjørner” (Grønbech, “Om ‘Mulatten’ og dens franske forlæg,” 55). “Mumie i Ægyptens Pyramide” (Jens Andersen, Andersen. En biografi, vol. 1: 310).

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Then I sank down through the wavering ground […] and dreams hovered round me. It seemed to me as if I were again in the pyramids of Egypt […] and forth stepped the thousand years’ old king, the mummy form, black as pitch, black as the shining wood–snail, or the slimy mud of the swamp.20 The striking blackness of the sexually aggressive Marsh King in this quotation is probably more metaphoric than an actual reference to skin colour. In either case, the link between blackness and deviant sexuality is embedded in a creature that belongs to the Nordic folklore – the Nordic semi-unconscious, so to speak.21 The Egyptian princess is not initially burdened with the combination of blackness and hyper-sexuality, but is literally dragged down into it on her arrival in Denmark – an event with allegorical implications. In these dreams, the Egyptian princess and The Mulatto’s title character are both associated with light rather than darkness, but the latter is elsewhere described as a combination of the two: On the turf of the marsh, the hot sun–kiss is given, And white and pure the lily springs forth and thrives. As it drank flesh into its leaf, it was given scent and colour from the sunlight.22 The lily is a metaphor for the biracial protagonist, so the allegory might mean that he has received some physical features from his African mother, but his light complexion, good manners and charm stem from his father. The allegory makes all the more sense, however, read in relation to Helga’s origin in “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” Indeed, the water lily’s Danish name is marsh–king’s 20 21

22

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” in The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, tr. Lily Owens (New York: Avenel, 1981): 324. Johan de Mylius comments on the alignment between the Marsh King and the old Egyptian kings represented by the mummy in the princess’ dream. He considers the Marsh King “a demonised version of her own father, for whose revival she will be sacrificed” (Forvandlingens pris. H.C. Andersen og hans eventyr [Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 2004]: 350). This alignment underscores the princess’ kinship to Mme de Beaumont’s Beauty, surrendered to what Maria Tatar labels “patriarchal norms,” in the form of an agreement between her father and the Beast (The Classic Fairy Tales [London & New York: Norton, 1999]: 27). “Paa Sumpens Dynd det hede Solkys gives, /Og hvid og reen groer Lilien frem og trives. Da ædle Dele inddrak den i Bladet, Den Duft og Farve fik ved Straalebadet” (Hans Christian Andersen, Mulatten. H.C. Andersens samlede værker, bind 11 [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005]: 309).

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rose (nøkkerose). Baby Helga is initially referred to as a lotus flower, and the Egyptian lotus was considered a member of the water lily family until it was reclassified to a different family of plants in 2015.23 In other words, Helga is the lily whose personal characteristics depend upon her mixed-race origin, but in her case the European father contributes with flesh while the African mother grants charm and virtue. One could go on exploring parallels between the play and the fairy tale, including the invocation of the biblical Moses and the presence of storks and ­lotus flowers, to which I will return. However, the foregoing is sufficient to demonstrate that Andersen’s inventions when rewriting “Les Épaves” foreshadow “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” and invoke the historical context of slavery, which was extant in Danish and French colonies when The Mulatto made its author’s fortune. The invocation of the historical context has been noted by Jens Andersen: “Andersen’s dramatization adds to the French short story a significant and original dimension, in the play’s bold focus on the question of slavery.”24 However, one could question the boldness of this focus in The Mulatto. The title character is a free man of colour, and thus belongs to a group that acquired citizen status and civil rights equal to whites in Danish West Indies in 1834.25 He is pictured as a noble native, pitted against the “brute” – a mixed-race runaway slave. The runaway constantly fantasizes about his revenge on the planters and his lust for white women. Both men are oversexualized, but the runaway is the only male equivalent of the European phantasm of Black Venus – brute, base, and in a perpetual state of arousal. Although the story of the African princess supports abolition to some extent, The Mulatto is more about rescuing the one noble, almost white protag­ onist than abolishing slavery. The runaway slave’s character could arguably confirm Elisabeth Oxfeldt’s claim that Andersen’s texts are interwoven with imperialism.26 However, reading “The Marsh King’s Daughter” as an extension of The Mulatto may augment such a conclusion.

23 24 25 26

Cf. Dag Inge Danielsen, “Lotusblomsten er ikke lenger nøkkerose,” Forskning.no https:// forskning.no/botanikk/lotusblomsten-er-ikke-lenger-nokkerose/478489 (14 August 2015): n. pag. (accessed 16 February 2016). “Andersens dramatisering tilførte den franske novelle en væsentlig og original dimension i skuespillets dristige fokusering på slavespørsmålet” (Jens Andersen, Andersen. En biografi, vol. 1: 438). Jens Vibæk, Vore Gamle Tropekolonier (Copenhagen: Fremad, 1966), vol. 2: 270. Oxfeldt, “Discovering His Inner Turk: Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic,” 12.

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Past and Present in “The Marsh King’s Daughter”

Read in conjunction with The Mulatto, the beginning of “The Marsh King’s Daughter” introduces a shift of perspective, similar to what Joseph Conrad’s protagonist, Marlow, will later effect by famously interrupting the narrator’s praise of London with the words: “And this also […] has been one of the dark places of the earth.”27 Marlow’s interruption in Heart of Darkness invokes the wilderness of a Britain conquered by the Roman Empire. Andersen presents an equally dark, damp, uncultivated and peripheral Denmark, but not a conquered one. On the contrary – Danish Vikings are on their way home from a successful raid on the coast of Gaul (today’s France and Belgium), bringing slaves with them. Furthermore, Marlow points out the differences between the past and present Britain, while Andersen’s narrator emphasises continuity: Yes, in the particulars you see now what you might have seen then […] the fly still wears a gauzy dress of the same cut, the favourite colours of the stork are white, with black and red for stockings, the people’s outfits were certainly different in those days, but any of them, be they slaves or hunters, anyone who ventured on to the marshes, met with the same fate a thousand years ago as they would now – they stumbled in, and sank down to the Marsh King […]. Very little is known of the Marsh King’s rule, but that is perhaps for the best.28 This passage from the introduction prepares the reader for an allegorical displacement of meaning from the Middle Ages of the plot to the nineteenth century of Andersen and his contemporary readers. In a way not entirely foreign to the genre, the fairy tale’s implicit ‘once upon a time’ serves both as a setting of the actual scene and a pretext for addressing contemporary issues in a de-familiarised mode. Like Conrad’s River Thames, the Danish marshes seem to contain a millennium of time, and if time appears to stand still as Marlow 27 28

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 2007): 5. “Ja, i det Enkelte saae man den gang her, hvad man endnu seer […] Fluen bar sin Flors­ klædning med samme Snit som nu, Storkens Liv-Couleur var Hvidt med Sort og røde Strømper, derimod havde Menneskene paa den Tid et andet Kjolesnit end nu til Dags, men hver av dem, Træl eller Jæger, hvemsomhelst, der traadte ud på Hængedyndet, gik det for tusinde Aar siden som det endnu gaaer dem, der komme her, de plumpede i, og sank ned til Dyndkongen […]. Meget lidt veed man om hans Regjering, men det er maaskee det Bedste” (Andersen, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” 235). All of my translations from “The Marsh King’s Daughter” are indebted to Lily Owens’ translation from 1981, in which the text is slightly simplified.

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and the crew await the tide to set the water in motion, it is all the more static and confined within Andersen’s damp marshes. Marina Warner points out that “[…] one of the things that fairy tale promises is an unbroken link with the past,” but in “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” this promise appears to be a warning that little has changed.29 The narrator’s introduction invites a reading that compares the plot to contemporary affairs concerning “slaves or hunters” of the 1850s, and the narrator underscores how the king’s rule remains unchanged. In reality, Frederik vii was in office – the king who officially bestowed on the former slaves of Danish West Indies the freedom they had already forced through an uproar months earlier in 1848. According to Thorkild Hansen, however, the abolition of slavery hardly brought about improved living conditions for black people in Danish West Indies during Frederik vii’s rule.30 Little of this was common knowledge in Denmark at the time, and that was “perhaps for the best” for those in power. As a matter of fact, Andersen might have been better informed on the subject of colonialism than the average Dane. According to Frederick J. Marker, he prided himself on having “swallowed all the available books on Africa and America” when working on The Mulatto.31 When writing “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” he resumed his studies, and “read a couple of contemporary travelogues from Africa.”32 For instance, he might have read his compatriot Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer’s account of Danish Guinea, published in 1760. Rømer reports that African women with small children were sold to buyers of different nationalities: “Then I have seen most of the French take the child from the mother’s back and throw it onto the beach.”33 Rømer assures the reader that Danish officials collected the babies and distributed them among the company’s slaves, but mentions “other places” where he had seen such babies abandoned “until, at night, a wolf may have dragged them off.”34 Andersen reminds the reader of “The Marsh King’s Daughter” that wolves still inhabited Danish marshes at the time of Helga’s birth. However, she does not become their prey because an enterprising stork picks her up from the pond and relocates her to a Viking family. She grows up hunting for the storks 29 Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time (New York: Oxford UP, 2014): 53. 30 Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 434. 31 Frederick J. Marker, Hans Christian Andersen and the Romantic Theatre (Toronto & Buffalo: Toronto UP, 1971): 49. 32 “læste et Par Nutids Reise-Skildringer fra Afrika” (Andersen in Topsøe-Jensen, “Dynd-­ Kongens Datter,” 155). 33 Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea, tr. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (New York: Oxford UP, 2000): 182. 34 A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea, 182.

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that saved her, and schemes to torture a Christian priest her Viking stepfather has enslaved. But when night comes and her disposition alters, she rescues the priest and rides off with him. He is a runaway slave and she the hunter, which harks back to the earlier cited introductory passage. The priest frees Helga from her toadskin and wild sexuality, and the two of them collect her mother, who flies with Helga to Egypt. In the folk tradition of swan–maiden fairy tales, the swan–maiden usually leaves her children behind when escaping from captivity.35 Andersen’s deviation from this convention, and his narrative focus on the daughter Helga – born from the violent meeting between the enslaved princess and the Marsh King – is closely linked to the fairy-tale’s theme of sexuality, violence, and love. 4

“Love Gives Birth to Life”: Love and Reproduction

Helge Topsøe-Jensen observes that “The Marsh King’s Daughter” is constructed over certain binaries such as the North versus the South and spirit versus matter.36 The character Helga embodies these contrasts without being able to reconcile them – she is “Beauty and the Beast combined in one and the same person.”37 A similar point could be made about the Black Venus image, as it epitomised northern ideas about the south, and inspired both disgust and desire among Sarah Baartman’s contemporaries.38 Significantly, the most pressing division confronting Andersen’s allegorical ‘Black Venus’ is the one between sexuality and love – a division addressing all the antithetic binaries of the story. While Baartman was renowned for her sexualised body, but never seen as a person with feelings, as Natasha Gordon-Chipembere puts it,39 Helga’s relation to sexuality and love is up for negotiation. According to the wise men of Egypt, a successful reconciliation between sexuality and love is key to the Egyptian princess’ return, the king’s revival, and the bright future of the country. “Love gives birth to life! The highest love gives birth to the highest life!” the wise men keep repeating.40 They distinguish between different kinds of love, and mention the one “between the light and 35 36 37 38 39 40

Cf. Barbara Fass Leavy, In Search of the Swan Maiden. A Narrative on Folklore and Gender (New York & London: New York UP, 1994): 2. Topsøe-Jensen, “Dynd-Kongens Datter,” 159. “Dejligheden og Uhyret i samme Person” (“Dynd-Kongens Datter,” 59). Cf. Kara Reilly, “Two Venuses: Historicizing the Anatomical Female Body,” 216. Gordon-Chipembere, “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp,” 8. “Kjærlighed føder Liv! den høieste Kjærlighed føder det høieste Liv!” (Andersen, “DyndKongens Datter,” 245).

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the plants, and how the sunbeam kisses the marshes so that the germ springs forth.”41 The passage recalls the allegory of mixed-race reproduction in The Mulatto, and the meeting between the Egyptian princess and the Marsh King. The latter, however, is not a matter of love – Helga’s life is the outcome of violation. Niels Kofoed considers the wise men’s words to be the central insight of the fairy tale. He finds they “make perfect sense […] as the princess of Egypt is the warm sunbeam that descended to the Marsh King, and from their meeting, the flower [Helga] sprang forth,” ignoring the fact that the princess did not freely plunge, but was dragged down into the pond.42 However, since the Egyptian princess is the intertextual sister of the enslaved African princess in The Mulatto, the Marsh King’s violation could be associated with love by way of historical detail. An earlier claim that people were marked by slavery not only evokes a metaphorical meaning, but also refers to a sobering fact. According to Leif Svalesen, slaves in Danish Guinea were branded: “The Guinea Company marks its slaves on the front of the right thigh. The Company’s mark consists of an ‘S’ inscribed in a heart.”43 As the act of enslavement was sealed by pressing the symbol of love – the heart – onto the captive bodies, the symbol takes on an ironic meaning. With regard to the capture of the two princesses, one could note that the transport of female slaves was encouraged by the state during the last ten years of legal Danish-Norwegian slave trade – between 1792 and 1803 – in the form of tax relief. The purpose was to increase the number of births among slaves in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, in order to make ‘the stock’ selfreproducing, and render overseas slave trade superfluous.44 The official state approach to this matter suggests the enslaved women were chiefly considered sexual creatures, likened to breeding animals, so the question of their love was hardly on the agenda. Brought across the Atlantic Ocean only a decade before Baartman arrived in Europe, these women were reduced to their sexuality in ways that touch upon aspects of the Black Venus phantasm. 41

“mellem Lyset og Væxterne, hvorledes Solstraalen kyssede Dyndet, og at Spiren derved kom frem” (“Dynd-Kongens Datter,” 246). 42 “giver også god mening […] idet den varme solstråle er Ægyptens prinsesse, der steg ned til dyndkongen, og af deres møde sprang den blomst ud” (Niels Kofoed, “‘Dynd-Kongens Datter’ (1858) og ægyptianismen,” in H.C. Andersen. Modernitet & Modernisme, ed. Aage Jørgensen & Henk van der Liet [Amsterdam: Scandinavisch Instituut, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2006]: 170). 43 Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship Fredensborg, tr. Pat Shaw & Selena Winsnes (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000): 99. 44 Vibæk, Vore Gamle Tropekolonier. Bind 2, 180.

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The historical practice of separating colonial women’s sexuality from love and other aspects of humanity haunts the outskirts of the fairy-tale’s imaginary, and raises the stakes in Helga’s mission to unite sexuality with love. The question remains whether she succeeds, and readers do not agree upon one answer. Klaus P. Mortensen finds an affirmative answer in the turn of events when, during her wedding, Helga disappears into heaven and escapes sexuality altogether.45 As she returns from her peek into heaven, centuries have passed on earth and her life is over. Arne Duve, however, does not share Mortensen’s enthusiasm – he regrets that Helga’s “earthly love” has gone to waste.46 Helga’s own reaction to the unexpected time-lapse is hardly as enthusiastic as Mortensen’s: “Helga understood it all now, and sank on her knees. […] The body crumbled into dust, and a faded lotus-flower lay on the spot on which Helga had stood.”47 Kofoed accounts for the complex signification of the lotus flower in the fairy tale, with reference to Egyptian mythology, and notes that it “is even shaped like the female genitals.”48 According to Barbara G. Walker, the lotus is “Asia’s primary symbol of the yoni (vulva),” that is, of the visible parts of the female genitals.49 As such, the faded lotus represents Helga’s body and sexuality separated from the “ray of brightness” into which her soul turns, but it is also the concrete visualization of her dead genitals, upon which the wise men’s doctrine of love giving birth to life seemed to depend.50 Regardless of Helga’s possible disappointment, the agony of a fictitious character is obviously incommensurable with the violent experiences of a real person. However, the ending of the fairy tale, in which Helga’s earthly remains shrink into the image of her genitals, echoes an aspect of Baartman’s afterlife. Baartman’s genitals seem to have acquired a special position among her remains due to the notion of the so-called “Hottentot apron,” a supposedly  hypertrophied labia – which Natasha Gordon-Chipembere considers a 45 46 47 48

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Klaus P. Mortensen. Svanen og Skyggen – historien om unge Andersen (Copenhagen: Gad, 1989): 179. “jordiske kjærlighet” (Arne Duve, Symbolikken i H.C. Andersens eventyr [Oslo: Psychopress, 1967]: 266). Andersen, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” 331. “Den har tillige form af det kvindelige skød” (Kofoed, “‘Dynd-Kongens Datter’ (1858) og ægyptianismen,” 168). Kofoed particularly emphasizes that the lotus flower signifies a unity of spirit and matter, but does not relate this point to the rather sad fadedness of Helga’s flower by the end of the story. The fact that the flower is faded or dead (henvisnet) might call into question readings in which Helga achieves or becomes the perfect reconciliation of opposites. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Fransisco: Harper, 1983): 549. Jens Andersen, Andersen. En biografi. Bind 1, 331.

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“European historical fabrication.”51 The “apron” is also known as “the ‘tablier égyptien,’”52 and, according to Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911, a theory had been advanced that the Khoikhoi, Baartman’s own people, descended from the Egyptians of the early dynasties.53 Such speculations obviously do not relate the historical Baartman to Andersen’s Egyptian princesses, but they might indicate that Helga is related to the idea of Baartman. Helga’s end suggests that she is not able to reconcile love and sexuality – neither for herself, nor on behalf of Baartman or any other woman entangled in colonial history. Even if her spirit is elevated, the dead flower and her legend, as conveyed by the portrait on the marble wall, indicate alienation. However, the fairy tale goes on for yet another paragraph that puts this ending up for debate. 5

“What Will the Children Say of It?”

The conclusion to “The Marsh King’s Daughter” deviates from the conventional harmonic fairy-tale-endings, epitomized in the phrase ‘happily ever after,’ and leaves the story open. The deviation is underscored by the storks’ final comments: “‘Now that is a new ending to the story!’ stork father said; ‘I did not expect it at all!’”54 The storks are entrusted with the very last words in the text, addressing Helga’s end: “‘What would the children say of it?’ stork mother asked. ‘Yes, that is after all the most important thing!’ stork father said.”55 51

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Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp,” 8. Sander L. Gilman (1985) and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (1999) both ascribe the overexposure of Baartman’s genitals to a certain nineteenth-century scientific community, the museums’ exhibiting Baartman’s remains (Musée d’Histoire Naturelle and Musée de l’Homme in Paris), and the general “nineteenth-century observer” (Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology. Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness [Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1985]: 88). However, Zine Magubane turns the tables with her critique of the “theoretical industry” that has, “following Gilman’s theoretical lead, focused obsessively on Baartman’s body and its difference” (Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” 817). Karlien van der Schyff, “Staging the Body of the (M)other: The ‘Hottentot Venus’ and the ‘Wild Dancing Bushman,’” in Representations and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 160. Encyclopedia Britannica. Eleventh Edition, vol. 04 (Cambridge UP, 1911): 837. “‘Det var da en ny Slutning paa Historien!’ sagde Storkefader; ‘den havde jeg nu slet ikke ventet!’” (Andersen, “Dynd-Kongens Datter,” 274). “‘Hvad mon Ungerne ville sige om den?’ spurgte Storkemoder. ‘Ja, det er rigtignok det Vigtigste!’ sagde Storkefader.” (“Dynd-Kongens Datter,” 275).

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In line with Aage Jørgensen’s claim that the storks embody the prosaic Victorian bourgeoisie,56 the last comments might reveal their moral anxiety faced with the concluding image of Helga’s genitals in the form of a flower. As such, they may be compared to well-meaning British abolitionists’ critique of “the indecent nature of the exhibition” of Baartman.57 However, there is an obvious ironic quality to the last paragraph, as the storks’ excessive concern for the children seems out of place, and rather serves to remind the reader that Helga’s story is not chiefly a nursery tale, but addresses the adult, aware reader. At the same time, one might take the storks’ concern at face value, relating it to people born in the post-slavery era – the ‘children of colonialism.’ As in The Mulatto, persons of mixed race, in particular, are implied when “The Marsh King’s Daughter” touches upon the question of how to deal with a history of colonial violence – especially sexual violence – since Helga is unable to heal the wound of her origin and unite sexuality and love. One could keep in mind the special position of children in the context of Danish abolitionism. When Christian viii promised the slaves in Danish West Indies freedom in twelve years, he granted their unborn children unconditional freedom: “Nobody will be able to say that there are still slaves born in our kingdom, even though we must tolerate that some of these still live there.”58 In the overseas colonies, Governor General von Scholten made the establishment of schools for slave children his central concern.59 Thorkild Hansen states: “Peter von Scholten and Anna Heegaard had never had children together, or rather, their children sat all here [in the schools for the slaves’ children], their and Denmark’s adopted children.”60 The comparison between enslavement and adoption is problematic for obvious reasons, but the quotation nonetheless suggests that the status of slave children was an important issue in relation 56 57

Jørgensen, “‘What Would the Children Say…?’: ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Revisited,” 252. Yvette Abrahams, “Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early ­Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Nation, Empire, Colony. Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson & Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998): 221. 58 Christian viii in Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 355. Further page references are in the main text. Thorkild Hansen speculates that the king’s emancipation of babies might have been to the children’s disadvantage since they no longer would be the responsibility of their parents’ owners (Islands of Slaves, 355). However, adult slaves freed themselves through a rebellion shortly after the emancipation of their unborn children. 59 Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 347. Hansen mentions fairy tales by H.C. Andersen as part of the curriculum in Scholten’s schools (Islands of Slaves, 440). 60 Islands of Slaves, 349. Anna Heegaard was the Governor General’s coloured common-law wife, to whom he is supposed to have promised to emancipate the slaves in Danish West Indies (Islands of Slaves, 310–11).

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to Danish abolitionism. I will follow the storks’ lead and look at the fairy tale ending with post-slavery generations in mind. 6

Helga and Moses: Bringing Back the Slaves

The fairy-tale’s storks have not only guarded the taboo on sexuality – a task commented on by stork father – they have guarded Helga’s story and passed it on through the generations. Their repertoire includes the famous story of the Biblical Moses, but the story of the Marsh King’s daughter “is still unknown, perhaps because it is almost from this country.”61 The narrator’s explanation hints at a preference for the exotic in nineteenth-century literature, but it can also be understood in the light of the fairy tale’s insistence upon the tyranny, unbridled sexuality and slave economy of Nordic authorities, as opposed to reserving such features for Oriental rulers.62 If so, it seems fitting that the fairy tale presents itself as being tucked away among the storks – the guardians of taboos. William Michelsen dismisses the reference to Moses in the beginning of the fairy tale, claiming that the differences between Moses and Helga are far more striking than their similarities,63 while Ebba Kathrine Larsen regards Moses’ story as paradigmatic for “The Marsh King’s Daughter.”64 Larsen refers to the supposed Christian values of the narrator, but I would argue that the reference to Moses is crucial if one is to understand Helga’s main project. The narrator’s paraphrase of the biblical ‘fairy tale’ obviously foreshadows the course of events in Helga’s life: “Moses, who was launched by his mother on the banks of the Nile, found by the king’s daughter, given a good education, and became a great man, who was later buried in an unknown place. It is quite

61 62

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“kjendes endnu ikke, maaskee fordi det er næsten indenlandsk.” (Andersen, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” 234). Marina Warner discusses how the introduction of the Arabian Nights to a European audience by the beginning of the eighteenth century brought about a boom of ‘orientalised’ stories and fairy tales, as well as “a stratagem of disavowal, by projecting magic, lust and cruelty as unknown, foreign and inimical” (Stranger Magic. Charmed States and the Arabian Nights [Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2011]: 26). William Michelsen, “Dynd-Kongens Datter – en førkristen myte om menneskenaturen,” in Gullalderstudier. Festskrift til Gusav Albeck, ed. Henning Høirup, Aage Jørgensen & Peter Skautrup (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1966): 176. Ebba Kathrine Larsen, “Mor/datter-forholdet som bærer av epifani: en komparativ analyse av eventyret “Dynd-Kongens Datter” av H.C. Andersen og romanen Dykungens dotter av Birgitta Trotzig” (master’s thesis, University of Bergen, 2006): 44.

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familiar!”65 Like Moses, baby Helga was abandoned by her mother and left floating upon the water on leaves. She was brought up by a good stepmother and, on her wedding day, disappeared, no one knows where. Like Moses, who was granted a glance at the Land of the Covenant, she peeked into Paradise. Perhaps, like Moses, she would never be allowed to enter the place. But the reason why Moses “became a great man” was because of his endeavours to free his people from enslavement in Egypt, and lead them to the Land of the Covenant. This feat has no adequate counterpart in Helga’s story, although her endeavours to free the enslaved priest from the Vikings and her mother from the Marsh King are reminiscent of Moses’ mission. With the stork’s help, Helga and her mother fly to Egypt – a land almost likened to Paradise by the stork children who “thought that their eyes deceived them, that is how marvellous they found it all.”66 Egypt is in and of itself an ambivalent signifier in this context. By the 1850s it was a regional super-power in the making, with colonial ambitions of its own with regard to its southern neighbours. While part of Africa, although culturally associated with the so-called Orient, Egypt aspired to be a modern country, about to launch the major project of constructing the Suez Canal. With regard to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, Elisabeth Oxfeldt notes: “Of the Oriental displays, Egypt’s was clearly the most disturbing as it blurred the boundaries between Oriental and European, ancient and modern.”67 On the one hand, the Egypt of “The Marsh King’s Daughter” is responsible for enslaving the Hebrews, and, on the other, it is the princesses’ Promised Land. Like Helga, Egypt is a kind of hybrid – a place where opposites reside. Neither the fairy tale’s Egypt nor the real one of the 1850s was a peripheral colony under European administration.68 Stork mother, however, warns the children against venturing further to the South, where jungle, desert and wild animals await them. Not only is Egypt the best place to stay, in her opinion, it also marks the border between civilization and wilderness. 65 66 67 68

“det om Moses, der af sin Moder blev sat du i Nilens Vande, funden af Kongens Datter, fik en god Opdragelse og blev en stor Mand, som man siden ikke veed om, hvor han blev begravet. Det er ganske almindeligt!” (Andersen, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” 234). “troede, at det var Oienfoblindelse, saa mageløst fandt de det Hele” (Andersen, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” 243). Oxfeldt, “Discovering His Inner Turk. Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic,” 114. The fact that Denmark no sooner than the 1840s was exempted from a hundred-year-old tax dues to the sultan of Morocco to prevent him from raiding Danish ships and enslaving the crew might serve to illustrate a difference between northern Africa and the Gold Coast, on which Danish Guinea was situated (Hansen, Coast of Slaves, 252).

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It is clear, however, that the health and prosperity of the fairy-tale king and the Egyptian nation cannot be taken for granted: they depend upon the princess’ return with Helga, and the proper employment of the latter’s sexuality in marriage. Such a scenario would secure the triumph of the wise men’s doctrine of love giving birth to life and, consequently, mend the damage done in the Marsh King’s pond. At this point, a quick look at historical events external to the fairy tale, concerning the afterlife of Sarah Baartman, is useful. Kari Jegerstedt reflects upon the urgency with which Nelson Mandela requested that Baartman’s remains be sent from Paris to the newly-established post-apartheid South Africa, and refers to the way “[w]oman as a figure plays a decisive role in the transition from one discursive system to another.”69 According to Karlien van der Schyff, the legend of Baartman was granted symbolic signification in the context of South Africa’s transition away from the apartheid regime, as the repatriation campaigns casted Baartman as “a national figure of healing and homecoming, […] the post-apartheid ‘National Mother.’”70 Helga is greeted in Egypt as a national figure of healing and homecoming, but escapes or misses out – depending on the reader’s point of view – on the opportunity to consolidate this position. She is by no means the mother of a nation or the founder of a new Land of the Covenant in which the former slaves can start a new life. Her body turns to dust, except for the faded ­flower– genitals. Unlike Moses and Baartman, she receives no burial but leaves the story much like she entered it – split in two, between the dust and the light. She does not reconcile sexuality with love, but her story draws attention to the challenges of such a mission and, perhaps, to the importance of thinking it through. Read in relation to Denmark’s and former Denmark–Norway’s colonial history, Helga’s project takes on urgency, addressing a rupture still open in 1858. The project concerns the aftermath of colonialism in the areas Denmark, according to Hansen,71 exploited, corrupted and then abandoned when they were no longer considered profitable.72 In a narrower sense, it addresses the 69

“Kvinna som figur spiller en avgjørende rolle i endringen fra et diskursivt system til et annet” (Kari Jegerstedt, “Hottentott Venus,” Vagant 2 [2011]: 103). Jegerstedt’s discussion of the South African scene draws on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s dictum “the figure of woman is pervasively instrumental in the shifting of the function of discursive systems” (Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 74). 70 Schyff, “Staging the Body of the (M)other: The ‘Hottentot Venus’ and the ‘Wild Dancing Bushman,’” 147. 71 Hansen, Coast of Slaves, 433–51, and Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 262. 72 Danish Trankebar on the Indian coast and Danish Guinea on the Gold Coast were sold to Britain in 1845 and 1850 respectively. In 1917, following decades of negotiations during which Denmark kept lowering the price, Danish West Indies were sold to the usa, in spite of protests from both the white minority and the black majority of inhabitants.

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history of colonial sexual violence in Denmark and its colonies, and the possibility for healing. Far from being merely ornamental to Andersen’s exploration of this theme, the fairy tale aesthetics has proved to be crucial, first and foremost in the form of the allegorical trope, and perhaps also through the inherent optimism of the genre – the anticipation of a just solution. Simultaneously, “The Marsh King’s Daughter” contains what Marina Warner calls the fairy tale genre’s promise of an unbroken link with the past, which in this particular fairy tale amounts to the threat that there may be no just settlement in relation to history. Works Cited Abrahams, Yvette. “Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Nation, Empire, Colony. Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson & Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998): 220–36. Andersen, Hans Christian. “Dynd-Kongens Datter,” in Samlede Eventyr og Historier. Bind 2 (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1964): 234–75. Andersen, Hans Christian. Mulatten. H.C. Andersens samlede værker, bind 11 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005). Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” in The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, trans. Lily Owens (New York: Avenel, 1981): 304–31. Andersen, Jens. Andersen. En biografi. Bind 1 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003). Biedermann, Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism. Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them, tr. James Hulbert (New York: Meredian, 1994). Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 2007). Danielsen, Dag Inge. “Lotusblomsten er ikke lenger nøkkerose,” Forskning.no https:// forskning.no/botanikk/lotusblomsten-er-ikke-lenger-nokkerose/478489 (14 August 2015): n. pag. (accessed 16 February 2016). Dundes, Alan. “The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation,” in The Meaning of Folklore. The Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Logan UT: Utah UP, 2007): 70–6. Duve, Arne. Symbolikken i H.C. Andersens eventyr (Oslo: Psychopress, 1967). Encyclopedia Britannica. Eleventh Edition, vol. 04 (Cambridge UP, 1911). Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology. Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1985). Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha. “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp,” in Representations and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah ­Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 1–14.

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Grønbech, Bo. “Om ‘Mulatten’ og dens franske forlæg,” Anderseniania (Odense: H.C. Andersens Hus, 1978–79): 43–60. Grønholdt, Jytte. “Med dæmonien som drivkraft. Analyse og fortolkning af H.C. Andersens eventyr,” Anderseniania (Odense: H.C. Andersens Hus, 1995): 71–93. Hansen, Thorkild. Coast of Slaves, tr. Kari Dako (Accra: Sub–Saharan Publishers, 2002). Hansen, Thorkild. Slavernes Skibe (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968). Hansen, Thorkild. Islands of Slaves (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2005). Hernæs, Per O. The Danish Slave Trade from West Africa and Afro-Danish Relations on the 18th-Century Gold Coast (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Trondheim, 1992). Jegerstedt, Kari. “Hottentott Venus,” Vagant 2 (2011): 103–04. Jørgensen, Aage. “‘What Would the Children Say…?’: ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Revisited,” in H.C. Andersen. Old Problems and New Readings, ed. Steven P. Sondrup (Odense: The H.C. Andersen Center, 2004): 235–58. Kofoed, Niels. “‘Dynd-Kongens Datter’ (1858) og ægyptianismen.” H.C. Andersen. Modernitet & Modernisme, eds. Aage Jørgensen & Henk van der Liet (Amsterdam: Scandinavisch Instituut, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2006): 153–72. Larsen, Ebba Kathrine. “Mor/datter-forholdet som bærer av epifani: en komparativ analyse av eventyret “Dynd-Kongens Datter” av H.C. Andersen og romanen Dykungens dotter av Birgitta Trotzig” (master’s thesis. University of Bergen, 2006). Lavik, Maria. “Small Players in the Big Game – Norwegians and the Slave Trade.” (master’s thesis. London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013). Leavy, Barbara Fass. In Search of the Swan Maiden. A Narrative on Folklore and Gender (New York & London: New York UP, 1994). Magubane, Zine. “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15.6 (2001): 816–34. Marker, Frederick J. Hans Christian Andersen and the Romantic Theatre (Toronto & Buffalo: Toronto UP, 1971). Michelsen, William. “Dynd-Kongens Datter – en førkristen myte om menneskenaturen,” in Gullalderstudier. Festskrift til Gusav Albeck, ed. Henning Høirup, Aage Jørgensen & Peter Skautrup (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1966): 155–79. Mortensen, Klaus P. Svanen og Skyggen – historien om unge Andersen (Copenhagen: Gad, 1989). Mylius, Johan de. Forvandlingens pris. H.C. Andersen og hans eventyr (Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 2004). Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. “Discovering His Inner Turk. Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic,” in Journeys from Scandinavia. Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840–2000 (Minneapolis & London: Minnesota UP, 2010): 6–30. Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Nordic Orientalism. Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800– 1900 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2005).

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Qureshi, Sadiah. “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” History of Science 42.2 (2004): 233–57. Reilly, Kara. “Two Venuses: Historicizing the Anatomical Female Body,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 19.4 (2014): 111–21. Rømer, Ludewig Ferdinand. A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea, trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (New York: Oxford UP, 2000). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham NC: Duke UP, 1999). Schyff, Karlien van der. “Staging the Body of the (M)other: The ‘Hottentot Venus’ and the ‘Wild Dancing Bushman,’” in Representations and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 147–63. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Dicipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003). Svalesen, Leif. The Slave Ship Fredensborg, tr. Pat Shaw & Selena Winsnes (Bloomington & Indianapolis IN: Indiana UP, 2000). Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales (London & New York: Norton, 1999). Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (London: Phoenix, 2006). Topsøe-Jensen, Helge. “Dynd-Kongens Datter,” in Buket til Andersen: Bemærkninger til femogtyve Eventyr (Copenhagen: Gad, 1971): 155–85. Unterkircher, Franz. Tiere, Glaube, Aberglaube: Die schöensten Miniaturen aus dem Bestiarium (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1986). Vibæk, Jens. Vore Gamle Tropekolonier. Bind 2 (Copenhagen: Fremad, 1966). Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1983). Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time. A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014). Warner, Marina. Stranger Magic. Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2011).

Chapter 4

The Finger That Mocks the World

Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby and Images of African American Womanhood Carmen Birkle Abstract Carmen Birkle addresses the representation of black womanhood, embodied in African American artist Kara Walker’s massive woman-sphinx sugarcoated sculpture, entitled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014). By drawing on parody and the African American concept of “signifyin(g)” – both of which imply repetition with a critical difference, though in slightly different ways – Birkle argues how history and the stereotypification of black female sexuality are brought together in the oversexualized Black Venus figure that parodies Jezebel and the related idea of promiscuity, but also symbolizes black women’s roles as Mammy and Aunt Jemima figures in the service of their white masters. With reference to African American musician Nicki Minaj’s wax figure at Madame Tussauds Las Vegas and her “Anaconda” rap video, the chapter explores how Sugar Baby and Minaj taunt white representations, stigmatization, and steretypification by way of seemingly adopting, yet critically inverting them, reclaiming their sexuality and right to self-representation in the process.

1

Introducing the White Gaze on Black Bodies

African American artist Kara Walker’s (*1969, Stockton, CA) massive white 2014 installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby1 at the old deserted Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, presents a paradoxical and highly evocative image of African American womanhood. Sugar Baby depicts a black woman who is crouched on the floor, lying on her arms and knees, with her breasts and buttocks exposed. In her aesthetic representation of black women’s history, Walker not only highlights a number of cultural phenomena associated with black America, such as the figures of Mammy and Aunt 1 I first encountered Sugar Baby through Ilka Saal’s paper given at the annual conference of the historians of the German Association for American Studies in 2015, entitled “Histories of American Foodways.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_005

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Kara Walker, *A Subtlety*, 2014. Photography by Jason Wyche. Courtesy Creative Time.

J­emima, the minstrel shows, the work of black slaves in sugar-cane fields in the Caribbean, and the nineteenth-century sideshows and freak and medicine shows, often staged in circuses or museums. Above all, she evokes the phenomenon of the sexualized, erotic, and exotic Venus Hottentot figure whose genitalia and buttocks were the main features of her body2 as represented in medical 2 See Stuart Hall, “Chapter 4: The Spectacle of the Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (1997. London: Sage, 2003): 265.

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literature as well as popular culture;3 with her aesthetics of exaggeration, she draws people’s attention to the ongoing colonial practice of voyeurism with regard to black women. Recently, at the Madame Tussauds wax museum in Las Vegas, the model of black U.S. rapper Nicki Minaj became a new attraction for visitors.4 Minaj’s wax figure reproduces a scene from her video “Anaconda” and is strikingly similar to Sugar Baby’s pose. Audience reactions shed light on the reception of such a provocative installation, which, like Walker’s Sugar Baby, becomes more than just an aesthetic object and expresses its own politics. Although the two exhibits share significant aesthetic features, they may have emerged from two different contexts: one is meta-critically commenting on history, the other is potentially buying into the most recent post-feminist craze, capitalizing on white people’s desire for a sexually thrilling experience with the black female Other. Both seem to contribute to the image of the black woman as a sexualized object, as Jezebel, exposed naked to the eyes of the world, and thereby deliberately confirm the stereotypes floating around in people’s minds. In the following, I argue that Walker’s installation includes allusions to blackface minstrelsy, the Mammy figure and Aunt Jemima, freak shows, Jezebel, and the rapper Minaj. These phenomena are not simply alluded to, but are criticized by Kara Walker, who offers her voyeuristic audience the spectacle of a black female body, which they observe in awe because of its sheer size as well as Walker’s audacity of openly displaying a black woman as sexual object. What is at stake here is the question of the white (and black) gaze on black bodies5 and scopophilia, as Sigmund Freud suggests, that is the pleasure of looking.6 White viewers seem to conceive of the black body as “the quintessential object of the ethnographic gaze, the ‘strange,’ exotic, and fascinating object of anthropology.”7 “The white gaze,” as George Yancy argues, “given the power 3 See Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999); Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-­ Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 204–38. ProQuest 2003 (accessed 29 August 2015). 4 I would like to thank Franziska Külbel for making me aware of the similarities between Sugar Baby and Nicki Minaj’s wax figure. 5 George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 6 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000): 37. 7 See Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race, xvi.

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of the ocular metaphor in Western culture, is an important site of power and control, a site that is structured by white epistemic orders and that perpetuates such orders in turn.”8 However, in the case of Walker’s installation and Minaj’s wax figure, the situation is more complex since they are both black artists exhibiting a black woman through a white-sugar sculpture and a wax figure of her own body, respectively. They both address a heterogeneous audience that includes black viewers. Walker and Minaj signify in their respective ways on the history of representation of black female bodies; their performances are what Linda Hutcheon calls parody and describes as “repetition with critical difference,”9 and what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., refers to as “Signifyin(g).”10 In The Signifying Monkey, Gates explores how African American artistic practices signify upon their own and white American traditions. For Gates, “Signifyin(g)” “is repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference. Whatever is black about black American literature is to be found in this identifiable black Signifyin(g) difference” (xxiv; emphasis in original). Consequently, Gates looks for this signal difference in the black vernacular. Linda Hutcheon considers parody a “conciliatory rhetorical strategy, building upon more than attacking its other, while still retaining its critical distance” (xiv). Instead of voicing an accusation of racism, Walker and Minaj use the aesthetics of such a “double-voiced discourse” (xiv). Parody, in Hutcheon’s sense, establishes a dialogue between the past and the present, or an “inter-art discourse” (2), and will “embody and bring to life actual historical tensions” (xii). It is the “tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference” (xii) that is at work in both works. Both “re-vision” the past in Adrienne Rich’s feminist understanding of the concept: “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.”11 This survival and self-­reflexivity mark the signal difference that becomes part of what Hutcheon calls the “pragmatic dimension” – the consideration of the aesthetic artworks’ contexts, including the perspectives of the producer and receiver at a time

8 9 10 11

Black Bodies, White Gazes, xviii. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (1985. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000): 7. Further page references are in the main text. Henry Louis Jr Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1989): ix. Further page references are in the main text. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” 1971, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, by Adrienne Rich (New York: Norton, 1979): 35.

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when the original, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, has lost its meaning and value as a unique work of art.12 In their popularized aestheticizations of the black female body, Walker and Minaj signify on stereotypes of African American women; they enter into dialogue with these images to mock “our” belief in the completed eradication of racism, to raise questions regarding African American identity, and to play with it. By so doing, they challenge gendered and racialised power dynamics: Walker, by critically exposing the white appropriation and abuse of black female bodies; and Minaj, by affirming that she herself is in control of her own (black) body and can capitalize on it in her own deliberate way. Thus, Walker and Minaj emphasize that “the body is a site of contested meanings […].”13 What some of the visitors to the exposition do not seem to understand is that Walker metaphorically and Sugar Baby literally give them the finger and, thus, evoke the (re)signification process, and “make the stereo­ types work against themselves.”14 In order to understand on which images Walker’s art signifies and how or whether Minaj establishes a critical difference in her performances, I first elaborate on the historical images of women in blackface minstrelsy and their subversion in the music of jazz and blues singer Ma Rainey, who, in her own way, plays with the stereotypes of black people. The well-known representations of Aunt Jemima and Mammy, viewed as results of blackface minstrelsy, shed light on the nurturing ideals that white Americans attributed to African American women in the nineteenth century, while at the same time questioning this validity.15 The idea of Black Venus, historically embodied by the African woman Saartije (or Sarah) Baartman, better known as Hottentot Venus, is another central trope on which Walker and Minaj both signify. The outspoken and bad-woman image that Minaj cultivates evokes the biblical Jezebel, which raises questions of post-feminist consumerist individualism in the age of late capitalism. Finally, Sugar Baby, with its finger that mocks the world, reveals how Walker takes cultural and ethnic responsibility.16 In contrast, Minaj mostly takes on responsibility only for ­herself 12

Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006). 13 Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, xxii. 14 See Hall, “Chapter 4: The Spectacle of the Other,” 274. 15 Joice Heth, exhibited by P.T. Barnum in his circus in mid-1835 as a 161-year-old African American woman who, he claimed, nursed the nation’s first president, George Washington, is an interesting variation of the Mammy figure. Her death in 1836 revealed the hoax and the relevance of what Uri McMillan calls “‘mammy-memory’” (30). 16 See Divya Tolia-Kelly and Andy Morris, “Disruptive Aesthetics? Revisiting the Burden of Representation in the Art of Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare,” Third Text 18.2 (2004): 154. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 7 October 2018).

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by offering her body for consumption. However, in spite of their different strategies, both politicize their aesthetics by embracing the power dynamics of a resignification process, demanding that audiences reconsider changing images of African American womanhood. 2

Performing in Blackface

In October 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois voiced his view on art as follows: “All Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”17 It is this understanding of art that pervades African American art production. In line with Du Bois, I consider art political and show how the black body has been subject to a variety of ideologies that also shape the current discussion of Sugar Baby. The minstrel show of the nineteenth century staged white views of black bodies; in return, in the twentieth century, minstrelsy by black performers projects a very different, mocking view, thereby reflecting the critical distance taken by the artists. Blackface minstrelsy originated in the early half of the nineteenth century, and Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice (1808–1860) is considered to be its most famous representative.18 The white men performing in blackface minstrelsy were often considered “‘white Negroes”19 and represented a form of racial cross-over that thrilled the working-class people in the audience, often in the Bowery.20 As Eric Lott points out, “blackface acts and words have figured significantly in the white Imaginary of the United States”;21 they simultaneously exhibited and hid the attraction that blacks held for whites. Ultimately, like Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby and Nicki Minaj’s wax figure, an analysis of blackface minstrelsy reveals its potential to express “historical contradictions and social conflicts […].”22 What is of most significance for my analysis is what Eric Lott describes

17 18 19 20 21 22

Quoted in Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre (1994. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999): 5. See Laurence Senelick, “Minstrel Show,” Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, ed. Don B. Wilmoth & Tice L. Miller (1993. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996): 261–62. LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture (2006. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2012): 15. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture, 15. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993): 4–5. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, 8.

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as “the cultural exhibition of the body,”23 which late twentieth- and early ­twenty-first-century artists pick up with a critical difference. Although some women did perform on stage in ante-bellum times,24 most female roles were played by white men. This immediately evokes notions of cross-dressing, including crossing gender and racial lines. This masquerade, accompanied by music and lyrics, would often reveal “[w]hite men’s fear of female power.”25 The process at work here seems to be that of emasculating black men and desexualizing black women through ridicule. But at the same time, it also exposed white men’s desires for black bodies:26 “To wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood.”27 Similarly, the perceived strength and exotic threat of black women were appropriated, controlled, and subdued by white men. Because of their immense popularity and commercial success (102), minstrel shows, in spite of their stereotypical nature, contributed to the spread of African American culture or, as Lott maintains, to “the blackening of America” (102). The parodic repetition of black images was meant to restore white superiority over blacks and masculinity over femininity (see 161). To conclude, in Mahar’s words, “blackface comedy made gender a dominant issue because as a form of entertainment created and controlled by men, it embodied deeply held concepts about the power relationships between the sexes.”28 What is most interesting for my reading of the connection between Sugar Baby, Nicki Minaj, and the minstrel show is the gradual involvement of African Americans as troupes and actors as early as in the 1850s. Black women were among the actors and often presented the “warm-hearted mammy”29 as one of the caricatures believed to be real by many whites. The figure of Aunt Jemima, who is associated with Mammy, was also created in one of these minstrel shows. As LeRoy Ashby points out: It was while watching a blackface act in Missouri in 1889 – a performer in drag acting the role of a cook and singing ‘Old Aunt Jemima,’ a song that Billy Kersands had earlier adapted from an old slave work tune and 23 24

Love and Theft, 10. William G. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999): 325. 25 Lott, Love and Theft, 27. 26 See Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 203. 27 Lott, Love and Theft, 52. Further page references are in the main text. 28 Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 331. 29 Senelick, “Minstrel Show,” 262.

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­ opularized – that a white entrepreneur, Chris Rutt, settled on the image p of a slave mammy – Aunt Jemima – to promote his new self-rising, readymix pancake flour […] as a familiar figure on the minstrel stage, Aunt Jemima was waiting to be discovered.30 Ultimately, this history of blackface minstrelsy has significance for Kara Walker’s installation, not only as part of African American history but also because it is an important element in American popular culture that Lott terms “the social unconscious of blackface.”31 Blackface minstrelsy’s white actors put black bodies on stage, just like at an auction, turning them into objects for the gaze – diminished, belittled, and ridiculed. By evoking the strength of the bodies and simultaneously undoing it, America’s social unconscious both criticized and justified the peculiar institution, and enforced the inferiority of the black race. At the same time, it was a means for the working class to criticize and make fun of the social elite, while hiding behind the “masking device”32 of burned cork. This criticism of white society’s elite is an element signified on by later black performers such as the blues and jazz musician Ma Rainey (1886–1939), in particular in her song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (1927).33 Ma Rainey’s song highlights some of the features of the minstrel show and repeats them with a critical difference. Prior to her solo career, she had performed in Rabbit Foot Minstrels’ shows and traveled the country with minstrel troupes, eventually organizing her own Rainey and Rainey group. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” as the title indicates, emphasizes the singer and dancer’s race and sexuality. Ma Rainey is a strong motherly figure whose headband associates her with Aunt Jemima. However, Ma Rainey is sexualized with her bottom as the center of interest: All the boys in the neighborhood They say your black bottom is really good Come on and show me your black bottom I want to learn that dance. In a call-and-response way, the singer is asked to dance the black-bottom dance so that the title’s threefold references are revealed: it is literally a song, a 30 Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture, 90. 31 Lott, Love and Theft, 234. 32 Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 1. 33 Ma Rainey, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Lyrics, http://www.metrolyrics.com/ma-raineysblack-bottom-lyrics-ma-rainey.html (accessed 15 March 2016).

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dance, and a body part. Barely concealed references to grandpa’s libido reveal the song’s erotic implications: Early last morning, ‘bout the break of day Grandpa told my Grandma, I heard him say Get up and show your old man your black bottom I want to learn that dance. Since that kind of dance was often performed in the backstreets of black communities, it must have had different meanings for different ethnic groups. The outspoken sexuality and the movements of the body that remind audiences of minstrel shows seem to confirm the stereotypes related to African Americans. Ah, do it ma, honey Look it now Ma, you gettin’ kinda rough here you gotta be yourself now, careful now not too strong, not too strong, Ma. However, here too, the critical potential is used to let the white audience believe that they are getting authentic black music and dance, while the musicians are actually making fun of their audiences by giving them what they expect and leaving them ignorant of what is actually going on. Mita Banerjee calls these performances “defiant oppositional strategies,”34 and reads images of Ma Rainey’s smile as “both the smile of assent and as the grin of defiance,”35 turning it into a version of Sugar Baby’s finger that mocks the world. 3

Nursing the Nation: Aunt Jemima and Mammy

Mammy36 and Aunt Jemima are the best-known stereotypical representations of African American womanhood that have survived socio-cultural, political,

34 35 36

Mita Banerjee, Race-ing the Century (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005): 79. Race-ing the Century, 80. According to Alexandra Radu, “the earliest use of the word ‘mammy’ can be traced back to 1810 to a travel narrative when the word is first coined when talking about the South. Etymological roots speak of a blending between ‘ma’am’ and ‘mamma’” (“Mammy and Miss America: From Plantation to the Fashion Industry,” Procedia: Social Behavioral Sciences 92 (2013): 778–83. Science Direct (accessed 28 August 2015): 779).

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technological, and economic changes for almost 200 years.37 In the sense of Stuart Hall, [s]tereotypes get hold of the few “simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized” characteristics about a person, reduce everything about the person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them, and fix them without change or development to eternity. […] stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes “difference.”38 Both Mammy and Aunt Jemima do precisely that; they reduce the black woman to a few characteristics which have stayed fixed in history. Stereotypes, as Hall explains, fix boundaries between us and them, and only “occur where there are gross inequalities of power.”39 Such power inequalities have prevailed ever since the first slaves were taken from Africa to the New World. The two figures, born in the caricatures of the mammy in the minstrel show,40 exhibit a large-size image of a black female who is responsible for the well-being of her white masters and mistresses. Billy Kersands’s song “Old Aunt Jemima,” which was popular in the 1870s, developed into the Aunt Jemima of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, embodied by the black woman Nancy Green.41 Who can forget Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Margret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939)? Who will not immediately think of Aunt Jemima’s smiling face and red bandana when preparing pancakes? Βoth images are firmly ingrained in the popular imaginary of U.S. society, if not worldwide. Nourishing and nursing the white nation were these figures’ historical tasks. They are the invention of a white society and can perform nothing but the happy slave role. But their smile, just like Ma Rainey’s, could perhaps also be a strategy of resistance, in particular since in the 1890s, as a marketing strategy, “a real black woman assumed the role of Aunt Jemima, promoting the 37

38 39 40 41

See Jennifer Fuller, “Gimme a Break! And the Limits of the Modern Mammy,” in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, ed. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2013): 105–20. ProQuest Ebrary (accessed 28 Aug. 2015); Christopher J.P. Sewell, “Mammies and Matriarchs: Tracing Images of the Black Female in Popular Culture 1950s to Present,” Journal of African American Studies 17.3 (Sept. 2013): 308–26. SpringerLink (accessed 28 August 2015). Hall, “Chapter 4: The Spectacle of the Other,” 258; emphasis in original. “Chapter 4: The Spectacle of the Other,” 258. M.M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1998): 1. Phil Patton, “Mammy Her Life and Times,” American Heritage Magazine 44.5 (September 1993), online: para 7.

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pancake flour across the country with the catchphrase ‘I’se in town, honey,’”42 a phrase introduced in 1905.43 The real black woman continues “to summon up nostalgic images of the mythical Old South,”44 embodying the “contented, nurturing mammy […].”45 “If we are what we eat,” as Katelyn M. Hipskind suggests in her review essay of three book-length studies on Aunt Jemima and Mammy, “what does it say that we, as a society, still readily ‘consume’ the mammy image without thought or consequence?”46 Aunt Jemima, after all, is not just the preparer of food but the food itself. The Chicago-based Quaker Oats Company announced in 1989 that they would give Aunt Jemima a more modern appearance, a more stylish one without a bandana. However, what they have preserved, as they say, are the traditional qualities of “warmth, quality, good taste, heritage and reliability.”47 Doris Witt’s perception of this marketing view suggests that the qualities could refer to both the cook and the product. For her, “Aunt Jemima prepares and is food […].”48 While the Aunt Jemima performers repeat the image, with a critical difference that they are interested in its economic value, they do not parody or subvert it. The image is identified with the product, and both create the stereotype, which is then identified with the black female body. While at first only entertaining, Aunt Jemima as Mammy was an image that the white population could control, so that it satisfied a nostalgic need for a glorious past. As Hipskind concludes, the “jovial slave, the archetype of the mammy, was one Black image that allowed White Americans (especially White women) to distance themselves from Black servitude while simultaneously consuming the culture and practices of the other.”49 Yet, the studies Hipskind reviews also trace the history of black protest and resistance against such a stereotypical representation of African American womanhood. Aunt Jemima and Mammy have “a confusing history.”50 When looking at Walker’s and

42 Ashby, With Amusement for All, 90. 43 Patton, “Mammy Her Life and Times,” para 11. 44 Ashby, With Amusement for All, 90. 45 With Amusement for All, 90. 46 Katelyn M. Hipskind, “Consuming Mammy: A Review Essay on the Manifestations of Mammy in Twentieth-Century America,” Black Diaspora Review 1.1 (Summer 2009): 12–16. IU ScholarWorks Repository (accessed 28 August 2015): 14. 47 Quoted in Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1999): 22. 48 Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity, 22; emphasis in original. 49 Hipskind, “Consuming Mammy: A Review Essay on the Manifestations of Mammy in Twentieth-Century America,” 16. 50 Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima, 2.

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­ inaj’s works, this confusing history is re-signified as the burden of repetition M in representation.51 What if Aunt Jemima’s smile and Mammy’s care are performances just as their inventors wanted them to be? What if the smile is not the expression of a happy slave, but a façade which hides criticism, resentment, and rejection? Would these ideas not disrupt a society based on “the old black southern mammy” symbolizing “self-sacrificing maternal devotion and loyalty to the entire white family for whom she worked”?52 As many more recent representations show, black women criticize the “hegemonic limits on the economic and social development of the entire black community by fixing the black woman into the role of servant for white families.”53 As Patricia Hill Collins points out, “Challenging these controlling images has long been a core theme in Black feminist thought.”54 This challenge is achieved through repetition with a critical difference. 4

Rapping Jezebel

Although Mammy, Aunt Jemima, and minstrelsy are demeaning, patronizing, and racist stereotypifications of black women, they are imbued with positive characteristics such as caring, nurturing, love, and happiness. Jezebel, however, is the image of a black woman who is threatening to white onlookers; she is “the antithesis of the mammy figure.”55 Jezebel is associated with characteristics described as erotic and calculating.56 Most of these adjectives depict sexuality and outward appearance and, as such, evoke the specter of m ­ iscegenation, 51 52 53 54 55

56

See Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 10 (Spring 1999): 61–78. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 7 October 2018). Alice A. Deck, “The Mammy/Aunt Jemima as an American Icon: Toni Morrison Responds,” in US Icons and Iconicity, ed. Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser & Susanne Rieser (Wien: Lit, 2006): 155–66. “The Mammy/Aunt Jemima as an American Icon: Toni Morrison Responds,” 155. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000): 69. Sewell, “Mammies and Matriarchs: Tracing Images of the Black Female in Popular Culture 1950s to Present,” 310; Patricia G. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles: Civil War Reenactment, African American Women, and the Performance of Idealized Femininity,” Text and Performance Quarterly 32.4 (October 2012): 320. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 28 August 2015). Sonja M. Brown Givens & Jennifer L. Monahan, “Priming Mammies, Jezebels, and Other Controlling Images: An Examination of the Influence of Mediated Stereotypes on Perceptions of an African American Woman,” Media Psychology 7.1 (2005): 93. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 28 August 2015).

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female power and control, loss of masculinity and effeminization. The biblical Jezebel, wife of Ahab, is known to be malicious, and transgresses against God. As a consequence, she is killed by dogs that tear her flesh and eat her. Over the centuries, ‘Jezebel’ has become the label for an evil and scheming woman, and is associated with promiscuity. In the popular imaginary, as Carolyn West argues, “African American women are often portrayed as sexually irresponsible, promiscuous Jezebels.”57 She suggests, in line with bell hooks, that one should “take an ‘oppositional gaze’ toward the images of Black women” in order to “critically examine, challenge, and ultimately deconstruct these images […].”58 Is this what Nicki Minaj does? The video that accompanies her song “Anaconda”59 certainly spells Jezebel in capital letters and is an example of the image of “video vixens.”60 Situated in a tropical environment, most probably meant to evoke South America as the location of the Anaconda snake, the rapper and her female dancers, all scantily clad, dance and sing provocatively, exuding eroticism. Male voices begin, as in Ma Rainey’s song, claiming the woman as “my anaconda,” which she can only be if she has “buns.” Minaj then raps about a relationship to a drug dealer whose money the female voice cherishes. Their relationship is full of violence from both sides, with sex in cars and images of mutual devouring. The focus, however, is almost exclusively on the woman’s “butt” and “fat ass,” and attention is drawn to it through the lyrics and her wooing movements in the video. As Carolyn West explains, in this specific genre of hip-hop music, which is called “booty rap,”61 there is “a clear reference to the culture of strip clubs and pornography as scantily clad women simulate sex acts with male rappers and other female performers”;62 Moira O’Neil has labeled this “assthetics.”63 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Carolyn West, “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ toward the Images of Black Women,” in Lectures on the Psychology of Women, ed. J. Chrisler, C. Golden & P. Rozee (4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008): 288. “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ toward the Images of Black Women,” 288. Nicki Minaj, “Anaconda,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs (accessed 15 March 2016). Patricia G. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles: Civil War Reenactment, African American Women, and the Performance of Idealized Femininity,” Text and Performance Quarterly 32.4 (October 2012): 308–31. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 28 August 2015): 320. Carolyn West, “Still on the Auction Block: The (S)exploitation of Black Adolescent Girls in Rap(e) Music and Hip-Hop Culture,” in The Sexualization of Childhood, ed. Sharna Olfman (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009): 91. “Still on the Auction Block: The (S)exploitation of Black Adolescent Girls in Rap(e) Music and Hip-Hop Culture,” 91. Moira O’Neil qtd. in Mae G. Henderson, “‘About Face, or What Is This ‘Back’ in B(l)ack Popular Culture: From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie,” in Cultural Migrations and

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At the end of the video, Minaj tries to provoke a black man on a chair to have sex with her by sitting on him and moving around like a snake, asking him to “Come on!” The signal difference between this performance and the exhibitions of Black Venus, Aunt Jemima, and Mammy is that Minaj, like Ma Rainey, is in control of the situation and of the images that are projected. She seems to enjoy her body, its exhibition, and its quasi-nakedness. Minaj’s character in the video certainly embodies the features of a “contemporary Jezebel” that “can be found jiggling and gyrating in hip-hop music videos.”64 Minaj’s wax figure on all fours in the museum gives the onlooker a “come on” look, with her bottom protruding prominently. Rapper Azealia Banks on Twitter considers the representation “disrespectful” and “shady,”65 expressing concern that the figure encourages museumgoers to engage in objectifying behaviors. Banks seems to have been right about her concerns because tourists – black, white, male, female – have actually posed in sexual acts and posted their pictures on social media. One of these images shows a young black man faking intercourse with the wax figure. Nicki Minaj’s performances both in the museum and in the video invoke the historical image of Black Venus who is at the disposition of white and black men, and yet, she seems to be the one to control the encounter in her video but not necessarily in the museum. Some post-feminist critics argue that (black) women can finally do what they want and, thus, also signify on the past in the way they want. Whereas Stéphanie Genz calls contemporary times a “new era of choiceoisie,”66 Elspeth Probyn labels it a time of “no choice.”67 Angela McRobbie argues “that women are currently being disempowered through the very discourses of empowerment they are being offered as substitutes for feminism.”68 However, such

64 65 66 67 68

­ endered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of the Female Body, ed. Silvia G Pilar Castro Borrego and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011): 127. West, “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ toward the Images of Black Women,” in Lectures on the Psychology of Women, ed. J. Chrisler, C. Golden & P. Rozee (4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008): 294. See Kelley Dunlap, “Azealia Banks Was Right about Nicki Minaj’s Wax Figure,” Buzzfeed (18 August 2015), https://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleydunlap/people-are-doing-horriblethings-to-nicki-minajs-wax-figure (accessed 19 August 2015). Stéphanie Genz, “Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’ and the Dilemma of Having It All,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.1 (2010): 103. Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home,” Screen 31.2 (1990): 154. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2009. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010): 49.

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v­ ideos (and songs) can also “influence our perceptions of rape survivors”69 who, if black, have a hard time claiming rape in the light of the Jezebel stereotype. West concludes: The difficulty, however, lies in telling the difference between representations of Black women who are sexually liberated and those who are sex objects. Are rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown [and one might add Nicki Minaj] victims of the hip-hop industry, examples of repackaged Jezebels, or savvy business women who freely exploit their sexuality for personal financial gain?70 As West suggests, one might ask whether the difference between victim and clever business–woman is one of parodic signal difference that turns the repetition of a stereotype into a form of empowerment. Can Minaj be considered a “repetition with a critical difference” of the original ideas of Black Venus and Hottentot Venus? Animalistic features are common to both Black Venus’s and Minaj’s images. The frame voice is the man, the professor in Black Venus, and the male partner and possessor of Anaconda in the video and song. The difference is that Minaj stages her own show and moves around freely. Is that a critical difference? Murali Balaji suggests that we analyze “the expanse of ambiguity that lies between the images of Black womanhood that bombard consumers of BET and MTV and the self-­conceptualization of the women who play those roles.”71 For Balaji, it is a question of “who controls the image” (1) of so-called “video vixens” (5).72 The ­fragmentation and ­almost exclusive focus on the “butt” objectify the black woman but do not seem to take away her control. Balaji concludes that “the limitations of empowerment and resistance are based on the notion that self-definition is often under the framework of patriarchal capitalism” but that there is still “resistance to male domination, as well as racial oppression and sexual objectification” (14). Another feature that indicates that Minaj may be engaging in some form of parody is the fact that, over twenty years later, she uses “Anaconda” – both

69 70 71 72

West, “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ toward the Images of Black Women,” 295. “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls,” 295. Murali Balaji, “Vixen Resistin’: Redefining Black Womanhood in Hip-Hop Music Videos,” Journal of Black Studies 20.10 (2008): 1. Further page references are in the main text. I suggest that this question can also be raised in conjunction with white womanhood in pop music if one considers Miley Cyrus and the videos accompanying her music, for example, “Can’t Be Tamed” (2010) and “Wrecking Ball” (2013).

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lyrics and video – to enter into dialogue with the 1992 hip-hop song “Baby Got Back”73 (on the album Mack Daddy) by male rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot. “Baby Got Back” was briefly banned by mtv because of its sexual explicitness, but subsequently became a best-selling hit and won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance in 1993. The song begins with two thin white women gossiping about a black female dancer’s butt that makes her, from their point of view, look “like a total prostitute.” Sir Mix-a-Lot then takes over and raps about his desire for “big butts,” which he finds erotic and sexually arousing: “that butt you got makes me so horny.” The song is full of sexual allusions and the video with explicit gestures. He promises not to hit or curse black women but he raps: “I gotta be straight when I say I wanna ‘fuck’ till the break of dawn.” The song is sexually explicit on many levels and reduces the female body to only one of its parts. Nicki Minaj signifies on Sir Mix-a-Lot: “Oh my god, look at her butt. […] My anaconda don’t want none / Unless you’ve got buns, hun. […] little in the middle but she got much back.” While the reference to “anaconda” in Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song and performance is a symbolic reference to the penis, Minaj’s repetition does not evoke the same image. She appropriates the phallic symbol as one of strength, virility, and power and turns herself into a proud agent who lusts for black men. In both cases, the black female bodies become a desirable beauty ideal – in contrast to the white thinness presented in many magazines. At the end of the male rapper’s video, a woman is briefly shown with a phone number, asking viewers to call, as in prostitution; in contrast, the lyrics ask women to call Sir Mix-a-Lot. Minaj appropriates this discourse of black female objectification and celebrates the empowerment through her body while profiting from the post-feminist claim of individuality and the opportunity to do what you want. 5

Mocking the World with Sugar Baby

Kara Walker first became known for her paper-cut silhouettes in the mid-1990s. Her reputation turned into “notoriety in 1997” when she received “the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award,”74 and art critics began to criticize her for her work’s racism. The African American artist Howardena Pindell accused her of “catering to the bestial fantasies about black culture 73 74

Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Baby Got Back” (Official Video), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_JphDdGV2TU (accessed 15 March 2016). David Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” Oxford Art Journal 33.3 (2010): 279.

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c­ reated by white supremacy and racism.”75 Oversized penises, “fucking, sodomy, cannibalism, vaginal rape, oral rape, anal rape, shitting, beating, whipping, and lynching”76 are only some of the images that violate viewers’ expectations and, thus, their comfort zone. Some of the figures clearly signify on Saartje Baartman and expose the perpetuation of the colonial abuse of black women’s bodies. What is explicit in Sugar Baby’s finger is also implicitly present in those earlier artworks, namely that white racial and racist representations of black people signify through repetition with a signal difference. While Gates’s “signifyin(g)” may not require parody as part of the repetition, Walker adopts parody. As David Wall points out: The ubiquitous visual tropes of Kara Walker’s work – race, sex, the gothic, the grotesque, violence, violation, abjection, obscenity, desire, death, excrement, and slavery – collide and crash violently and constantly with the racial and sexual registers of American history and culture. Her re­ presentations of transgression and excess – those visual discursive eruptions that leak from the confines of the image – possess a disturbing and destabilising power. […] to transgress the dominant modes of visual representation is to simultaneously attack the [sic] “the cultural scripts and social structures that shape them.”77 Walker’s aesthetics of excess transgresses commonly accepted boundaries of what can be represented. While throwing into her viewers’ faces their personal involvement and complicity in racial representation, Walker’s art does not, as David Wall maintains, reveal “a subversive or revolutionary strategy.”78 However, in the long run, excess, transgression, and parody may result in precisely that, a revolution and, subsequently, a subversion of the status quo. With her installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, Kara Walker, like Nicki Minaj, continues to signify on African American tradition but perhaps on a less provocative level. The minstrel show, Mammy, Aunt Jemima, and the Venus Hottentot seem to be the reference points and (visual) texts of her signifyin(g). While the head scarf signals Aunt Jemima and her benign smiles evoke Mammy (and perhaps Ma Rainey), the exposure of her large breasts, genitalia, and buttocks reference Black Venus and Venus Hottentot of the 75 76 77 78

Quoted in “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 279. Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 289. “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 281. “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 299.

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Kara Walker, *A Subtlety*, 2014. Photography by Jason Wyche. Courtesy Creative Time.

­ ineteenth century, as well as the sexually alluring Jezebel. Walker’s deliberate n evocation of the work of slaves on sugar–cane plantations in the Caribbean in this oversize body is evidence of this signal difference. Walker accompanied the sculpture with a further explanation: “An Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” It was on display from 10 May to 6 July 2014, almost at the same time the sugar factory was dismantled. This

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“40-foot-tall, 75-foot-long, and 35-foot-wide sculpture of sugar”79 was not just a reminder of the many female slaves who worked in the Caribbean sugar refineries, a monument to the dead, but also a critique of those who delighted in its taste without considering its mode of production. Sugar was associated with black people at the time. In the posture of the Sphinx, an “ancient hybrid of lion and woman, mystic goddess and undecipherable mystery,”80 Sugar Baby evokes femininity’s strength but also challenges what and how things are transmitted through history into the present. “Sugar” seems to be the key factor in a critical reading of Sugar Baby. Sugar was needed from the eighteenth century onward, as Ilka Saal points out, not only to cater to the tastes of European and North American taste buds, but also to “literally feed […] the proletariat” in England. Together with the little black/brown boy figures surrounding Sugar Baby, “Walker brings into focus such white consumption of black labor” and evokes “the emergence of modern capitalism.”81 Erecting her sculpture in a sugar refinery implies Sugar Baby’s refinement, that is, her whiteness as the immensely refined ideal, at the same time as it suggests that whiteness can only be ideal if contrasted with and based on blackness. Take away the inherent blackness of Sugar Baby’s history, and whiteness would fall to pieces. In Sugar Baby, we can identify the Sphinx as the guardian of history, Mammy as the care-giver of white people, Aunt Jemima as the cook for white people, Black Venus as white people’s sexualized object, and Jezebel as a threat to white power. Kara Walker almost literally feeds her audience with these stereotypes. The perpetuation of the stereotypes is certainly not what Kara Walker aims at, but her re-appropriation of these stereotypes is a form of repetition with a signal difference.82 The reactions of her audience were what she was interested in, an audience that was both black and white. Many of the visitors were simply in awe of the sculpture’s immensity and its overwhelming presence. Others were titillated by the fact that Sugar Baby’s gigantic breasts, buttocks, 79 80 81

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Laura K. Reeder, “Kara Walker: Subtlety as a Big Idea,” Art Education (Jan. 2015): 51–58. Academia (accessed 3 September 2015): 52. Kay Larson, “Exhibitions: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” Curator: The Museum Journal 57.4 (October 2014): 505–11 (accessed 3 September 2015): 508. Ilka Saal, “The Taste for Whiteness: Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014),” Food, Fatness and Fitness: Critical Perspectives, http://foodfatnessfitness.com/2015/04/27/the-tastefor-whiteness-kara-walkers-marvelous-sugar-baby-2014/ (27 April 2015): n. pag. (accessed 15 October 2016). See also Monika Seidl, “Cutting Edge: About Silhouettes, Racial Stereotypes in Transition, and the Art of Kara Walker,” in Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ed. Hanna Wallinger (Wien: Lit, 2006): 149.

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and genitals were exposed. Voyeurism and scopophilia certainly enhanced people’s enjoyment and entertainment. For some, this would be the only experience because they would not know anything about the history embodied in the oversized figure. Yet others were seen taking sexually suggestive pictures and posting them in social media, as is the case for Minaj. How much respect did this show to the art work and black women? Or was this precisely what Walker wanted to expose, namely that there is no respect for the black female body, not even in art? At the same time, black women see the pride and the power that resides in Sugar Baby. As Kay Larson argues, Walker’s sculpture shows that “all those old power relationships from the time of slavery have not lost their sting, nor their roots in human self-centeredness.”83 The observers of the onlookers might realize that selfies taken with Sugar Baby – whether sexually explicit or not – constitute an instance of self-centeredness and of immersion in the history of slavery and black female (s)exploitation. Showing these photographs to others implies, once more, that white society can set the self as the norm and the black female as “the other” or as deviation. Like the Venus Hottentot, Sugar Baby is stared at as an immense other and a threat. Mammy and Aunt Jemima as benign images seem to disturb the perception of this threat but become part of the oversized other. Sugar Baby is, in one figure, Jezebel, Mammy/Aunt Jemima, the lion, and the woman. What lies at the heart of Walker’s complementary images could be considered excess, which makes it impossible for the viewer “to maintain any neutral distance from the image and is, thus, continually forced into the recognition and acceptance of her or his own complicity in the ‘violence of looking’ at the heart of racial representation.”84 The viewers’ recognition that they are involved in transgression and excess85 is deeply shocking in the twenty-first century. Yet, the selfies unveil that not only scopophilia but also the desire to possess is at work. Looking is power; being looked at is powerlessness. Like Susan–Lori Parks’s play Venus (1996), Walker has been accused of “repackaging damaging stereotypes and selling them to white audiences.”86

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Larson, “Exhibitions: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” 506. Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 280. See also Julie Burell, “The Lower Stratum of History – The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker,” in Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture, ed. Carol E. Henderson (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010): 125. “The Lower Stratum of History – The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker,” 123.

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Were it not for the finger with which Sugar Baby seems to mock the world, accusations of stereotypification might be more easily justified. But even the “fig sign,” with the thumb held between the first two fingers, is imbued with multiple meanings such as fertility, protection against the evil eye, or an obscene gesture evoking sexual penetration. All three readings could be applied to Sugar Baby. The stereotypes she represents have certainly been productive for more than 500 years if one considers the black female body in slavery since the black woman was sexually abused and literally produced offspring. The idea of protection from the evil eye turns the spectator and the spectacle into destructive forces both in history and today, with the viewer as the one in control. Finally, the reference to an obscene gesture, in light of Kara Walker’s other works, seems to be the most dominant meaning, containing the other two and signaling a mocking gesture that reveals that the stereotypical image is not just repeated but re-appropriated and imbued with new meaning. Such gestures may evoke Jezebel again, but since the features of the sculpture are also those of Mammy, Aunt Jemima, and Black Venus, they disrupt the legacy of these stereotypes and warn the viewers that what they see is not what they believe they see. Mammy is rebellious; Aunt Jemima stages a revolution; Jezebel and Black Venus re-appropriate their own bodies in a gesture of empowerment. The onlookers do not understand and are disempowered. Re­ aligned power dismantles the historically perpetuated images, and the ultimate demolition of both the factory and the sculpture insinuates the final destruction of the stereotypical images, at least for this installation. They live on in the selfies and on the internet, in scholarly attempts to understand Walker’s art and in the shocking evidence of our own – black and white, male and female – involvement in historical and contemporary racism and sexism. According to Shaw, “Their [Sugar Baby’s and Minaj’s] power lies in the way they make people feel uncomfortable by visualizing their sublimated fears and desires.”87 6

De-stereotyping African American Womanhood

As my analysis has shown, images of the minstrel show, Mammy, Aunt Jemima, Jezebel, and Black Venus have survived into the twenty-first century as archetypal texts. Their various historical manifestations and records reveal the power with which they still dominate the cultural imaginary. Stereotypes 87

Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham: Duke UP, 2004): 154.

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are reductions that force people into cultural straightjackets from which they cannot easily escape. Slavery and the white fear of black otherness, and concomitantly, the desire to scientifically prove black women’s and, thus, black people’s inferiority, motivated people in nineteenth-century Europe and the U.S. to curiously eye the staging of the black female body. The images of Black Venus and Venus Hottentot have given rise to numerous visual, audio, and written representations, first by white colonizers and more recently by black people themselves in an effort to redefine, revision, and re-appropriate their own history. Nicki Minaj’s wax figure and Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby reproduce, it seems, these images. However, far from perpetuating black women’s sexual objectification and victimhood, Walker and Minaj parodically signal repetition with a significant difference, but in aesthetically different ways and to different degrees. While Minaj’s posture in the wax museum and her dance in her videos are obviously sexually provocative and self-confidently staged, Walker’s sculpture seems to be more of a historical replica and conglomerate of images known from documentaries, TV, and magazines. Yet, both Minaj and Sugar Baby return the gaze and refuse objectification. Minaj’s defiant gaze and Sugar Baby’s fig sign can be read as strategies to claim power. Both provoke the audience and motivate the viewers to engage with the art object. Both use Gates’s “metaphor of the double-voiced,” by metaphorically and literally “making the white written text speak with a black voice”88 or making the unspeakable visible. Selfies and photographs reveal how easily people fall into stereotyped sexist and racist behavior. Sugar Baby is large but still invites men to engage in sexual acts, and Nicki Minaj’s life-size wax figure has motivated young men to simulate intercourse and young women to pose with obscene gestures. While Sugar Baby was deliberately destroyed in 2014 and only exists in photographic images, Minaj’s wax figure and videos continue to allow the fetishization of the black female body, albeit in Minaj’s own deliberate way. While Walker’s Sugar Baby was probably a minor commercial success, Minaj continues to cash in on consumerism and capitalism. Not only does she assert control over her body and its aesthetic representation, but also offers it for consumption by continuing the tradition of the “big butt.” Sugar Baby, through numerous representations in social media, and Minaj, through videos and wax, not only keep Black Venus alive but also magnify her presence with critical differences: super-human size, omnipresence (through media), and full control over their aesthetic politics. 88 Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, 131.

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Works Cited Ashby, LeRoy. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture (2006. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2012). Balaji, Murali. “‘Vixen Resistin’: Redefining Black Womanhood in Hip-Hop Music Videos,” Journal of Black Studies 20.10 (2008): 1–16. Banerjee, Mita. Race-ing the Century (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005). Benjamin, Walter. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006). Burell, Julie. “The Lower Stratum of History – The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker,” in Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture, ed. Carol E. Henderson (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010): 123–44. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). Davis, Patricia G. “The Other Southern Belles: Civil War Reenactment, African American Women, and the Performance of Idealized Femininity,” Text and Performance Quarterly 32.4 (October 2012): 308–31. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 28 August 2015). Deck, Alice A. “The Mammy/Aunt Jemima as an American Icon: Toni Morrison Responds,” in US Icons and Iconicity, ed. Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser & Susanne Rieser (Wien: Lit, 2006): 155–66. Dunlap, Kelley. “Azealia Banks Was Right about Nicki Minaj’s Wax Figure,” Buzzfeed (18 August 2015), https://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleydunlap/people-are-doing -horrible-things-to-nicki-minajs-wax-figure (accessed 19 August 2015). Fuller, Jennifer. “Gimme a Break! And the Limits of the Modern Mammy,” in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, ed. Beretta E. SmithShomade (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2013): 105–20. ProQuest Ebrary (accessed 28 Aug. 2015). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1989). Genz, Stéphanie. “Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’ and the Dilemma of Having It All,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.1 (2010): 97–119. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 204–38. ProQuest 2003 (accessed 29 August 2015). Givens, Sonja M. Brown & Jennifer L. Monahan. “Priming Mammies, Jezebels, and Other Controlling Images: An Examination of the Influence of Mediated Stereotypes on

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Perceptions of an African American Woman,” Media Psychology 7.1 (2005): 87–106. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 28 August 2015). Hall, Stuart. “Chapter 4: The Spectacle of the Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (1997. London: Sage, 2003): 223–90. Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre (1994. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). Henderson, Mae G. “‘About Face, or What Is This ‘Back’ in B(l)ack Popular Culture: From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie,” in Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of the Female Body, ed. Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011): 125–56. Hipskind, Katelyn M. “Consuming Mammy: A Review Essay on the Manifestations of Mammy in Twentieth-Century America,” Black Diaspora Review 1.1 (Summer 2009): 12–16. IU ScholarWorks Repository (accessed 28 August 2015). Hobson, Janell. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005). Holmes, Rachel. The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartje Baartman, Born in 1789 – Buried 2002 (Bloomsbury: Random House, 2007). Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (1985. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000). Larson, Kay. “Exhibitions: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” Curator: The Museum Journal 57.4 (October 2014): 505–11 (accessed 3 September 2015). Lhamon, W.T., Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performances from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1998). Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993). Ma Rainey. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Lyrics, http://www.metrolyrics.com/maraineys-black-bottom-lyrics-ma-rainey.html (accessed 15 March 2016). Mahar, William G. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999). Manring, M.M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville VA: U of Virginia P, 1998). McMillan, Uri. “Mammy Memory: Staging Joice Heth, or the Curious Phenomenon of the ‘Ancient Negress,’” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22.1 (March 2012): 29–46. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 28 August 2015). McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2009. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010). Mercer, Kobena. “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 10 (Spring 1999): 61–78. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 7 October 2018). Minaj, Nicki. “Anaconda,” Lyrics, http://www.metrolyrics.com/anaconda-lyrics-nickiminaj.html (accessed 1 September 2015).

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Minaj, Nicki. “Anaconda,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4oo RsWs (accessed 15 March 2016). Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000): 34–47. Patton, Phil. “Mammy Her Life and Times,” American Heritage Magazine 44.5 (September 1993), online: para 30. Probyn, Elspeth. “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home,” Screen 31.2 (1990): 147–59. Radu, Alexandra. “Mammy and Miss America: From Plantation to the Fashion Industry,” Procedia: Social Behavioral Sciences 92 (2013): 778–83. Science Direct (accessed 28 August 2015). Reeder, Laura K. “Kara Walker: Subtlety as a Big Idea,” Art Education (Jan. 2015): 51–58. Academia (accessed 3 September 2015). Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” 1971, in On Lies, ­Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978, by Adrienne Rich (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979): 33–49. Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (New York: Routledge, 1994). Saal, Ilka. “The Taste for Whiteness: Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014),” in Food, Fatness and Fitness: Critical Perspectives, http://foodfatnessfitness.com/2015/04/27/ the-taste-for-whiteness-kara-walkers-marvelous-sugar-baby-2014/ (27 April 2015): n. pag. (accessed 15 October 2016). Seidl, Monika. “Cutting Edge: About Silhouettes, Racial Stereotypes in Transition, and the Art of Kara Walker,” in Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change, ed. Hanna Wallinger (Wien: Lit, 2006): 139–58. Senelick, Laurence. “Minstrel Show,” Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, ed. Don B. Wilmoth & Tice L. Miller (1993. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996): 261–62. Sewell, Christopher J.P. “Mammies and Matriarchs: Tracing Images of the Black Female in Popular Culture 1950s to Present,” Journal of African American Studies 17.3 (Sept. 2013): 308–26. SpringerLink (accessed 28 August 2015). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke UP, 1999). Shaw, Gwendolyn Dubois. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2004). Sir Mix-a-Lot. “Baby Got Back” (Official Video), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_JphDdGV2TU. (accessed 15 March 2016). Sir Mix-a-Lot. “Baby Got Back.” Lyrics. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sirmixalot/­ babygotback.html. (accessed 15 March 2016). Tolia-Kelly, Divya, and Andy Morris. “Disruptive Aesthetics? Revisiting the Burden of Representation in the Art of Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare,” Third Text 18.2 (2004): 153–67. Taylor & Francis Online (accessed 7 October 2018).

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Wall, David. “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” Oxford Art Journal 33.3 (2010): 277–99. West, Carolyn. “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ toward the Images of Black Women,” in Lectures on the Psychology of Women, ed. J. Chrisler, C. Golden & P. Rozee (4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008): 286–99. West, Carolyn. “Still on the Auction Block: The (S)exploitation of Black Adolescent Girls in Rap(e) Music and Hip-Hop Culture,” in The Sexualization of Childhood, ed. Sharna Olfman (Westport CT: Praeger, 2009): 89–102. Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1999). Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

Chapter 5

The Italian Gaze on Black Venus Camilla Erichsen Skalle Abstract Camilla Erichsen Skalle discusses the near-comprehensive presence of Black Venus figures in Italian colonial propaganda during the so-called ‘scramble for Africa.’ Building on the work of Giulietta Stefani, she shows how these figures are crucial in the construction of a virile Italian masculinity that comes, later, to define and dominate the fascist era. Within this construction, Africa, often described metaphorically as an exotic-erotic Black Venus, serves, paradoxically, as the site for both masculine re- and, possibly, degeneration. Italy has never come to terms with its colonial history, thus the Black Venus tropes and metaphors continued to appear also after Italy’s colonial and imperial defeat. Focusing on the male and imperial objectifying gaze, Skalle de­ monstrates how the very same stereotypes structure and influence what have come to be seen as the first novels to critically engage with Italian imperialism and the fascist ideologies of masculinity: Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (1947) and Mario Tobino’s Il deserto di Libya (1951).

…

In those young Somali women one could get a glimpse of a mix of Greek and Roman femininity […] and the warm and velvety shades of the colour of the Arab blood […]. But in the brown and graceful daughters of the sun, blooming like flowers in the tropics’ greenhouses, you can still find a form of softness, fullness of lines and a vague sweetness of expression that furiously whips the blood with a sharp fascination, pungent, wild and intoxicating as the scents and aromas of the acacias’ resinous woods.1 1 “In quelle giovani somale si scorgeva un assieme di femminilità greca e romana commista […] ed alle calde e vellutate tonalità di colore proprie del sangue arabo […]. Ma nelle brune ed aggraziate figlie del sole, sbocciate, come fiori gentili in quelle serre dei tropici, si riscontra, ancora, una pastosità di forma, una pienezza di linee ed una vaga dolcezza di espressione che sferzano furiosamente il sangue con un fascino acuto, acre, selvaggio e inebriante come i profumi e gli aromi di quelle resinose boscaglie d’acacie” (Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, Nell’Harrar [Milano: Galli, 1896] http://www.archive.org/details/nellharrar00bricgoog [accessed 10 February 2015]: 44–6). All translations into English are the author’s unless stated otherwise. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_006

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The description of the Somali girls introducing this chapter on Black Venus in the Italian colonial context is taken from the travel journal by the Italian explorer and photographer Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti (1855–1926) – the first to cross what is referred to as the Horn of Africa. Robecchi-Bricchetti’s focus on the girls’ hips, breasts, eyes, and skin colour, which facilitates a comparison of their beauty to exotic flowers, produces unknown and violent sensations and a thrill of pleasure. The description stands as an emblem of the male2 and imperial3 objectifying gaze which is the main theme in my exploration of the Italian Black Venus. Robecchi-Bricchetti’s description of the girls is a typical example of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperialist representations of African women. With their scientific findings, photographs and travel logs, the European explorers dispersed their impressions and prejudices to their readers back home, and thus assisted, according to Pratt,4 the political colonization of the continent, as well as the shaping and the definition of the non-European world and woman.5 These images of black women as seductive Venuses continue to represent the black female subject in Italian literature published during the post-war period, as we will see in the two novels discussed in this chapter: The Deserts of Libya (Il deserto di Libya, 1951) by Mario Tobino and The Short Cut (Tempo di uccidere, 1947) by Ennio Flaiano. The novels are set in the Italian colonies during World War ii, and they have been read as post-colonial predecessors in Italian literature6 because of their critical engagement with the Italian involvement in Africa, as well as with the image of the vigorous and virile man commonly represented in popular fascist literature during the regime. Yet the novels’ representations of black women seem to echo those of the Black Venus of the political, scientific and popular discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One may ask: Why do the two novels, which destabilize the stereotypical image of the Italian soldier, still reproduce the images of the 2 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. 3 Ann E. Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997). 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 5 For a study of the use of images in Italian colonial travel literature see Loredana Polezzi, “Il pieno e il vuoto. Visual Representations of Africa in Italian Accounts of Colonial Experiences,” Italian Studies 67:3 (2012): 336–59. 6 Roberta Orlandini, “(Anti)colonialismo in Tempo di uccidere di Ennio Flaiano,” Italica 69.4 (1992): 478–88.

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black female body? The occupation of the African continent was considered by many Italians to be a means of masculine regeneration, while the colonies also presented a danger of degeneration.7 However, is this paradoxical idea of the colonies reflected in the relationship between the novels’ male protagonists and the female subjects they encounter, and, if so, how does it influence the texts’ gender dynamics? Both novels discussed in this chapter make use of a limited point of view with male protagonists as focalizers, and the question is what the voice depicting the women reveals about these male protagonists: are they embedded and fixed in the colonial discourse on the black woman, or are they able to recognize the women they encounter as mutual subjects? To examine these questions, I provide a close reading of a few significant scenes in which the novelists depict African women, paying particular attention to narrative perspective and voice. 1

Black Venus in the Italian Colonies

During the Scramble for Africa (ca. 1875–1914), Italy was still a young nation. According to the majority of the political environment, the Italian state had to secure its share of the so-called dark continent in order to create a mature nation, escape its subordinate international position and demonstrate its power and modernity.8 When Mussolini’s fascist government came to power in 1922, the colonial and expansionist policy of the late nineteenth century continued, and in 1936 the Italian Empire was officially proclaimed.9 One motive for the Italian expansionism, as previously mentioned, was a desire to display power both within the state and abroad. Another incentive was Italy’s poor economic situation; the authorities saw the colonies as an advantageous opportunity for acquiring new regions as sources of raw materials for their domestic industry, as well as for redirecting the large-scale emigration flow of unemployed Italians from the Americas, Australia and the other European countries to African territories, thereby boosting Italy’s economic 7 Giulietta Stefani, Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2007). 8 The entry of the Italian army into Eritrea in 1882 signals the starting point of Italy’s expansionist campaigns in Africa. During the years that followed, Italy obtained, through local agreements, a few small colonies in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, but the colonial army also suffered devastating defeats such as the Battle of Adwa in 1896 which became a symbol of African resistance. 9 The Italian imperial dream ended with the end of World War ii, and in 1947 Italy officially lost all its former colonies apart from the United Nations Trust Territory, Italian Somaliland, which remained under Italian administration until 1960.

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development.10 Those who joined the colonial campaign as farmers, as workers or soldiers were promised properties, jobs and wealth in exchange for their colonial contribution. In addition, the promise of exotic, beautiful and easily available local women drew Italian men to the colonies. During the occupation of the Horn of Africa, the representation of the black woman’s body played a significant role in the established colonial imagery, and the indigenous woman became a metaphor for the unknown, virgin African territory.11 Images of Black Venus were present in films, advertisements and songs, as well as in novels and poems. Studies have demonstrated that pictures and postcards showing nude or semi-nude black women were not only distributed in the private sphere as gifts to friends and family back in Italy, but were also used in the official imperial propaganda to attract both soldiers and workers to the new continent.12 The historian Silvana Palma even defines the use of images as “one of the fundamental instruments in the strategies and practices linked to the colonial discourse, thanks to their ability to recall topoi or establish new ones with an immediacy and an emotional intensity unknown to other types of texts,” thereby highlighting the rhetorical and emotional power of visual representations.13 And Sandra Ponzanesi, in “Beyond the Black Venus:

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Gigliola Dinucci, “Il modello della colonia libera nell’ideologia espansionistica italiana. Dagli anni ‘80 alla fine del secolo,” Storia contemporanea 3 (1979): 427–79. Analyzing the relationship between the white man and the black woman in colonial photographs, Campassi and Sega find that “The black woman becomes the symbol of Africa […] and the relationship between the white man and the black woman is symbolic of the relationship between the imperial nation and the colony; the man offers his stimulating, life–giving virility; the woman is thereby enriched in her self-fulfillment as the complement of masculine ego-expansion” (Gabriella Campassi & Maria Teresa Sega,“Uomo bianco. Donna nera: l’immagine della donna nella fotografia colonial,” Rivista di storia e critica della fotografia iv 5 [1983]: 55). See Sonia Sabelli, “L’eredità del colonialismo nelle rappresentazioni contemporanee del corpo femminile nero,” in Brava gente. Memoria e rappresentazioni del colonialismo, eds. Elena Petricola & Andrea Tappi, Zapruder 23 (2010): 106–15, Sandra Ponzanesi, Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (New York: suny Press, 2004), and Barbara Sòrgoni, Parole e corpi: Antropologia, discorso giuridico e politiche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea, 1890–1941 (Napoli: Liguori, 1998). For analysis of Italian colonial photographies in general see Silvana Palma, “Fotografia di una colonia: L’Eritrea di Luigi Naretti (1885–1900),” Quaderni storici vol. 37, No. 109 (1), La colonia: italiani in Eritrea (2002): 83–147. Silvana Palma, “The Seen, the Unseen, the Invented Misrepresentations of African ‘Otherness’ in the Making of a Colony. Eritrea, 1885–1896,” Cahiers d’études africaines (2005): 53. DOI: 10.4000/etudesafricaines.14887 (accessed 24 October 2018). Palma’s study focuses not only on the use of images of women during the colonial period, but also, among others, on those of men which were put to military use.

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Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices,” emphasises this even further when she states that: The exotic and alluring representations of the native served the purpose of inciting the virile and adventurous Italian soldiers and workers to venture into the unknown, uncharted and virgin soil of Africa. The inscriptions of the local women – as ‘black Venus’ – beautiful, docile and sexually available – corroborated the most important aspect of the rhetoric of empire, which used the sexual metaphor as a way of fusing the public discourse with the private.14 The women in these photos are generally anonymous, some look straight into the camera, but most of them gaze towards something or someone outside the camera’s frame rather than at the photographer, which may suggest unwillingness and/or shyness in front of the camera. Many of the young women are decorated with jewelry or with fabrics or leather alluding to the so-called ‘African wilderness.’ Quite a few of the pictures resemble classical works of art such as The Birth of Venus (1482–85)15 by Sandro Botticelli and the odalisques’ poses of J.A.D. Ingres (Grande Odalisque, 1814; L’Odalisque à l’esclave, 1839),16 yet the postcards are more sexually explicit because of the women’s exposed genitals and the motifs of bedroom setting. The allusions to known paintings suggest a certain similitude between the black body and malleable material, as well as an explicit reference to the sexual availability and willingness that is part of the Black Venus imaginary. In this way the photographs reproduce the stereotypical representation of the Black Woman: She, the dark continent, is servile and eager to capitulate to and please her master. 2

Colonies for Men

In Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere (2007, Colony for Men. Italians in East Africa: a Story of Gender), the historian Giulietta Stefani analyzes the gendered aspects of the Italian participation in the 14 15 16

Sandra Ponzanesi, “Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices,” in Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, eds. Jacqueline Andall & Derek Duncan (Peter Lang, 2005): 173. Tempera on canvas [172.5 cm x 278.9 cm], Uffizi, Florence. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, oil on canvas [91 cm x 162 cm], Musée du Louvre, Paris; L’Odalisque à l’esclave, oil on canvas [76 cm x 105 cm], Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

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S­ cramble for Africa and, in particular, the occupation of Ethiopia, focusing on the tight connections between colonialism and masculinity.17 One of the reasons for the Italian colonialism, Stefani argues, was the crisis which the European masculine role went through in the same period; a crisis chiefly prompted by nineteenth-century modernization and industrialization, with its alienation and loss of individualism, but also by increasing women’s liberation and the more negative stance on the bourgeois lifestyle. Social and individual insecurity put masculine gender identity, in particular, under pressure, and the fear of masculine degeneration spread.18 Stefani goes on to point out that the idea of a mandatory masculine regeneration culminated in the Great War, which was considered, by many, to be a kind of rite of passage and resurrection of male identity. Later, the combination of nationalism, virility and will to fight made up a powerful mix within fascist ideology and its emphasis on youth, strength, and health. According to Stefani, the Italian colonial campaign was considered to be an ideal means for recuperating and fulfilling a “genuine” and “strong” masculinity (29).19 Stefani underscores, however, that the African territory was not only seen as a place for regeneration, but also a land of exotic degeneration: The figure of Tarzan is emblematic of the possibility for the civilizing white man to recover and reinvigorate his manhood through the contact with primitive nature. The same theme can be found […] in many memoires written by Italians who have recovered courage and vigour by selfcontrol and rationality. Africa is the ideal place for this male journey, it is, par excellence, the place of the western male’s regeneration. Provided, however, that the white man doesn’t lose his reasoning faculties, brought to him by civilization, that ensure him racial superiority, otherwise the “primitivism” of inferior races will lead to a degeneration worse than the “effeminacy” produced by the weak life in the industrial city.20 17

To show a diversity of the Italian colonial experience Stefani makes use of complex and extensive material consisting of diaries, memoirs, novels, newspapers, essays, public speeches and documents, letters and more. 18 Stefani, Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere, 40–41. Further references are in the main text. 19 See also Rhiannon Noel Welch’s Vital Subjects. Race and Biopolitics in Italy, 1860–1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016). Whereas Stefani focuses on virile masculinity and re­ generation, Welch analyses the rhetorical making of post-Unification Italians, within the colonial and ­racial discursive frame of that time, as vital subjects: “robust, vigorous, wellnourished, and (re-)productive” (12). 20 “La figura di Tarzan è emblematica della possibilità per l’uomo bianco civilizzatore di recuperare e rinvigorire la propria virilità attraverso il contatto con la natura primitiva.

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This dual attitude towards the African colonies as a place of masculine recovery and its perdition is to be found in public discourse, as well as in colonial fiction published during the fascist era. The same ambivalence can be seen in the erotic construction of the colonies: as a “paradise of the senses” which could, if not socially controlled, turn into perversions and degeneration (98). After the introduction of the racial laws in 1938, relationships between Italian men and women from the colonies were punishable. In order to maintain racial superiority and purity, the danger of white degeneration and the inferior nature of the colonized were emphasized, and this is reflected in the radical change in representations of the black body. The sensually, erotically, and exotically displayed bodies in the photographs I have described previously partly begin to change; hence, in this period, one can find images representing the erotic black Venus exploiting the “the black female’s sexual appeal […] to reinforce the gender roles tailored by fascism,” as Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto states in her study on the Italian blaxploitation films of the 1970’s,21 and images showing what was considered to be repulsive and deformed black women. In order to limit the desire for the indigenous women, medical discourse, as well as fiction and visual media such as comics and commercial posters22 tried to make clear, in the service of fascism, the connection between black women and deformity, monstrosity, and degeneration.23 As we can see, the Italian ­imagery of

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È lo stesso tema rintracciato […] in molte delle memorie degli italiani, che vantano un recupero del coraggio e del vigore temperato dall’autocontrollo e dalla razionalità. L’Africa è il luogo ideale per questo percorso maschile, è, per antonomasia, il luogo di rigenerazione del maschio occidentale. A patto però che l’uomo bianco non perda le facoltà raziocinanti, portato della civilizzazione, che ne assicurano la superiorità razziale, perché altrimenti il sopravvento del “primitivismo” della razza inferiore lo condurrà a una degenerazione che è peggio dell”effeminatezza’ prodotta dalla molle vita della città industriale” (Stefani, Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere, 97). Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, “Blaxploitation Italian Style: Exhuming and Consuming the Colonial Black Venus in 1970s Cinema in Italy,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, Cristina Lombardi-Diop & Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 193. For a rich presentation of photographies, postcards and commercial posters displaying erotic black Venuses or deformed black female bodies, see also the essay “Corpi di donne nel colonialismo italiano” published on the blog Schiavi e servi (Slaves and Servants), http://schiavieservi.blogspot.com/2011/07/corpi-di-donne-nel-colonialismo.html ­(accessed 24 September 2017). As Sander L. Gilman shows, the connections between scientific, or medical discourse in particular, and racial stereotypes became common in the nineteenth century during which “the female Hottentot comes to represent the black female in nuce” (Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 [1985]: 206). One critic, for example, shows the contradictions in the fascist use of the so-called Hottentot

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the black woman re-echoes the paradoxical “master text” on the black female body of which Gjerden, Jegerstedt and Švrljuga write in this volume’s opening essay. Having seen how the erotic and exotic Black Venus was replaced by the deformed body, I will now explore what happens in the anti–colonial literature of the post-war era. 3

The Deserts of Libya and the Colonial Fantasy

The novel The Deserts of Libya tells the story of the Italian 3rd Regiment of the 31st Medical Corps stationed in the Libyan oasis Sorman, close to the Tunisian border, at a safe distance from the war action. The first part of the novel narrates how members of the regiment, from privates to senior officers, relate to each other and to the locals, and how they handle the homesickness and passivity they all experience. Due to the Italian defeat and retreat in Africa and the battles between German and British troops, the regiment is sent closer to the battle lines, and the second part of the novel narrates more of the actual war action. Thus, the novel is both a reflection on the Italian presence in the colony and an account of the Italian army’s situation: the poor conditions, fear and madness, disastrous battles and devastating nostalgia. The novel’s anti– colonial stance is evident in the narrator’s ironic comments on the characters’ prejudices with regard to, for example, Libyan culture, the soldiers’ behaviour, and the fascist colonial politics. There is little interaction between Italians and Libyans in the novel, and even less between Italian soldiers and Libyan women. The chapter “Woman’s Wiles” is the only exception, and it is important to this analysis because it ­explicitly shows the connection between the novel’s representations of the Libyan woman and the stereotypical images of Black Venus.

Venus. In 1938, after being absent from the Italian scientific discussion for at least thirty years, the fascist periodical La difesa della razza published a drawing of Saartjie Baartman to warn Italians about the dangers of deformity in children of interracial relationships (Barbara Sòrgoni, “‘Defending the Race’: the Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8.3 [2003]: 412). But, as Sòrgoni shows, by that time the Italian colonies, which did not include areas in South Africa from which Baartman came, already had a notable presence of children of mixed races, whose photographs could have been used as evidence, but did not support the fascist racism and fear of degeneration.

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The novel’s protagonist is Lieutenant Doctor Marcello. His attitude to the Italian presence in Libya and the Arabic culture he meets in the colony is complex and ambiguous. The lieutenant, a “true and fervent admirer of feminine beauty,”24 is quite disappointed because the only women he has met to that point in the Libyan colony are those he describes as “old witches,” and those protected by veils from his longing gaze. His fascination with and desire for the Arab harem and the erotic secrets that the veiled woman hides have not yet come to fruition. He remembers the stories that a certain Colonel Sacchetti has told him with such passionate precision, of the camel driver who, like a “master, king, emperor,” beckons his woman to drop her clothes and begin “the slow belly-dance that for centuries has kindled the eyes of the Arab men and filled them with desire” (214). So far none of the women Marcello has met resemble the ones he has heard stories about; none of them corresponds with his colonial fantasy, which is to unveil the hidden erotic secrets of the female other. However, the lieutenant’s luck changes and, while visiting Mahmud, one of the oasis’ patriarchs, he is asked to perform a medical exam on one of his host’s young, female relatives. The girl unveils in front of him and hides her breasts for a moment. Marcello’s heart turned over. Her face was exquisitely beautiful, and she gave a stifled sob of laughter […]. Marcello realized that if he wanted to prolong this vision he must keep a tight hold on himself […]. Marcello put his ear to the girl’s chest: her heart was beating like a captive bird’s, and she was breathing unevenly, in little short gasps. Marcello was tortured by the thought that if he was silent for too long Mahmud would turn around; yet he knew he could not control his voice […] for a brief moment he let his hand rest on the girl’s breasts. But this was so disturbing that at once it seemed to him as if he had not touched her at all. (212–13) The examination ends, the girl covers herself, and Marcello, “after that brief vision of pure and hidden virgin beauty, found himself once more facing the mystery of the East” (213). In the literary passages I compare in this essay, narrative focalization and the gaze are central. “To gaze,” Jonathan Schroeder states, “implies more than

24

Mario Tobino, The Deserts of Libya in The Lost Legions, tr. Archibald Colquhoun & Antonia Cowan (London: MacGibbon & Kee Limited, 1967): 206. Further page references are in the main text.

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to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.”25 The gaze, be it filmic, photographic, literary or other, is therefore never objective or neutral, but always engaged in a power relationship between the subject and the object. In the ground-­breaking essay in feminist film criticism, “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasures” (1975), Laura Mulvey bases her analysis on Lacanian psychoanalysis, claiming that mainstream narrative cinema seldom presents women as possessors of the gaze; they are almost always portrayed as objects of the male gaze and thus of male desire. The spectators will identify with the male protagonist and gaze at the woman through his eyes, “so that the active power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.”26 As we have seen, the perspective in the previous excerpt is limited exclusively to the lieutenant’s side of the encounter. He, the possessor of the gaze, is superior to the girl being watched, judged and touched. Marcello interprets the girl’s laugh as coquetry and her gasps as excitement; it never occurs to him that they may be signs of fear. His interpretation of the encounter is not contested because the narrator’s focalization stays with him. The next passage reveals how reality is overruled by fantasy and memory, which render the girl he has just examined even more beautiful. While explaining to Mahmud the symptoms of a disease that the girl does not have, Marcello relives his magical encounter: [H]e looked wistfully at the place where the girl’s face had been a moment before. She had a lovely pure forehead; her hair was black and rather dishevelled; her deep black eyes danced with a fierce joy; her nose was small and delicate; and her cheeks, her mouth, and the oval of her face had the perfect Oriental beauty of the girl he had imagined and dreamed about – without ever really believing he would actually meet her, talk to her, and even touch her and feel her heart beat. (213) The lieutenant does not need to have the girl in front of him; his memories vividly come alive before him, partly due to the conventional imperialist and colonialist descriptions of the black woman. His prejudiced conception of the

25 26

Jonathan Schroeder, Visual Consumption (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 58. Mulvey, “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasures,” 12. The spectator will engage with the characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male, hence women were seen more as objects than as subjects.

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Other is challenged to a certain degree during the following encounter with two female relatives of Mahmud: They might have been a couple of Venetian beauties, were it not for their oriental colouring. They vied with each other in their eagerness to expose their triumphant nakedness. The so-called sister-in-law was the first. Her robe fell from her like lead. […] Neither of them was ill: they were just fiercely, provocatively exited. Tall, in the full splendour of life, had they not been Arab women with centuries of slavery behind them, they would have triumphed in elegant streets and drawing-rooms – instead of which they had dared and intrigued in order to get themselves examined by a young doctor who had become friend of their husband and master […]. They stood there before him, full of pride in their own beauty, and of curiosity about him; but above all he could see in their eyes – in their whole expressions – an unformulated hostility, a latent gleam of rebellion. (214) All this – the excitement, the pride, the rebellion – the lieutenant perceives by only looking at the two women. But to the reader, the scene is quite ambiguous: Do the women want to undress in front of a stranger, or have they been ordered to do so? And, if the latter, why? The novel does not offer any answer to these questions because the focalization denies the reader access to the women’s side of the story. According to the lieutenant, they belong to their master and must obey him, but at the same time they cannot hide their desire for the White Man. He sees them as proud but submissive; he styles them to fit his fantasy and superior position, but they also leave him with a sense of their resistance and defiance. And even if they had been emancipated from what the lieutenant sees as slavery, the only role he is able to imagine for them is as objects of the masculine gaze and male desire. After the examinations, Marcello walks happily back to the regiment’s encampment: “he had finally seen the beauty of the Arabian Nights, a beauty that obtained value because it is secret and risky” (87). This exemplifies the argument Meyda Yegenoglu makes in Colonial Fantasies (1998): “In Western eyes the Orient is always more and other than what it appears to be, for it is always and everywhere in a veiled, disguised, and deceptive manner.”27 Because of the veil, the Libyan woman is less available to the colonialist, and because of it, she is a source of erotic–exotic fantasies, which Marcello has finally experienced.

27

Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 48 (emphasis in orig.).

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In the cited scenes the women represent a kind of regeneration of the male subject: the examination of the women has shown Marcello that all the stories he has heard about the Orient are true, and he leaves the visit satisfied with his adventure. It is the narrator who reveals that the encounter has been conditioned by his Oriental fantasies throughout, by subtly and ironically underscoring the three women’s fear, resistance and hostility during the examinations, as well as the power of fantasy over reality. 4

The Short Cut’s Black Venus

The Short Cut by Ennio Flaiano is set in Ethiopia during the thirties. An unnamed lieutenant in the Italian army has obtained a few days’ leave because of a toothache. He tries to reach another camp to find a dentist, but during the journey his car breaks down, and he decides to continue on foot. After a few hours he loses his way and suddenly comes across a local woman taking a bath in a pond: The woman did not notice my presence. She was naked and was washing herself at one of the pools, squatting down like a well-trained domestic animal. I thought as I watched her that she would show me the way […]. A woman washing herself is a very common sight in these parts and shows that a village is near. “There are all sorts of things in this bush,” I said. And went on looking at the woman. In fact I sat down, noticing now that I was really tired after the morning’s useless march.28 The novel is narrated in the first person, as we see in the citation above, by way of internal focalization, and privileges the narrator-protagonist’s gaze and thoughts. The reader has to follow his scrutinizing and almost cinematic eyes as he lazily examines the naked woman, whom he compares to an animal. The voyeur does not shun the scene in which the woman is caught in a private, intimate moment, but instead makes himself comfortable: The woman lifted her hands lazily, raising the water to her breast and letting it fall on it; she seemed rapt in her game. Perhaps she […] would stay there a long time still, determined to wash without haze for the pleasure of feeling the water run over her skin […]. She did not notice my presence and I stayed to watch her. It was a very common sight, but better than 28

Ennio Flaiano, The Short Cut, tr. Stuart Hood (The Marlboro Press: Vermont, 1992): 12. Further page references are in the main text.

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any others that had come my way up till then. Since the game showed no signs of stopping, I lit a cigarette and meantime decided to rest. (12) There is still no interaction between them, and the focalization is still with the narrator when he leaves his voyeuristic position; he walks up to the woman and tries to seize her arms: When I touched her she pushed me away and made to rise. Her face had darkened. I made her sit down again brusquely […] she repelled me with firmness, but my desire, so ill expressed, did not offend her […]. She repelled my hands because thus Eve had repelled the hands of Adam in such a thicket. Or perhaps so as to give greater value to the adventure, because to repel is a phase in the game, or perhaps because she was afraid. But afraid of what? It was certainly not the fear of being raped, but the more profound fear of the slave who yields to her master. She had to pay her part of the war which her menfolk were losing. (18) The woman remains voiceless, and her signs of resistance are misinterpreted; it does not occur to the protagonist that she is, in fact, trying to stop him. This scene resembles the power position from which the male colonialist interprets and fixates the female other in Tobino’s novel. The two male protagonists’ views of the indigenous women are so embedded in the Black Venus tradition that neither the object nor the subject of the gaze is capable of escaping it. The last citation also exemplifies what Stefani argues in her study on colonialism as the means to masculinity’s regeneration. In Flaiano’s novel, the man is in power; he sees the woman’s fear, but ignores it and sets himself in the position of the master and conqueror before he rapes her. During the night that follows, the lieutenant accidently shoots and wounds the woman and then kills her. Does he regret raping and killing her? No. The only thing he is afraid of is being accused of manslaughter: I stood and thought of finishing her off. I must kill her. Many reasons counselled me to kill her, all equally strong. I must finish her off and hide the corpse […]. I leaned over and caressed her brow. I chased away two flies which had alit at the corners of her mouth […]. I did not think about anything except of aiming straight […]. I saw her turning her head under the turban. I fired. (40–41) To comfort himself the lieutenant tells himself that he had just put her out of pain and misery, and in order not to get caught by the authorities, he buries the woman under a pile of rocks. Just a few moments earlier he had put her

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down like an injured animal. Now, with much attention, but with just as much absurdity, he picks out the rocks with great care to cover her body: Before putting the stones in place […] I laid the dress on her corpse like a shroud and said a short prayer. On the dress I placed two crossed branches, thinking that I would not be able to put them on the grave mound […] With what care I chose the stones and with what care I put them, one at a time, on this body that received them so gently. (42–43) Marcel Schneider has rightfully stated that Flaiano’s novel differs from the fascist literature that “glorified the action-loving, violent Fascist mind and body that was supposed to signal Italy’s recuperation of Roman glory.”29 Others interpret the novel as the representation of an existential encounter with the unknown and the absurd.30 The novel is written in an oneiric and surreal style, and its protagonist represents the opposite of the fascist literary heroes: he is cowardly in his efforts to escape from the consequences of his actions, and shows signs of degeneration and weakness. Ultimately, he falls ill from an imaginary illness, before he lets his fear get the better of him. During their encounter, the voiceless woman in Flaiano’s novel represents regeneration of the strong and virile male subject, but then she turns into a symbol of degeneration. Still voiceless, she transforms the confident and victorious Italian lieutenant into a paranoid, confused and insecure protagonist who fears for his security and life. The roles have changed to the extent that the lieutenant is left defenceless and without control of his own life, like the indigenous woman before him. But, although the novel implicitly comments on the wrongdoings of the Italian fascist presence in Africa by representing the male protagonist as weak, its anti-colonial project is only partly fulfilled because, in my opinion, it does not escape the Oriental framing of the indigenous woman. Just as Tobino’s protagonist interprets the Libyan women’s behaviour within the stereotypical frame of the mysterious and erotic veiled woman, Flaiano’s protagonist reproduces and lives the myth of the sexually willing indigenous woman and the white man’s superiority. Thus, the novel re-echoes the colonial discourse so important to the Italian nation-building project and imperial ambitions. The two novels’ male protagonists’ gaze is governed by their Eurocentric ideological background; their white, male gaze “steadies [the black 29 30

Marcel Schneider, “Allegory and Anti-history in Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere,” Stanford Italian Review 4.1 (1986): 111. Francesco Jovine, “Tempo di uccidere,” in La critica e Flaiano, ed. Lucilla Sergiacomo (Pescara: Ediars, 1992): 98.

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woman], in order to decode and conformably recode her into its own system of representation.”31 5

The Colonialist and the Missing Looking Relation

In Looking for the Other (1997), E. Ann Kaplan affirms that “like everything in culture, looking relations are determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, economics,” thereby arguing that “the possibilities for looking are carefully controlled, [because] looking is power.”32 The object of her study is inter-gender and inter-racial looking relations and subjectivity in film, and she builds her gaze theory on Mulvey, among others. Of fundamental importance in her analysis is the notion of the imperial gaze with which we represent the ethnic Other, which “reflects the assumption that the white Western subject is central, much as the male gaze assumes centrality of the male subject” (78). In accordance with psychoanalytical film theory, Kaplan also affirms that anxiety prevents this gaze from actually seeing the people gazed at: The anxiety arises from the fragility of being in the “master” position. Masters unconsciously know that mastery cannot remain theirs forever: there’s always the threat of being toppled. The gaze of the colonialist thus refuses to acknowledge its own power and privilege: it unconsciously represses knowledge of power hierarchies and its need to dominate, to control. Like the male gaze, it’s an objectifying gaze, one that refuses mutual gazing, mutual subject-to-subject recognition. It refuses what I am calling a “looking relation.” (79) Tobino’s novel can be seen to thematize this fear of being toppled. Here, the protagonist’s anxiety occurs on two levels. On the narrative level, Marcello fears that he will reveal his excitement in front of Mahmud. Since it is the colonized male subject who is staging the unveiling, Marcello’s voyeuristic pleasure is regulated “from below.” Because of the fear of being toppled, Marcello has to hide and disguise his desires in order to prolong his erotic encounter with the female Other. It is in Mahmud’s power to either put an end to the fantasy and punish the colonizer, or to repeat the session and reward Marcello. Thus, the colonialist is not in control; the Other man is. On the unconscious level, the colonialist is afraid of losing his position and is hence unable to see the women’s 31 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (New York: Grove Press, 1967): 110–11. 32 Kaplan, Looking for the Other, 4. Further page references are in the main text.

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subjectivity. Even though he recognizes the hostility and the rebellion in the two adult women’s eyes, their look, in Kaplan’s terminology, remains a simple gaze, and the protagonist does not engage in the so-called looking relation, acknowledging the two women’s individuality. They remain representations of the Oriental woman who is beautiful, mysterious, but subdued, and who answers only to her master. In The Short Cut, the missing looking relation between the colonial man and the colonized woman is perhaps even clearer. The woman remains voiceless during the whole encounter, and there is nothing in the lieutenant’s description of her that gives her individuality and personality. She is almost a part of the scenery, placed in front of him so he can affirm his superior white, male position. Her every movement is interpreted as part of an erotic game, and as the slave’s surrender to her far more civilized master. But something changes when the protagonist thinks he has caught leprosy from her. Having discovered spots and wounds on his hands, he becomes paranoid and mistrustful, convinced, incorrectly, that he will either be exposed as a killer or die from the illness. Infecting him and slowly killing him, the Other woman, according to the lieutenant, has the power. She has taken her revenge, but is still denied individuality and personality, becoming instead a symbol of the danger of degeneration that the colonial adventure constitutes, as described by Stefani in her study on masculinity and Italian colonialism. Unlike the images of deformed women described earlier in this essay, the woman in Flaiano’s novel does not appear in a degenerated form; it is the lieutenant himself that degenerates after he rapes her. His newly regained glory and mastery of the Other turns out to be a brief moment of regeneration, and it is inevitable that he fall back into the male crisis of the early twentieth century. 6

Concluding Remarks

After its defeat in World War ii, Italy lost all its colonies, and studies and public discussions related to Italy’s colonial past have been absent until recently.33 Because of this, myths about the italiani brava gente have, and in some regards continue to have, a controlling and defining influence on both the popular and the official image of Italians as different from other European colonizers, 33

For extensive studies of the Italian colonial history see, e.g. Nicola Labanca, Oltrem­are. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2002); Ruth Ben-Ghiat & Mia Fuller ed. Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005); Jacqueline Andall & Derek Duncan ed. Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory­ (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).

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b­ eing more benign or human colonizers. The two novels I have analysed in this chapter diverge somewhat from this perspective by showing a critical attitude towards the colonial intervention in Africa and destabilizing, to some degree, the male gaze and position. In The Deserts of Libya this is evident in the protagonist’s fear of being toppled and losing access to his Arab fantasies, and in The Short Cut in the lieutenant’s fear of either being identified as a murderer or killed by the woman’s disease. Nevertheless, they both reflect the gender and racial dynamics of the period portrayed. Looking relations are, according to Kaplan, determined by such mechanisms as history and power hierarchies, and this becomes clear when deconstructing the male gaze in Tobino’s and Flaiano’s novels, which, as discussed above, fail to engage with Kaplan’s inter-racial and inter-gendered gaze. Instead, the protagonists objectify the women they encounter by focusing on their bodies and seeing them as slaves who must obey to their masters. Thus, Black Venus becomes an object onto which the white man, through his voyeuristic drive and pleasure, projects his own dreams and fears. The literary descriptions of the female Other in the two novels remain static within an imperial male tradition, even when put to ironic use. When introducing the two novels, I asked why these predecessors of Italian post-colonial literature still represent the colonized woman through the traditional tropes and prejudices, which belong to the nineteenth-century descriptions of Black Venus. The myth and fantasy of the willing and exotic Other seem to have been strong and enduring since the post-war novels examined here are not able to represent the black woman without falling into stereotypical descriptions focusing solely on her looks, body and skin colour. The Deserts of Libya and The Short Cut show how naturalized the pseudo-scientific and imperial discourse of the African woman had become, and I would suggest that the stereotypical exotic-erotic Black Venus representations in the two novels also function as a means to strengthen the modern white, male subject still in crisis after the war by making a clear distinction between themselves and the female Other. Works Cited Andall, Jacqueline & Derek, Duncan ed. Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005). Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, & Mia Fuller ed. Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Campassi, Gabriella & Maria Teresa Sega. “Uomo bianco. Donna nera: l’immagine della donna nella fotografia colonial,” Rivista di storia e critica della fotografia iv 5 (1983): 54–62.

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Caponetto, Rosetta Giuliani. ‘Going Out of Stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period (Ph.D Dissertation. University of Connecticut, 2008) http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3329116 (accessed 20 April 2015). Caponetto, Rosetta Giuliani. “Blaxploitation Italian Style: Exhuming and Consuming the Colonial Black Venus in 1970s Cinema in Italy,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop & Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 191–203. “Corpi di donne nel colonialismo italiano,” Schiavi e servi (5 July 2011), http://­ schiavieservi.blogspot.com/2011/07/corpi-di-donne-nel-colonialismo.html ­(accessed 24 September 2017). Del Boca, Angelo. “The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism,” in A Place in the Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Literature from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003): 17–36. Dinucci, Gigliola. “Il modello della colonia libera nell’ideologia espansionistica italiana. Dagli anni ‘80 alla fine del secolo,” Storia contemporanea 3 (1979): 427–79. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask, tr. Charles L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Flaiano, Ennio. Tempo di uccidere (1947. Milano: Rizzoli, 1974). Flaiano, Ennio. The Short Cut, tr. Stuart Hood (The Marlboro Press: Vermont, 1992). Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 204–42. Jovine, Francesco. “Tempo di uccidere,” in La critica e Flaiano, ed. Lucilla Sergiacomo (Pescara: Ediars, 1992): 98–100. Kaplan, Ann E. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997). Labanca, Nicola. Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2002). Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Orlandini, Roberta. “(Anti)colonialismo in Tempo di uccidere di Ennio Flaiano,” Italica 69.4 (1992): 478–88. Palma, Silvana. “Fotografia di una colonia. L’Eritrea di Luigi Naretti (1885–1900),” Quaderni storici Vol. 37, No. 109 (1), La colonia: italiani in Eritrea (2002): 83–147. Palma, Silvana. “The Seen, the Unseen, the Invented. Misrepresentations of African ‘Otherness’ in the Making of a Colony. Eritrea, 1885–1896,” Cahiers d’études africaines (2005): 39–69. DOI: 10.4000/etudesafricaines.14887. Polezzi, Loredana. “White Male, and Italian Performance. Masculinity in Italian Travel Writing about Africa,” in In Copore. Bodies in Post-Unification Italy, eds. Loredana Polezzi & Charlotte Ross (Madison & Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2007): 29–55.

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Polezzi, Loredana. “Il pieno e il vuoto: Visual Representations of Africa in Italian Accounts of Colonial Experiences,” Italian Studies, 67:3 (2012): 336–59. Ponzanesi, Sandra. Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (New York: suny Press, 2004). Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices,” in Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, eds. Jacqueline Andall & Derek Duncan (Peter Lang, 2005). Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Passaggi migranti: genere, generazioni e genealogie nella letteratura postcoloniale italiana,” in World Wide Women Globalizzazione, Generi, Linguaggi, 3. Torino, cirsde – Centro Interdisciplinare di Ricerche e Studi delle Donne Università degli Studi di Torino, eds. T. Caponio, F. Giordano, Manetti, L. Ricaldone (2011): 139–54. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Robecchi-Bricchetti, Luigi. Nell’Harrar (Milano: Galli, 1896). http://www.archive.org/ details/nellharrar00bricgoog (accessed 10 Februray 2015). Sabelli, Sonia. “L’eredità del colonialismo nelle rappresentazioni contemporanee del corpo femminile nero,” in Brava gente. Memoria e rappresentazioni del colonialismo, eds. Elena Petricola & Andrea Tappi, Zapruder 23 (2010): 106–15. Schneider, Marcel. “Allegory and Anti-history in Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere,” Stanford Italian Review 4.1 (1986): 107–21. Schroeder, Jonathan. Visual Consumption (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Sòrgoni, Barbara. Parole e corpi: Antropologia, discorso giuridico e politiche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea, 1890–1941 (Napoli: Liguori, 1998). Sorgoni, Barbara. “‘Defending the Race’: the Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus During Fascism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8.3 (2003): 411–24. Stefani, Giulietta. Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2007). Tobino, Mario. The Deserts of Libya in The Lost Legions, tr. Archibald Colquhoun & Antonia Cowan (London: MacGibbon & Kee Limited, 1967). Yegenoglu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Welch, Rhiannon Noël. Vital Subjects: Race, (Re)productivity, and Italian Modernity (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016).

Chapter 6

The Voice of Venus

Angela Carter’s “Black Venus” and the Democratization of Literature Kari Jegerstedt Abstract Kari Jegerstedt raises the question of how, if at all, it is possible to ‘give voice’ to the abjected, always already erased other, considering the simultaneous world-scattering and wor(l)ding effects of imperialism on writing and (post)colonial regimes of know­ ledge and subjectivity. Addressing the question from the perspective of the ­(self)critical white feminist, Jegerstedt revisits Carter’s short story “Black Venus,” lauded by c­ ritics for giving voice to Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire’s Caribbean lover. Jegerstedt stresses that the narrator does not simply re-present Duval but quite explicitly substitutes her own ‘voice’ for Duval’s – thus enacting a similar overwriting of Duval’s voice to the one Baudelaire may be said to do. She goes on to argue that, rather than ‘giving voice,’ the story problematizes the (imperialistic) silencing which is at work in what Jacques Rancière has called the democratic era of literature. At the same time, however, the short story also points to the earlier oral tradition and the fairy tale as alternative narrative venues for establishing global solidarity, thus highlighting again the issue of genre in questions concerning the imagination.

The question of whether and, if so, how it is possible to give voice to the historically abjected women who have embodied the figure of Black Venus in racialized and sexualized Western discourses has long been a source of much debate in Black Venus scholarship: is it possible, or even desirable, to give voice to someone whose thoughts and mind can only be inferred? Is it possible to re-present someone without at the same time presuming to speak for her? Will not all kinds of re-presentation ultimately serve as re-appropriations of always already erased figures, only in and for other discourses and for others’ interests?1 These difficulties are no less pertinent from within self-critical, 1 For a short presentation of various stands on this question, see for example Jorunn Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt & Željka Švrljuga, “‘The Venus Hottentot is Unavailable for Comment’: ­Questioning Representation through Aesthetic Practices,” in Gendered Citizenship and the

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anti-racist white Western feminism. As Gayatri Spivak reminds us in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been an incommensurable and discontinuous other into a domesticated other that consolidates the imperialist self.2 However, a feminist practice dedicated to undoing the injustices of history, and thereby inscribing the present within a richer past, cannot choose not to work on this dilemma. The specific importance of Black Venus for a feminist rewriting of history from within imperial structures should be obvious: without taking into account how race, gender and sexuality are produced, intertwined and still function in imperialist discourses and contexts, (Western) feminism will never come to terms with its own imperialist roots. The question remains, however, as to what such a rewriting might look like. In order to assess some of the problems involved in this dilemma, this chapter revisits one of the early white feminist attempts to ‘give voice’ to Black Venus: the British feminist author Angela Carter’s short story “Black Venus” – a ludic rewriting of the life and times of Jeanne Duval (Charles Baudelaire’s lover and muse, celebrated most famously in the so-called Black Venus cycle of Les Fleurs du mal). Contrary to most critics, who argue that Carter is actually giving voice to Black Venus, I ­argue that the short story problematizes precisely the possibilities of doing so from within Western literary and aesthetic traditions. Instead, the short story calls for a renewed transnational solidarity on the basis of a globally shared storytelling practice. Originally published in the series “Next Editions” in 1980, “Black Venus” was later to become the title story of Carter’s short story collection Black Venus (1985). As several critics have noted, the concern in Black Venus is with history and with the attempts, in the words of Lorna Sage, to “resurrect (by means of invention, naturally) materials that didn’t quite make it to the record, and voices we didn’t get to hear.”3 Thus, the stories published in the collection differ from the more common preoccupation with literary and mythological figures Politics of Representation, ed. Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild Muriaas, & Brita Ytre–Arne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 281–303. 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999): 130. 3 Lorna Sage, Angela Carter. 2nd edition (Horndon, Tavistock and Devon: Northcote House, 2007): 44.

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in Carter’s earlier writing. What is at stake, in other words, is the relationship between the aesthetic, the fictive, and the historical–political, especially as it concerns the question of ‘voice’ and agency. As such, Sarah Gamble argues, Black Venus “shows the beginning of a new compromise being negotiated between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in Carter’s work, whereby the exercise of her extravagant imagination returns us increasingly and definitively to the realm of the real.”4 Nevertheless, in narrative technique and purpose, the collection forms part of what can be said to be the broader dedication in all of Carter’s work: to reread and rewrite the social fictions – or what she calls “myths” – that structure our reality; that is, the myths that structure what can be heard, said and sensed at a particular place, in a particular time. In this sense, Carter’s texts quite selfconsciously participate in the dynamics that, according to the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, literature shares with politics, namely the investment in “the re-distribution of the sensible,” where the sensible is a specific “partition of the visible and the sayable […] that frames a polemical common world.”5 Myths, Carter writes in her autobiographical essay “Notes from the Front Line,” are “extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree,” and declares herself a “de-mythologizer.”6 By strategically and critically–aesthetically intervening in “bits and pieces from various mythologies” (38), as she expresses it, and “putting new wine in old bottles [so that] the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (37), she aims to transform “actual fiction forms to both reflect and to precipitate changes in the way people feel about themselves” (42). As I have argued elsewhere, this writing/reading strategy – which strives to destabilize Western hegemonic narratives from within – places Carter firmly within a postmodern tradition of what Ross Chambers calls oppositional (or appropriative) critique, proceeding, most typically, in a ‘de Certeaudian’7

4 Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter. Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997): 149. 5 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, tr. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004): 10. 6 Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line,” in Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997): 38. Further page references are in the main text. 7 In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) Michel de Certeau famously argues that the daily ­actions and movements of common people subvert power structures by not always adhering to the rules and norms those structures call for and are meant to institute. He calls these actions, which might be wholly non-conscious, “tactics” as opposed to the “strategies” built into power structures. Several post-structuralist thinkers, among them Ross Chambers, have utilized this notion of “tactics” to theorize alternative forms of opposition.

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manner, “making use of dominant structures [various mythologies] for ‘other’ purposes [than they were meant for] and in ‘other’ interests.”8 In “Black Venus,” it is precisely the social creation or myth of the Black Venus figure that is redeployed and created anew in this manner. The aim is, as Jill Matus has argued, to tease out, through parody, “the racist and colonialist assumptions that inform traditional versions of Jeanne Duval” and thus challenge “the politics of assumptions about the sexualized woman as dark, diseased and corrupting.”9 Yet, since the story is also the title story, the way Carter redeploys this figure may be seen to signal the larger feminist-imaginary project that is at play, if not in her entire oeuvre, then at least in this specific collection. What, then, is it that the figure/myth/social creation of Black Venus offers to Carter’s de-mythologizing undertaking, understood as a feminist project of rewriting history? More specifically: how does her redeployment of the Black Venus figure relate to the historical figure of Jeanne Duval? And to what extent, and to what ends, does the signifier ‘Jeanne Duval’ come to figure in a wider exploration of the relationship between voice, history and fiction? Or, to phrase it somewhat differently: does Carter’s ‘Certeaudian using otherwise’ of the Black Venus figure merely re-appropriate the historical Jeanne Duval for Carter’s own literary project and personal desire, or does it open for a genuine exploration of what a feminist aesthetic practice can do in the realm of the political? This discussion draws upon Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime of art (literature included), which is explicitly constituted in a relationship to silence. Carter’s story dramatizes this formative breaking of silence through the notion of colonial silencing, thus eventually pointing beyond Rancière. In conclusion, then, I suggest that Walter Benjamin’s notions of the traditional tale, or storytelling, paves the way for a different praxis of solidarity. 1

Voice and Historical Agency

Most critics focus their reading of “Black Venus” on Carter’s redeployment and critique of male, colonial stereotypes of the other in Baudelaire’s poetry. The bulk of the short story consists of explicit rewritings of Baudelaire, but critics who focus solely, or first and foremost, on these aspects, miss important 8 Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991): xiii, cited in Kari Jegerstedt, “The Art of Speculation: Allegory and Parody as Critical Reading Strategies in The Passion of New Eve,” in Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, ed. Sonya Andermahr & Lawrence Phillips (London and New York: Continuum, 2012): 131. 9 Jill Matus, “Blonde, Black and Hottentot Venus: Context and Critique in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (1991): 467.

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elements in Carter’s more extensive involvement with literary form and genres. Formally, “Black Venus” can be divided into several distinct parts: the first and longest part, which takes its imagery almost exclusively from Baudelaire’s own poetry, is set in the poet’s Parisian apartment, one of “those smoky–rose, smoky–mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart,”10 where Duval is made to play Baudelaire’s “monkey, […] pussy-cat, […] pet” (10), and dance naked before making love to him. What readers are presented with here is precisely, to cite Spivak once again, the “domesticated other” – here figuring redundantly as domesticated animal – “that consolidates the imperialist self”: Duval is “[t]he goddess of [Baudelaire’s] heart, the ideal of the poet […]; he liked to have her make a spectacle of herself, to provide a sumptuous feast for his bright eyes that were always bigger than his belly” (18). The trope of the colonial other here taps directly into the trope of Black Venus as spectacle, produced by and playing up to white, male desire.11 Yet, as has been repeatedly noted in “Black Venus” criticism, the narration is also infused with an alternative perspective. This perspective, held in the same free indirect discourse which characterizes the rest of the first part, is supposedly Duval’s: “If she was going to dance naked to earn her keep, anyway, why shouldn’t she dance naked for hard cash in hand and earn enough to keep herself? Eh? Eh?” (13). As several critics have pointed out, the alternative perspective given to Duval serves to consistently punctuate the lofty poetic dreamlike language of the poet with the ordinary and mundane – thus subverting the trope of the muse, replacing it with the image of a quite commonplace woman preoccupied with sheer survival and enjoyment.12 According to the narrator, “A slumberous resentment of anything you could not eat, drink or smoke, i.e. burn, was [Duval’s] salient characteristic […] Consumption, combustion, these were her vocations” (12). There is a similar preoccupation with survival and enjoyment that structures the shorter, final part of the story, which serves as a sort of ‘conclusion’ to the narrative. Here Duval is transposed out of Baudelaire’s poetry, and a new, alternative ending to her life story is created for her. The narrator, who in the last part of the story speaks from a strictly impersonal perspective, makes Duval outlive Baudelaire by several years and sends her back to Martinique – quite well off with the money she inherits from Baudelaire – from where, until extreme old age, “she will continue to dispense, to the most privileged of the 10 11 12

Angela Carter, “Black Venus,” in Black Venus (London: Picador, 1985): 9. Further page references are in the main text. For a careful reading of how Carter utilizes and subverts specific poems by Baudelaire, see Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Parody. 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002): 141–46. See for example Matus (1991), Schmid (1997), Munford (2004), and Hutcheon (2002).

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colonial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairian syphilis” (23). Not surprisingly, this last part is commonly read as Carter’s most radical revision of Duval’s story, forming a clear-cut alternative to the suffocating and oppressive sexual, domestic drama of the first part.13 These two (main) parts, however, are also interspersed with lesser narratives. On the formal level, these parts are divided by the insertion of the factual report by Félix Nadar (photographer and a friend of Baudelaire), who claimed to have seen Duval on the streets of Paris after Baudelaire’s death, in terrifying bodily and economic decay: “her teeth were gone, she had a mammy-rag tied around her head but you could still see that her wonderful hair had fallen out. […] He did not stop to speak to her” (22). One of the functions of this insertion is to underscore the pure fictitiousness of the last part, since Duval never escaped Paris and might even have died prior to Baudelaire. On the level of the plot, the report also establishes the narrative conditions (the decay and poverty Duval might have experienced in Paris) that are broken in the ‘conclusion.’ The inclusion of the report is, in other words, more fictional than factual. Moreover, its historical correctness is in itself dubious; Nadar’s claim that it was actually Duval he saw was never verified (we do not even know if Duval was still alive at the time of the report). In addition to this insertion, the first part is also interrupted by a ‘historical section’ in which the narrator ironically reflects on what is known of Jeanne Duval from (other) historical records: “Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian ocean, or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays d’origine of less importance than it would have been had she been a wine)” (16, parentheses in the original). The historical interruption presents readers with what must be seen as the moral–political foundation of the short story as a whole, locating its raison d’être in the epistemic violence imposed by imperialism – a violence which makes the telling of Duval’s story both necessary and impossible: “The splendid continent to which her skin allied her had been excised from her memory. She had been deprived of history, she was the pure child of the colony. The colony – white, imperious – had fathered her” (17). Thus, the various parts of the story constitute distinctly different discourses or genres that each in its own way problematizes the relationship between history and fiction: the mock–poetic, the satirical–critical historic, the personal–confessional, and the speculative–fictive. The question is whether they form a succession and work together to create a narrative plot 13

See for example Matus (1991), Schmid (1997), Munford (2004), and Hutcheon (2002).

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with a clear linear development, or whether they cross to form scissions, internal contradictions and historical–fictional breaks. As already mentioned, it is tempting to view the up-beat, cheerful ‘conclusion’ as the story’s ‘happy ending’ – as if providing a victorious feminist revenge, while, at the same time, inscribing Duval with historical agency. According to Rebecca Munford, this part is definitely the most subversive part of the story since it lets Duval take “flight from the representational frameworks of Baudelaire’s fetishist poetic to re-presence herself within the public sphere.”14 Part of the ploy is that we know that this part is pure invention and has nothing to do with ‘facts,’ so the real, historical Duval is saved from any desire the narrator may have, as Spivak puts it, to make “the other into a self.”15 Yet, to the extent “Black Venus” is concerned with ‘giving voice’ to a historical figure,  the very fictitiousness of the last section begs the question of what role the relationship between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ plays, or can play, in the rewriting of history from a feminist, literary point of view. Indeed, the question of ‘voice’ and agency is a recurrent theme in the scholarly readings of “Black Venus.” A simple interpretation would state that when Carter recounts Duval’s relationship with Baudelaire from Duval’s ‘perspective,’ undercutting his poetic language of erotic desires with her own colloquial reasoning and mundane material concerns, she is giving voice to Jeanne Duval.16 More elaborate discussions question whether or not Carter merely reappropriates Duval to give voice to her own fictive–political project, thereby repeating, rather than challenging, the previous poetic injustice. The answer to the latter question is quite unanimously that Carter avoids mere appropriation. Linda Hutcheon, for example, places “Black Venus” within the tradition of postmodern feminist complicitous critique, arguing that Carter “give[s] back to Jeanne the history of which she was deprived,”17 by juxtaposing two different discourses: that of “the language of male sublimated desire for woman […] and the language of the political and contextualizing discourses of female experience.”18 Another critic, Jill Matus, is keenly aware of the orientalist probl­ ematic in re-presenting another subject, arguing that Carter manages to avoid the pitfalls of ‘speaking for’ the other through a meticulous inscription of the 14 Rebecca Munford, “Re-Presenting Charles Baudelaire/Re-Presencing Jeanne Duval: Transformations of the Muse in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 40:1 (2004): 10. 15 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 130. 16 Susanne Schmid, “‘Black Venus’ – Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire Revisited by An­ gela Carter,” eese 2 (1997): http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic97/schmid/2_97 .html (accessed 10 May 2016). 17 Linda Hutcheon. Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002): 143. 18 Politics of Postmodernism, 141.

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lack of knowledge about the ‘real’ Duval, hence making explicit the limits of her own discourse. In this way Carter, according to Matus, makes it clear that she neither speaks for Duval nor presumes to know her mind. Rather than imposing her own voice, Matus argues, Carter draws “attention to other possible representations of her than those we already have by persistently imagining her as an ordinary down-to-earth woman.”19 Rebecca Munford, on the other hand, argues that Carter not only “opens up a space for Duval’s realism and vernacular commentary to deflate Baudelaire’s poetic language by negating the role of inspiration and charm she is ascribed as muse in his poetry,”20 but, more importantly, gives Duval an agency of her own. This more or less concrete agency takes form on the narrative level by opening up “an imaginary space in which her heroine can extricate herself from her designated position as muse by reasserting her presence as a speaking subject.”21 Moreover, she continues, since Carter does not appropriate Duval’s voice to address current feminist concerns but sticks instead to the Baudelairian imaginary, she simultaneously evades the temptation of positioning “Duval as her own muse.” Instead, she asserts “her empowered bodily presence as a historical subject”: in short, according to Munford, Carter bestows Duval with historical agency by making her “bodily presence” function “as a threat to traditional ways of knowing and seeing within and beyond nineteenth-century spatial and representational frameworks.”22 Yet, although Matus and Munford may disagree as to the extent, and ways in which Duval actually ‘speaks’ as a historical subject in Carter’s story, they agree that Carter’s rewriting aims at, and succeeds in, undermining the existing colonial discourses which frame Duval’s historical (mis)representations. Moreover, they both contend that Carter’s story does so through a redeployment of the silences in which the historical Duval is cloaked: it is these silences, they argue, not Duval ‘herself,’ that must be made to speak in order to unsettle the ideological discourses in which she has been framed. 2

Silence and Writing

It is precisely the relation to silence that structures the democratization process of literature in the aesthetic regime in which literature becomes part of a new philosophy of equality, Rancière argues. The modern (aesthetic) ­concept 19 20 21 22

Jill Matus. “Blonde, Black and Hottentot Venus: Context and Critique in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” 437. Rebecca Munford, “Re-Presenting Charles Baudelaire/Re-Presencing Jeanne Duval,” 8. ”Re-Presenting Charles Baudelaire/Re-Presencing Jeanne Duval,” 10. ”Re-Presenting Charles Baudelaire/Re-Presencing Jeanne Duval,” 11.

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of literature which evolves in the “area of democracy” is instituted on the premise that “everything silent” – animate and inanimate, “high” and “low” – is endowed with potential meaning, thus breaking with the hierarchical structures of doing and saying that characterize the representative regime.23 It is this new conception of meaning – in which even pebbles speak, wearing “on the very bodies the testimony of their own history” like hieroglyphs24 – that establishes the conditions for the new form of writing that is modern literature. The language of literature, indeed words as such, “display[s] and decipher[s] the sign and symptoms written in a ‘mute writing’ on the body of things and in the fabric of language.”25 In other words, literature is marked by the potential to extend literary meaning indefinitely and include anything that was formerly considered inappropriate for poetical rendering. This is the democratic dynamics that provides the necessary conditions for post-Revolutionary French writing, which Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal is part of, where literature creates “not only [new] objects but a sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible.”26 Moreover, it is this relationship to silence as potential meaning that also aligns aesthetics, as a (possible) redistribution of the sensible, with politics understood as “a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience”: It [politics] is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of seeing.27 The point of radical politics – and of its literary equivalent – is, of course, not simply to broaden the field of discourse, to include ‘more’ within the ‘same.’ On the contrary: if and when the formerly excluded, the “part of no part” – that element of a system which has no place or voice within the system – speaks, the very coordinators which structure the system, including what can be said and known, change; new forms, new possibilities of social experience are formed. Rancière is careful to point out that this political potentiality of literature is 23 24 25 26 27

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 37. Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance, 33.1 (2004): 17. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 17. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcome,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010): 122. Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 10.

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not a reflection of the politics of its author; rather, the political potentiality of literature is directly linked to literature in the aesthetic regime as a specific way of doing and writing, a practice no longer marked by hierarchical laws but by the egalitarian principle of indifference. Literature, then, is a new writing regime in which anything has meaning, but also a regime “in which the writer is anybody and the reader anybody.”28 The question then becomes: who is heard and why? How and when – or under which conditions – does literature succeed in extending voice and visibility? However, the egalitarian principle of indifference, along with the notion that meaning is inherent in all things silent, also gives rise to a paradox in/for modern literature. Rancière uses the term “mute speech” to designate this paradox. As Alison Ross explains: insofar as it is otherwise “silent, prosaic things that literature makes eloquent […], literature also discovers how obstinately silent these things can be, how, in other words, any attempt at giving a literary rendering of them remains problematic, contingent, fraught and self-contradictory.”29 In this sense, silence – or “mute speech” – is productive excess: the excess of things over words, and the excess of words over their author(s). It is precisely this excess that ensures that meanings are pliable and can be transformed. At the same time, however, to the extent that modern literature is based on the principle that there is no longer a strict line separating aesthetic from non-aesthetic objects, literature, as a specific mode of writing and thinking, is undermined from within. This is the basic paradox that modern literature works at and within; as Rancière argues: “The politics of literature carries a contradiction that can be solved only by self-suppression.”30 With Flaubert as his prime example, he analyses how nineteenth-century authors’ writing about “the people” restrain their characters, trying to control the productive excess of mute speech to make sure that the silent stay silent, locked in their “mute eloquence.” What is more, Rancière analyses how this desire to restrain, or suppress, the consequences of democracy, while partaking in it, is also present in other poetics of knowledge, such as history writings. In Rancière’s Names of History, for example, the historiographer Jules Michelet enjoys the same status in the philosopher’s critical reading with regard to the paradoxes of democracy as the novelist Flaubert. Michelet’s attempt to give voice to the silent subjects of history ends in precisely the same impasses as does Flaubert’s, Rancière argues: on the one hand, he encounters difficulties in redeeming silent things in 28 29 30

Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” 14. Alison Ross. “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean–Phillipe Deranty (London: Routledge, 2014): 134–35. “The Politics of Literature,” 21.

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speech, while on the other hand, he undermines the capacity of the silent and dispossessed to speak for themselves. Thus, historically, the mute speech of democracy is both a relationship to silence and to silencing. Angela Carter’s “Black Venus” can be seen both to situate and to problematize Baudelaire’s poetry within this very tradition: Les Fleurs du mal renders poetic the phenomena and sensations which are silent within the representative regime; at the same time, this very type of poetic practice further silences the phenomena that are brought into language. Indeed, “Black Venus” can be read as a commentary not only on the relationship between literature and silence, silences which still leave traces of the ‘experienceable’; but also on the silencing effects of literature itself, as well as on the silencing effects of the poetics of knowledge that is history. Yet “Black Venus” goes a step further than Rancière: it links mute speech to the imperialist underside of Western democracy, which, as we shall see, follows its own ‘muting logics.’ As the short story makes clear also on the thematic level, to the extent that Duval can be made to ‘speak,’ her speech is always already rendered mute. Her muted speech is the effect of the literary tradition which has not only ‘deciphered’ her as a ‘thing,’ but which does so while, at the same time, reserving the privilege of speaking (literarily) to itself. Initially, this muting process amounts to an act of epistemic violence, the story suggests: you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover’s poetry but that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language. It made her dumb. (18) The question for a feminist rewriting of history must be what to do with this always already muting of the subject. If historical injustices can be undone by extending voice to Duval, without uncritically transforming her into a (mirroring) self, the epistemic violence of her constitutive dumbness cannot simply be discarded, or substituted by another’s (literary) utterance, but must be worked at and given ‘voice’ as such. Duval’s speaking literarily, in other words, cannot be other than ‘mute.’ The question then would be in what sense this muteness can be both respected and subverted. At the outset, however, it seems as if Carter’s short story is doing the exact opposite: it not only preserves Duval’s ‘muteness’ but intensifies it and, in fact, re-places it, playing it back at her, as it were, as a readily formed internalization, making her mime, or embody, her own subjectivization:

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a dumbness all the more profound because it manifested itself in a harsh clatter of ungrammatical recriminations and demands which were not directed at her lover so much – she was quite fond of him – as at her own condition, great gawk of an ignorant black girl, good for nothing: correction, good for only one thing. (18) Rather than ‘giving’ her ‘voice,’ the story, quite literally, puts another speaker in her place: “I will tell you what Jeanne was like” (9; emphasis added). This ‘invocation’ of a first-person narrator is by no means an innocent, purely benevolent, substitution of voice, but repeats the colonial power dynamics as such, emptying the other in order to inscribe her with new meaning. This new meaning is situated firmly within an imperialist logic: Duval, we learn at the very beginning of the story, is not only misrepresented, written over by somebody else’s speech; she is empty, pure space devoid of subjectivity: “she is a tabula rasa, still. She never experienced her experience as experience, life never added to the sum of her knowledge; rather, subtracted from it” (9). The concept of tabula rasa – the idea that human beings are born with a blank mind and only formed through experience – was a central trope in the Enlightenment period’s invention of childhood and its emphasis on the importance of education. It is, of course, also the colonial trope par excellence; as Bill Ashcroft points out: “the concept of a tabula rasa [which links the child and the ‘primitive’ in nineteenth-century European philosophy] has been of great significance in the imperial enterprise because the negation of colonial space was a necessary preparation for the civilizing process of colonization.”31 Of special importance here is the relationship of the idea of the tabula rasa to language and writing: The unformedness of colonial space is the geographic metaphor of the savage mind; both consciousness and space form the childlike innocence which is the natural surface of imperial inscription. This process of inscription is not merely metaphoric, because it is in writing itself that place is constructed out of empty space, and it is in the control of representation and the dissemination of this control in literacy and education that the colonial subject is subdued.32

31

Bill Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of a Colonial Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2001): 39. 32 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, 40.

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The invocation of an alternative narrative ‘I’ in “Black Venus” does nothing but make this dynamic – the construction of place out of empty space – explicit. Moreover, the colonial concept of tabula rasa also inflects what most critics (e.g. Hutcheon, Schmid, Matus, Munford) have viewed as Carter’s main subversive strategy, namely the presentation of Duval as an ordinary woman preoccupied with sheer survival and enjoyment. Although the representation of Duval as ‘ordinary’ might punctuate the lofty dreamlike language of Baudelaire’s poetic rendering of her – thus subverting the trope of the muse, from a colonial perspective – the very same ‘alternative’ representation calls attention to the perceived links between the “savage” and the “child”; both are trapped within a circle of crude, basic desires and in need of education. “[S]he wouldn’t have known what knowledge was for, would she?” (9), the narrator muses; “Apart from her meals and a few drinks, she is without many conscious desires” (16). Furthermore, the ‘ordinary’ qualities of Duval link her not only to the ‘child’ but also to the animal, the not-yet-human other of European Enlightenment, thereby evoking another colonial script with similar ‘soul-making’ (or educational) potential: the imperialist “othering,” dubbed by Spivak as the rendering of “the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate.”33 Unadorned, Duval looks “like an old crow with rusty feathers” (10); her hair resembles “the huge fleece of a black sheep” (14); her voice is “half-raucous, half-caressing, [the] voice of a crow reared on honey” (16). The constant undermining of the poetic language of Baudelaire’s sexual and aesthetic desires, does not undermine orientalist discourse as such; quite the opposite, it reproduces the power structures – economic, representational, and educational – that play along with and serve as the conditions of possibility for colonial and aesthetic desire. Even the nature of the restored Duval in the ‘concluding’ section of the story is not without its orientalist forerunners: she is both mischievous (spreading disease) and duplicitous (adorned with false hair and false teeth).34 Contrary to Matus’ claim that Carter draws “attention to other possible representations of [Duval] than those we already have by persistently imagining her as an ordinary down-to-earth woman,”35 the narrator draws precisely on the possible representations of Duval that we already have – within the colonial, orientalist context – including the tabula rasa; this also implicates the narrator herself in an imperialist project, “cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission.”36 33

Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry, 12:11 (1985): 240. 34 See for example Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2007). 35 “Blonde, Black and Hottentot Venus: Context and Critique in Angela Carter’s ‘Black ­Venus,’” 437. 36 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 116.

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If we read the narrator as a stand-in for the ‘white feminist’ who is out to ‘rescue’ her ‘darker sister’ from oblivion – which seems to be the logic implied by the scholarly tradition concerned with ‘giving voice’ – the imposition of her voice (“I will tell you what Jeanne was like”) is, of course, highly problematic. If, on the other hand, we read the story, not as a linear progression towards greater agency, but as a juxtaposition of a series of parallel Western imperialist discourses – mutually and internally contradictory yet interacting – in which Duval’s voice is equally absent, the narrative ‘I’ becomes a meta-fictional embodiment of the workings of literature in the aesthetic regime of art as such, dramatizing its paradoxical nature as being both a relationship to silence and a silencing in itself. However, the very invocation of a narrative ‘I’ can also be seen to open a different trajectory for equality in storytelling. 3

The Democratic Impulse of Literature Revisited

As the narratologist Ross Chambers has pointed out, every story inscribes its own readability – “a model of the relational apparatus, the context of reading, that will produce the text as meaningful” – through an act of self-situation.37 The invocation of a narrative ‘I’ in “Black Venus” can be read precisely as an act of a narrative self-situation, inscribing the text within an oral tradition through evoking the narrative ‘Ur-situation’; a personal narrator (addresser) tells a story (address) – here the story of a character (Jeanne), who is without voice, without consciousness, without knowledge – to an addressed, present audience, you (addressee). This is a traditional story-telling convention that we find in folklore and fairy tales, genres that Carter explored in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of reimagined fairy tales, taken for the most part from Charles Perrault and published a year prior to the first edition of “Black Venus.” According to Carter’s own assessment, compared to myths (in the broad sense) “folklore is a much more straightforward set of devices for making real life more exciting and is much easier to infiltrate with different kinds of consciousness […] by using sets of shifting structures derived from orally transmitted traditional tales.”38 Thus, by inserting the oral narrative pointer “I will tell you what Jeanne was like,” and thereby establishing a link to the oral tradition, the story may be seen to signal a desire for infiltration from different kinds of consciousness. However, the material that the narrator relies upon in 37 38

Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative (Chicago and L­ ondon: The U of Chicago P, 1991): 42. “Notes from the Front Line,” 41.

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the telling of this story is not the ‘free-floating’ remnants of oral transmissions but markedly the written word: high poetry and historical records. Only the last part of the story bears a resemblance to a purely fictional oral tale which makes ‘real life’ more exciting. Yet, it is also the part in which the last traces of the historical Duval are erased – except for the speculative fact that she might have had a brother. In so far as the last part offers an ‘alternative’ story, it is precisely because it has emptied out the historical content that is found in writing. This emptying opens Carter’s story to an alternative venue for rethinking the democratization of literature, a venue that does not proceed from the representational regime and its strict rules for doing and saying, but from the much more open and malleable oral tradition in which stories were shared among predominantly illiterate people. The fairy tale forms an important part of Carter’s oeuvre. Not only did she write her own adult versions in The Bloody Chamber, she also wrote fairy tales for children, translated Perrault’s fairy tales into English and edited two collections of worldwide tales, published posthumously in one volume as Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (2005). In the earlier introduction, Carter connects the telling of tales transnationally and trans-historically to a long-standing tradition shared by workers and common people all over the globe: For most of human history, “literature,” both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written – heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.39 Although the tale changes, not only thematically but also ontologically, once it is written down, it continues to bear witness to a collective form of art that was woven, as Walter Benjamin points out in his essay on storytelling, “thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.”40 Benjamin laments the disappearance of the art of storytelling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it was supplanted by the novel, an art form more ‘fitting’ to the mechanical warfare and the capitalist forces of ali­ enation characteristic to our time. Storytelling belongs to a bygone economy of meaning: it is intrinsically linked to work, to craft, to the peasant, the sailor,

39 40

Angela Carter, Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 2005): xi. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 91.

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and the travelling tradesman, as well as to an economy of exchange based on experience and common human intercourse. What is potentially lost with the art of storytelling is the opportunity for ordinary people to fight both the harsh realities of daily life and the workings of ideology, and to find consolation in the magic of the imagination. Benjamin links this power of storytelling to its capacity to counter myths with the accumulated wisdom of the people: Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. […] The wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.41 In this sense, storytelling is not only about magic, but the very practice of storytelling itself exhibits a form of liberatory ‘magic’ that enables common people to develop an alternative world view to that of the ruling ideology of the nation state, and thus to identify alternative routes of action. Although Angela Carter’s conception of myth differs from the classical understanding of myth – defining myth rather in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Roland Barthes as “social fictions which regulate our lives,” that is, historically constructed ideas circulating as if they were the “real thing”42 – her turn to folklore and storytelling has the same impact. Of course, the figure ‘Black Venus’ – an eroticized, racialized embodiment of white, male, imperialist desire – is a myth in the Carteresque sense, an idea circulating as if it were the “real thing,” made flesh in and through actual historical bodies like Jeanne Duval’s. If Carter is bestowing agency upon Duval, it is not by giving her ‘a voice,’ an alternative historical discursive meaning, but by giving her ‘storical’ agency. As storytelling, harking back to the narrative ‘Ur-scene,’ “Black Venus” is a magical flight into a fairy tale, transposing Duval, “with cunning and with high spirits,” into a completely different world, geographically and genre-wise. This is a genre which is also ‘hers’ to share, since the fairy tale is the common wisdom of the common people – black and white, men and women – meant to be experienced as experience, told and re-told; it is precisely that which the written literary tradition, even in the aesthetic, egalitarian regime, denies its colonial other. 41 42

“The Storyteller,” 102. “Notes from the Frontline,” 39.

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Magic is both the theme and the fibre of the fairy tale. In “Black Venus,” the flight is, as is usual in fairy tales, quite literal; it is the flight of the albatross, “the wonderful aerielistes who live in the heart of the storm” (19). In the poem “L’Albatros,” to which Carter’s story alludes, Baudelaire likens himself, the poet, to the albatross – “the prince of the clouds/ who is friendly to the tempest and laughs at the bowman.” However, captured on a ship and ridiculed by its crew, he is: “Banished to the ground in the midst of hooting/ His wings, those of a giant, hinder him from walking.”43 Commonly interpreted as an image of the cultural clash between the daring and free-flying imaginary of poetry and bourgeois ideology and commentary, we might even say, following Rancière, that the poem tries to rescue “the absolute singularity of art,” at the same time as it breaks the non-democratic hierarchical rules for saying and doing, and “destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity.”44 Carter plucks his wings without blinking, noting that Baudelaire, in his domesticity, rather resembles “the stately penguin in his frock coat,” “flightless,” “sitting good and quiet with [his] eggs on [his] feet” (19). The true albatrosses are not to be found in the high poetry of nineteenth-century France, the story suggests, but “glide in delighted glee, south, far south, so far south it inverts the notional south of the poet’s parrot-forest and glittering beach” (19). This is also the flight of Duval, not only to a different continent, but to a different genre, in which she is no longer deprived of experience, a “great gawk of an ignorant black girl” (18), but part of a storytelling tradition which is both older and more universal than any single individual can aspire to alone. Rather than ‘giving voice’ in an act of ‘benevolent sisterhood,’ then, “Black Venus” reminds us that a feminist solidarity must strive to find common ground beyond Eurocentric imperialism (be it literary or global capitalist), even when, or especially when, those ‘beyonds’ seems like glimpses of utopian thinking. As Walter Benjamin points out with regard to storytelling, “nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in [the vanishing of storytelling] merely a ‘symptom of decay,’ let alone a ‘modern’ symptom.”45 However, what it means is that, to the extent that storytelling is still possible today, its impact and meaning will have changed, “making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”46 This call to a “vanishing past,” although a “past” that may never have been “whole,” corresponds to Gayatri Spivak’s call for us to n ­ ourish 43

English translation by Eli Siegel, http://www.aestheticrealism.net/poetry/baudelairealbatross.html (accessed 10 May 2016). 44 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 23. 45 “The Storyteller,” 87. 46 “The Storyteller,” 87.

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an emergent, in contrast to a dominant, solidarity “best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet.”47 Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill. On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of a Colonial Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). Baudelaire, Charles. “L’Albatros,” tr. Eli Siegel, http://www.aestheticrealism.net/ poetry/baudelaire-albatross.html (accessed 10 May 2016). Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 83–109. Carter, Angela. Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 2005). Carter, Angela. “Black Venus,” in Black Venus (London: Picador, 1985): 9–24. Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line,” in Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997): 36–43. Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991). Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter. Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997). Gjerden, Jorunn, Kari Jegerstedt & Željka Švrljuga. “‘The Venus Hottentot is Unavailable for Comment’: Questioning Representation through Aesthetic Practices,” in Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation, ed. Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild Muriaas, & Brita Ytre–Arne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 281–303. Hutcheon, Linda. Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002). Jegerstedt, Kari. “The Art of Speculation: Allegory and Parody as Critical Reading Strategies in The Passion of New Eve,” in Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, ed. Sonya Andermahr & Lawrence Phillips (London and New York: Continuum, 2012): 130–46. Matus, Jill. “Blonde, Black and Hottentot Venus: Context and Critique in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (1991): 467–76. Munford, Rebecca. “Re-Presenting Charles Baudelaire/Re-Presencing Jeanne Duval: Transformations of the Muse in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40:1 (2004): 1–13. Rancière, Jacques. “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcome,” in Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010): 115–33.

47

Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 28.

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Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, tr. & intro. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance 33.1 (2004): 10–24. Ross, Alison. “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean–Phillipe Deranty (London: Routledge, 2014). Sage, Lorna (2007). Angela Carter (Horndon, Tavistock and Devon: Northcote House, 2007). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2007). Schmid, Susanne. ‘Black Venus’ – Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire Revisited by Angela Carter,” EESE 2 (1997): http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic97/ schmid/2_97.html (accessed 10 May 2016). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry, 12:11 (1985): 243–61.

Part 2 Epistemologies

∵

Chapter 7

Epic Theatre and the Culture of Spectacle

Aesthetic Figuration of Body and Race in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus Ljubica Matek Abstract In her rewriting of Sara Baartman’s story, Suzan-Lori Parks relies on the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht to mobilize contemporary readers and viewers and provoke them to reflect on the problematic issues of racial and sexual typecasting both past and present. Because Baartman was displayed as an object – a spectacle, the play Venus is also constructed as such: contextually, it heavily references Victorian freak shows, one of the most objectionable forms of spectacle, and formally it depends on the postulates of dialectic (epic) theatre, itself a type of spectacle. In this way, the interplay of the cognitive and the visual that is available in the phenomenon of spectacle is enhanced. Moreover, Parks rejects historical accuracy by pointedly adding new, fictional elements to the plot, that is Baartman’s life story, and thus prevents the audience’s identification  with the protagonist. The desired effect of the audience’s alienation (estrangement) is politically motivated and crucial in epic theatre, as it engages the spectators’ critical skills about the available epistemological frameworks that can and need to be changed.

Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, Venus, has been recognized as important in highlighting the “eurocentric discourse” and “the complex dynamics of attraction and repulsion aroused by the sexualized female ‘other,’”1 and scholarly attempts have been made to discuss the aesthetic aspect of Parks’ play in order to clarify either the author’s position or perception of the Venus figure within its complex historical and contemporary context. Despite the relative abundance of scholarly insights into these topics, the play invites another reading focusing on the phenomenon of spectacle as played out in Venus. With this in mind, this chapter

1 Ilaria Oddenino, “‘I Wanna Love Something Wild’: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” in Representation and Black Womanhood. The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha GordonChipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 122.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_008

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aims to demonstrate that Venus is a noteworthy example of Brechtian epic or dialectic theatre designed not only to expose political and social injustices, but also to call for change by making use of the critical and cognitive potential of theatrical spectatorship. In it, Parks rewrites and reinterprets Sarah Baartman’s well-known story by moving away from biographical attempts at historical accuracy in favour of making an engaged artistic statement. To do this, she focuses on the culture of spectacle that made it possible for Baartman to be exhibited as a spectacular “object.” More precisely, Parks employs the aesthetic features of epic theatre that is spectacle in itself, to create a political play that requires the readers to choose their own position with regard to the spectacle of the black female body displayed as an object of curiosity, a freak, fully dispossessed of personhood and human rights. However, Parks’ heavy reliance on the tradition of epic theatre has so far remained unrecognized. In fact, in her review of a staging directed by Jess McLeod, Venus Zarris, unaware of the theoretical background that would account for Parks’ aesthetic decisions, notes the following: Parks tells the story through a cluttered theatrical collage of stylized forms, presenting a kaleidoscope of primarily presentational scenes. The spectacle of fluctuating styles is fascinating to behold but keeps the audience at an emotional distance. Remarkably, the cast is so present, smart and invested in the story that they carry the script over its experimental trappings.2 This chapter will attest that “experimental trappings” serve as a mode to create spectacle and are the very core of the dialectic dynamics between the actors and the audience, or readers and characters.3 This dialectic implies that a dialogue, a socially engaged exchange of opinion on critical issues such as class, morality, and justice, or in this case, gender and race, is necessary in order to reach the “truth.” Parks constructed her spectacle by giving volition to Venus’ character, which caused a controversial reception of the play. From the very beginning, Baartman is represented as piqued by the opportunity to earn money and gold, to 2 Venus Zarris, “Venus – Review,” Chicago Stage Review.Com (15 June 2011), http://www.chicagostagereview.com/venus-%E2%80%93-review/ (this page is no longer available). 3 In the spirit of European literary studies, I treat Parks’ play predominantly as a literary text intended both to be read and performed in theatre. In this context, play is a literary form that is not exclusively performative, but exists and should be read and interpreted as a literary text as well.

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be treated as a princess, and to buy her own house.4 Consequently, it seems everything has been “done with full consent / of the fair HOTTENTOT” (72). Questions immediately arise as to why anyone would willingly agree to be displayed as a freak of nature, as well as why certain women are complicit in the commodification of their bodies. What has contributed to the situation in which gendered bodies and race become elements of spectacle? In her muchquoted paper on Venus, Jean Young mentions several reviews that, like Young herself, fail to take into account the specific aesthetic features of the genre of epic theatre5 which provide criteria with which an audience should judge a play consciously and critically. Young is primarily concerned with Baartman’s obvious complicity in her destiny as well as with Parks’ use of cultural stereotypes,6 suggesting that the play fails to recognize the “unequal power relationship”7 between Baartman and her keepers in the court of law. However, the truth seems to be quite the opposite. The reader is invited to remain unemotional about the situation (which some of the critics that Young mentions seem to have understood, and which Young takes to be the play’s flaw) and to judge for himself or herself the causes and consequences as well as the desirability of this particular social situation, the intention being to provoke strong criticism and social change. In fact, through the powerful interplay of the cognitive and the visual that is available in the spectacle, the reader/spectator can (and is expected to) learn through detachment, thereby contributing to changes in available epistemological frameworks. This is epic theatre’s dominant method of both representation and of advocating social change.8 To emphasize the terrible discord between the fact that Baartman is a person, and that her situation is utterly hopeless, Parks “remixes” history, as Nicole

4 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995): 24–7. Further page references to the play are in the main text. 5 This also points to the necessity of viewing every play as, first and foremost, a literary text and of understanding that different types of play should be read and understood in the context of their genre. This is even more the case if we take into account the fact that every staging of a particular play depends heavily on the individual abilities, knowledge, and vision of a director, who may intervene in the original text extensively, offering his/her own interpretation and thereby influencing the audience’s interpretation of the events on stage. 6 Jean Young, “The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in SuzanLori Parks’s Venus,” African American Review 31.4 (1997): 699. 7 “The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” 704. 8 Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” in Aesthetics and Politics (Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno) (London: Verso, 1980): 206.

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Hodges Persley suggests,9 and adds fictional plot elements that disregard historical facts. They include Venus’ attempt to leave the circus freak show and the love affair with the white doctor who, fascinated by her physique, keeps her as his mistress and then dissects her body after she dies. In all the various and extreme situations in Venus’ life – one day she is chained and displayed like an animal, the next she is fed chocolate in the salon or boudoir of a rich doctor – Parks emphasizes the tension between her lack of freedom and subjection to the white man’s gaze and attention, and her attempts at self-preservation. In Parks’ interpretation of Baartman’s story, Venus participates in making her body a spectacle because she sees it as an opportunity to escape her difficult life: first when she leaves South Africa, and again when she accepts Baron Docteur’s offer to be his mistress in order to escape her terrible life as one of Mother-Showman’s freaks (92–93). When Baron Docteur suggests that she has a homeland and a family, Venus replies: “I don’t wanna go back inny more. / I like yr company too much. / Besides, it was a shitty life” [sic] (109). However, such a simplistic representation of Baartman would mean reiterating what is already known and demanding sympathy with the victimized body without suggesting any possibility of change; and a mere sympathetic response to her situation is not the aim of epic presentation. Instead of weeping for Baartman (as Black Venus, the epitome of the exploited black female), we should ensure that the kind of objectification ingrained in racist and sexist ideas never happens again. By the same token, as Parks herself suggests in her conversation with Monte Williams, the main idea is to stop stripping Baartman (or any other black woman) of her subjectivity by suggesting that she was just a victim: I could have written a two-hour saga with Venus being the victim. But she’s multi-faceted. She’s vain, beautiful, intelligent, and, yes, complicit. I write about the world of my experience, and it’s more complicated than “the white man down the street is giving me a hard time.” That’s just one aspect of our reality. As Black people, we’re often encouraged to narrow and simply address the race issue. We deserve so much more.10

9 10

Nicole Hodges Persley, “Sampling and Remixing: Hip Hop and Parks’s History Plays,” in Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010): 65–76. Monte Williams, “At Lunch With: Suzan-Lori Parks; From a Planet Closer to the Sun,” New York Times (17 April 1996), http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/17/garden/at-lunch-with-suzan-lori-parks-from-a-planet-closer-to-the-sun.html?pagewanted=all (accessed 18 March 2015).

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Very provocatively, Parks implies that Venus’ complicity has contributed to her fate, but it has also been a consequence of the fact that the only choice she had was between being a working body:11 “The Girl on hands and knees with scrub brush and bucket scrubs a vast tile floor. She is meticulous and vigorous” (18), and a spectacularly oversexualized body, “Big Bottomed Girls. That’s their breed” (22). And while the historical Baartman might not have had much of a choice, the contemporary “Venuses” do, and they must take a stand. The complicity of the fictional Venus is supposed to empower women today, as it suggests that, however “insignificant” her decisions may have been for the outcome of her own life, they have resonated and made a difference for women of many subsequent generations who decide to revolt against their abusers or the abusing system, and abandon their victim mentality. While we should be aware of the historical moment, we should also take note of our own individual humanity without falling into the trap, as Oddenino suggests, of perpetuating the very imperialistic binaries we resent, such as self/other, civilized/savage, as well as white/black, male/female, all of which imply “relations of dominance.”12 According to Brecht, this can only be avoided “if the Aeffect is brought out”13 and that is what Parks very successfully manages to do not only by refusing to depict Venus solely as a victim, but also through certain structural and dramatic features of the text, which will be discussed later. Although Venus’ subjectivity is expressed through her persistent desire to become rich and be loved at any cost, the fact that she accepts the “rules of the game” does not eliminate the responsibility of her captors or deny the fact that she was abused by and in an exploitative system which did not allow any negotiating space for the Other. In fact, contrary to Young’s reading, 11

Issues of class also always come into play in a discussion of body and nineteenth-century human exploitation. According to Brecht, the subject matter of epic theatre, which aims to portray social processes in their causal relationships, are the crassest incidents of class war (Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and tr. John Willett [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977]: 121). The element of class undeniably played an important part in constructing and perpetuating colonial and imperial hierarchies which subsequently influenced the lives of millions, including Baartman’s, as did the issues of race and gender. With black women, this was typically complicated with issues of otherness and (sexual) desire arising from the white man’s imagination, which was marked by ideas of orientalism, racism and white hegemony, as can be seen with the trope of Black Venus – a black woman reduced to the features of her body and race. 12 Oddenino, “’I Wanna Love Something Wild’: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” 132. 13 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 98. The “alienation effect (A-effect),” as translated by Willett in Brecht on Theatre, or the “estrangement effect,” as translated by Jameson in Brecht and Method, is a translation of Brecht’s V-effekt (Verfremdungseffekt).

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which implies Parks’ alleged unawareness of Baartman’s legal powerlessness,14 Parks stresses how the circumstances inevitably lead to her objectification by impeding all of her attempts to achieve her personal goals and thus validate her subjectivity. So, when she wants to add more variety to her show, for example by reciting poetry or showing off her foreign language skills, the Mother showman reminds Venus that she is just a black bottom (60). Such exchanges suggest that Venus has a complex personality which she actively tries to express, but her endeavours are thwarted and she becomes a victim of the highly prejudiced and utterly unethical social circumstances she finds herself in. Instead of being able to act as a free agent, which she wants and sometimes does when it comes to insignificant matters, she is more often than not acted upon and manipulated by others, assuring the reader that there can be no ultimate emancipation for her (black, female) self. Rather, as the Chorus keeps insisting, she has decided to exchange one type of slavery (being a house slave in South Africa) for another even more degrading one (as a freak spectacle in Europe): “We could stand here and tell her some lies or the bald truth: that her lifell go from rough to worse. Yr a fool, girl!” [sic] (30). What is worse, her tragic destiny seems sealed as every opportunity for change is denied her: “Welcome welcome to the club sweetheart. Theres no escape from this place” [sic] (31). By suggesting that she has made a choice, Parks insists on giving Venus subjective agency but does not assign any blame to her; rather, she expects the contemporary reader/viewer to resist the values of such a discriminatory, one-sided system and the rules of the game. In a 1996 interview, Parks states that she writes about the world of her experience,15 thereby suggesting that Venus is not simply a history play (a play about an event from history or based on a historical subject), as evident from her artistic interventions into the incidents of Baartman’s actual life. Instead of simply retelling the horrific story of Baartman’s life, Parks intentionally makes the connection with the present precisely in order to give the reader/spectator the sense of agency: if the play is as much about social, gender, and racial issues of today, as it is about these issues in the nineteenth-century, then something can be done; a change can be made. Oddenino maintains that “Parks snatches the representation of Sarah Baartman from the hegemony of the European lens only to place it under that of her own African American sensibility; where is the real woman, when yet another filter has been placed between herself

14 15

Young, “The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in SuzanLori Parks’s Venus,” 704. Williams, “At Lunch With: Suzan-Lori Parks; From a Planet Closer to the Sun.”

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and her representation?”16 But to expect an unfiltered version of Baartman in any literary text is practically utopian, as even autobiographies cannot be considered to be immediate representations of the author. So, it seems that history is a valuable starting point for the discussion about the present, which is why, as Persley suggests, the sampling and remixing of history is a crucial method in Parks’ history plays.17 Interestingly, this points to the conclusion that history and its (re)constructions are a form of spectacle, too. Furthermore, to accept that the dialectics of the “historical” Baartman and the “imagined” Baartman are limitative means missing the point, which is to ensure that from this point on neither Baartman nor Venus, nor any other black woman for that matter, can be reduced to her race, gender, or class. Rather, the reader/spectator is invited to consider the particular complexity of Baartman that symbolizes the universal complexities of women of colour, and to effect such a change in (personal, and by consequence universal) perception, attitude and behaviour that women should no longer be perceived as spectacles of body, race or sex. Consequently, the play abounds with instances of conflict between the fact that Venus is a person and the fact that her personhood is being purposely overlooked. The court proceedings against Venus represent an additional spectacle fuelled by Parks’ use of “historical extracts,” or “documentary projections.” These illustrate interpersonal relationships which, in fact, create history. The “historicizing theatre”18 highlights the contemporary relevance of historical events, and the historical extracts provide objective commentary that enables the reader to make judgements not only about the past,19 but to critically consider the present. In scene 20E in which Venus is brought before the court of law, Sarah Bartmaan’s [sic] Certificate of Baptism is provided, which shows that she was baptized in 1811 in Manchester (75). Another document is a letter of protest that appeared in Morning Chronicle on Friday, 12 October 1810 in which a person expresses his/her indignation at the fact that Baartman is being displayed as spectacle:

16 17 18 19

Oddenino,“’I Wanna Love Something Wild’: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” 133. Persley, “Sampling and Remixing: Hip Hop and Parks’s History Plays,” 65–75. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 126 and 97. This is especially important in light of the theory that history is a subjective field and has many versions (see Walter Benjamin’s theses or contemporary criticism that deals with historicity and Hottentot Venus, for example Željka Švrljuga, “Hottentot Venus. Unsettling the Linear Time of History and Science,” in Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television and Other Media, eds. Marlene D. Allen & Seretha D. Williams [Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland, 2012]: 126–44).

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I allude to that wretched object advertised and publicly shown for money – the ‘Hottentot Venus’ who has been brought here as a subject for the curiosity of this country, for 2 cents a-head. Her keeper is the only gainer. I am no advocate of these sights, on the contrary, I think it base in the extreme, that any human beings should be thus exposed! (79) Both documents simultaneously imply Baartman’s subjectivity and her lack thereof. The Mother-Showman presents the certificate of baptism “As proof that I take good care of her” (75), but the reader knows that baptism is not what Venus needs in order to feel taken care of. She was most probably not baptized of her own free will and out of her own religious conviction, but was more likely forced into it for the sake of law and some kind of twisted propriety that required her pagan self to convert to Christianity – the religion of the “civilized.” Thus, this document that should certify her to be a child of God, like any other Christian, proves to be empty form – a mere spectacle for the court. Similarly, the outcry against her exploitation, noble as it may seem, clearly points to the conflicting views of the Other: she is at the same time “that wretched object” and “a human being,” but her exposure and subsequent humiliation is only important to others insofar as it contradicts their sense of taste and decency. The conclusion that Venus’ wellbeing is irrelevant to those who have a voice (white audiences, her white captors, the white doctors) is highlighted by the spectacle of “anatomical theatre” which ensues immediately after Venus leaves the spectacle of the freak show and becomes Baron Docteur’s “protégée.” At first, he displays her to fellow anatomists as a curiosity, an “uncivilized” woman intelligent enough to learn French (114–15); then they draw and measure her, indicating that corrections will be made after maceration (122). This chilling indifference to her anticipated death shocks the readers, indicating that the anatomists have no empathy or sympathy with Venus, since they do not perceive her as a human being. She is a freak of nature, a curiosity to them, and this is confirmed as Baron Docteur reads Venus’ anatomical details from his notebook. Although he slept with her, made her pregnant and forced her to abort his babies several times, fed her chocolate, and admitted that: “Shes my True Love. / She’d make uh splendid wife” (142), his notes are cold and clinical; at one point there was a comparison with chimpanzee and inferior primates (102), suggesting that Venus was merely an exotic, black body to him. The fact that the reader learns various details as achronological fragments contributes to the sense of shock and detachment from Venus’ situation precisely because they prevent identification and, thus, emotional catharsis. Parks’ treatment of Baartman’s story undoubtedly has a strong political agenda: she re-examines an important historical moment and aims to

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d­ econstruct current complex cultural patterns concerning race, gender, and sexuality (even if they have a long history). To do this, she must make us see the situation with new eyes, and resorts therefore to a dialectical approach to aesthetic figuration as envisaged by Brecht. Venus, although unhistorical, represents most s­ hockingly – and very accurately – the horrific fate of Baartman in particular, and of “freaks” in general,20 as they have been treated by the white, heteronormative, conservative, and patriarchal society of Europe at that time. The public exhibition of freaks can be traced back many centuries, but, as Tromp and Valerius argue, it is the nineteenth century that is especially significant for the study of the freak phenomena21 and it was in the year 1847 that the term became associated with human anomaly.22 Science and trade were thriving, and imperialist tendencies of the European nations, most notably the British, the French and the Belgian, had led to close encounters between the “civilized” white Europeans and various native populations of the colonized world. The fear of and contempt for the Other were accompanied by a sort of perverse delight in their Otherness, which fuelled the European imagination.23 It is in this nexus of attraction and repulsion, of dominance and submission, of desire and hate, of personhood and objectification that the phenomenon of bodily spectacle finds its ground and flourishes. Thus, the figure of Black Venus 20

21 22 23

The term has become ubiquitous in the area of scholarship associated with the Other in the sense of physiological disability or anomaly (see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Human Images of the Secret Self [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978]; Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988]; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body [New York: New York UP, 1996]; Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001]). As Tromp argues, the term can be potentially politically reclaimed (Marlene Tromp & Karyn Valerius, “Introduction. Toward Situating the Victorian Freak,” in Victorian freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp [Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008]: 7–16) and it “cannot be aligned with any particular identity or ideological position” (Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, 10). “Introduction. Toward Situating the Victorian Freak,” 1. Garland-Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, 4. Having been funded by the European nations, even the natural sciences of the time were racist in their subjective approach. Early naturalist research by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and his follower, Georges Cuvier (the character of Baron Docteur in Venus), contributed to the popular belief that the Caucasian race was the “original” race and as such represented the norm, whereas all other races occurred as a result of degeneration due to unfavourable environmental factors. Baartman is one of the first well-known “freaks” displayed and exploited because of her physiognomy. Later decades of the nineteenth century, that is the Victorian era (1837–1901), prove especially rich with stories and documents about such instances of exploitation, and a significant amount of scholarship has been produced on the topic (see footnote 20 for some of the relevant sources).

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bears a plethora of connotations, most of them so deeply rooted in culture and psyche that they still have relevance and strike a chord with different readers/ audiences, which makes it particularly pliable for representation within the aesthetic of epic theatre. Although historically Baartman arrives in England some two and a half decades before the Victorians turn freak shows into mass entertainment, the treatment she was subjected to very accurately foreshadows that trend. In Victorian freak shows, bodies displaying different morphological characteristics were displayed as curiosities denying the people any human integrity. They were objects meant to shock and entertain people, and they served as proof of white Europeans’ bodily superiority.24 Parks inevitably notices the uncanny similarity between Baartman’s life and the mechanics of the freak shows that followed, which is most probably why she makes explicit references to them. For instance, when one of the Dutch brothers makes plans to take Baartman to England in order to make money off of her, he explains: “Theres [sic] a street over there lined with Freak Acts but not many dark ones, thats [sic] how we’ll cash in” (21). Other characters use exactly the same form and phrasing that was typical for the nineteenth-century advertisers of freak shows: THE BROTHER, LATER THE MOTHER-SHOWMAN. Behind that curtin just yesterday awaited: Wild Female Jungle Creature. Of singular anatomy. Physiqued in such a backward rounded way that she outshapes all others. Behind this curtain just yesterday alive uhwaits a female – creature an out – of towner whos all undressed awaiting you To take yr peek. So youve heard. (14) 24

See, for example Tromp, Victorian Freaks. The Social Context of Freakery in Britain or Barry Reay, Watching Hannah. Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002). In addition to this, it seems relevant to point out that, at the time, zoological gardens, founded at first to serve as a proof of royal power, also became popular as they catered to the wide audiences’ interest in the exotic and the Other that contributed to the rapidly developing culture of spectacle. Certain zoos displayed humans along with animals in order to show the “difference” between Europeans and non-Europeans (See Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel & Sandrine Lemaire, “From Human Zoos to Colonial Apotheoses: the Era of Exhibiting the Other,” Africultures [December 2001], http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=5265 [accessed 6 August 2015]).

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To further establish the connection, Venus unsurprisingly becomes The Wonder no. 9 in Mother-Showman’s Chorus of 8 Human Wonders (40–41), which the Mother-Showman markets as a group of “the most lowly and unfortunate beings in Gods Universe” who “will dazzle surprise intrigue horrify and disgust”; they are “what never ever should have been allowed to live” and “the ugliest creatures in creativity,” each one of them a “living misfit” (40). Parks’ insistence on the discourse of the freak show advertisers, who attempted to titillate the public in order to earn money, provokes the audience’s dissociation from those who mistreat Venus, and reveals the culture of spectacle to be humiliating, unjust and highly dependent on Eurocentric stereotypical notions and prejudice. These stereotypes implied a hierarchy, which denoted the Other as inferior and oversexed, intended for white service or pleasure at best, and contempt and abuse at worst. The visual quality of the freak show experience reinforces Debord’s definition of spectacle as: “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”.25 This reveals the superficiality of practices that involve the exposure of people (or animals) in specific circumstances intended purely for entertainment, as they deny the complexity of the living being. Consequently, the public display of a Khoisan woman strips her of her human identity and reduces her to a body that is a mere visual stimulus for the spectators: “’The African Dancing Princess’ / She’d make a Splendid Freak” (19) and “Big Bottomed Girl. A novelty” (22). The reader and the actual audience of Parks’ play serve as an echo of those who have travelled a long way to see Baartman or any of the other “freaks”: “They came miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. Comin in from all over to get themselves uh look-see [sic]” (12). In other words, the contemporary reader or viewer takes the place of the anonymous mass of people who crowded in to see the “Wild Female Jungle Creature” (14), but never the place of the body exposed, since the spectator of dialectical theatre is not supposed to subconsciously identify with the protagonists, as is the case in Aristotelian tragedies where pity and fear ensure catharsis. Rather, he or she is invited to engage in conscious thought about the protagonists’ actions and decide whether what is seen is acceptable to them or not.26 Simply put, the reader/spectator must decide whether s/he wants to be a consenting part of a society that allows such forms of exploitation. Parks constructs the play as spectacle by employing the Verfremdungseffekt as an aesthetic dramatic feature, in order to compel us to re-think the justification of body spectacles and freak shows in which people with specific, 25 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press: 1983): 4. 26 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 91.

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rare bodily features are displayed in cages for fun and profit. Our “perceptual numbness”27 is thus overcome thanks to the paradox of the fact that the play, through its structure and aesthetic features, embodies and evokes what it wishes to abolish. At the very beginning, the reader is alienated through an ontological puzzle as the Overture ironically and tellingly displays Venus as a talking, sighing body, but also as a statue revolving on the stage like an inanimate objet d’art. The reader then learns that Venus is indeed dead: “The Venus Hottentot iz dead. There wont b inny show tonite [sic]” (11), but knows this cannot be true as this is only the play’s beginning, and, furthermore, she is talking. With this, the reader is immediately drawn into the world of the spectacle, which is her body, and also alienated from her, as are other protagonists, since she is both alive and dead, not a person but also not merely a statue; rather, she is an exotic erotic object – literally and symbolically both dead and alive. In addition, the complicity of the readers/audience of the spectacle is made quite explicit. The boundary between the theatre represented on stage and the one constituted by either readers reading or audience watching Parks’ play is blurred, so that the reader/audience becomes doubly caught up in the circumstances of Venus’ death/life. Thus, the reader begins to play an active part in a contemporary re-creation of a freak show, fuelled by the interest of an audience that does not admire and appreciate her body as a piece of classical art, but rather gawks at a spectacular “Oriental,” exotic freak of nature as designated by European imperial hierarchies and stereotypes. The play then continues with a reversed order of scenes: it begins with scene 31 and ends with scene 1. This unsettles the traditional chronological structure, and the purposeful fragmentation of scenes forces the reader and the viewer to actively attempt to reconstruct the chain of events. Subsequently, each segment or scene of the play is autonomous and can be seen, read, or talked about in its own right, independent of the rest of the text. As Brecht stressed, it is difficult “to break with the habit of assimilating a work of art as a whole,” and all his aesthetic attempts aimed at fragmenting the play in order to allow for different “effects to be singled out and studied.”28 In Venus, each scene is a step toward a fatal end, an end that is known to the readers from the start, not only because they know the story of Baartman and because they have been informed of her death, but also because there can be no other outcome in situations of crass exploitation. Every scene is also an independent micro-story with a suggestive title of its own, e.g. Scene 31: May I present to You “The African Dancing Princess”/ She’d Make a Splendid Freak, or Scene 24: But No One Ever 27 Jameson, Brecht and Method, 39. 28 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 91.

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Noticed / Her Face Was Streamed with Tears, or Scene 12: Love Iduhnt What / She Used to Be. While the reader is informed of the order of scenes and their titles thanks to his or her direct access to the text of the play, the theatre audience is treated to a similar experience because actors occasionally announce which scene is about to be presented: THE NEGRO RESURRECTIONIST. Scene #30: She Looks Like Shes [sic] Fresh Off the Boat. (28) This, along with the fact that a single actor plays multiple characters, reminds both the reader and the viewer that it is all an act,29 and that they should not attempt identification as the play has a specific agenda: one which is political and rational instead of cathartic. In fact, catharsis is impossible as the estrangement produced by epic plays stresses the idea that epic theatre is a conscious attempt at spectacle instead of pure mimesis. Thus, instead of losing themselves passively and completely in the character created by the actor, the audience is encouraged to be a consciously and constructively critical and socially sensitive observer, having been made aware of the actors’ deliberate performance.30 To highlight the fact that a black female body is seen as a source of visual excitement and sexual pleasure to others, Parks introduces a play within the play, entitled “For the Love of The Venus”. It shows that her attraction arises from the stereotypical notion that a black female is “more primitive, and therefore more sexually intensive”31 and attractive to the white man. In addition, a play within a play contributes to the breaking of the illusion that the audience is the “unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place.”32 It brings about a double alienation by making it clear that both plotlines are merely staged spectacles. The events of the second play are chronologically intertwined with 29

Brecht explains that the direct addressing of the audience by actors, who function as demonstrators and choruses, and by documentary projections serves to break off imitation and give explanation (Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 126). And explanation is, in turn, necessary because the technique of alienating the audience implies labelling human social incidents as striking and unnatural, something that should not be taken for granted and that demands explanation (125). 30 The text provides adequate information for the reader to understand this; the spectator’s awareness depends on the success of a particular staging and their familiarity with the text. 31 Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” 212. 32 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 92.

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the events of the original play, and the reader follows both stories at the same time. “For the Love of The Venus” is a drama in three acts, and features the story of a young man and his bride-to-be; the sole viewer of this play is Baron Docteur. In the play, the Young Man neglects his fiancée because he is infatuated by the Venus Hottentot and her sexual attributes, and the play, much like “The Murder of Gonzago” in Hamlet which mirrors the story of how Hamlet’s father was murdered by his own brother, mirrors and clarifies the relationship between Baron Docteur and Venus. Neither the Young Man nor Baron Docteur love Venus as a person but simply find her physical features overly exciting, so much so that Baron Docteur neglects his wife, just as the Young Man neglects his fiancée. They both seem to be mesmerized by the spectacle of her voluptuous black body, and they mask their sexual interest with pronunciations of “love,” such as Baron Docteur’s “I love you, Girl” (112), or the Young Man’s “I wanna love Something Wild” (58) which devastates his Bride-To-Be: “He sez he loves a Hottentot” (123). The constant emphasis on “love” highlights its stark absence from the world of sexual exploitation and symbolizes the actual tension between Venus’ subjectivity and her constant objectification. By leaving out the term “Hottentot,” which is loaded with meanings that imply colonial hierarchies, the titles of both plays have us focused on the implied idea of love through the deliberate use of the term “Venus” as both a parody and a pun on the figure of the Roman goddess of love. Through pun, the two titles engage in a conversation about mythology, history and art,33 but also about the way labels, prejudice and sexual desire constantly affect and modify our examination of the “arguments” presented. One of the most powerful associations (or, rather, disassociations) refers to Botticelli’s famous painting, The Birth of Venus, for many the epitome of Renaissance art. As people flock to Florence’s Uffizi to admire the beauty of the white, blond, naked goddess of love, emerging from the sea on a white shell, they also flock to admire Parks’ Venus which is her exact opposite: “Venus, Black Goddess, was shameless, she sinned or / else / completely ­unknowing of r godfearin [sic] ways she stood / totally naked in her iron cage” 33

The focus on ancient history and mythology is inevitable as Baartman was displayed under the name of “Venus.” The metaphor was supposed to be lucrative for the “business,” as sex and beauty have always sold well. Kevin J. Wetmore discusses this in his book Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre and points to an 1814 vaudeville that aimed at ridiculing Baartman’s physique and reaffirming the idea of white beauty. Wetmore sees Parks as using the attitude displayed in the vaudeville as the basis for her play Venus (33–37). The vaudeville in question is The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen by Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier and it is published in English translation in Sharpley–Whiting’s Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham & NC: Duke UP, 1999).

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(13). In Botticelli’s painting, the mythical handmaid, Ora, prepares to dress the shy Venus, whereas Parks’ Venus is shameless: “all undressed awaiting you / to take yr peek” (14). The implied parallel between the two goddesses may be said to further emphasize how utterly different their situation is, but it may also serve as proof that the European male imagination has always seen the female body as either a spectacle or a bounty, something to gaze at and fantasize about conquering and possessing. It has also typically tended to inscribe modesty onto the body of a white female, and shameless insatiability onto the body of the black female. As a result, there arises a discrepancy between the white Roman goddess, who has the mythical power over love, and the utter lack of love experienced by and associated with Black Venus. When Baron Docteur says to Venus: “I look at you, v / and I see Love” (14), his assertion only highlights the irony of her name by alienating the signifier from the signified as the “love goddess” feels compelled to constantly ask for reassurance: “Love me?” (107, 110, 111, 128, 139, 140). These initial associations connected with the title are complemented by the implications contained in the first words uttered in the play: “The Venus Hottentot” (9). This clear focus on Baartman’s “exotic” sexuality, as determined by her ethnic and racial origin, implies a complete rejection of the possibility of emotional love. Consequently, it is her sexual parts and race more than her body as such that are revealed as her defining features, in line with Bataille’s remark that “the beauty of the desirable woman suggests her private parts.”34 In Baartman’s case, her private parts were indeed the source of her animalistic attraction for the white audience: A MEMBER OF CHORUS, AS WITNESS. Thuh gals got bottoms like hot air balloons Bottoms and bottoms and bottoms piling up like like 2 mountains. Magnificent. And endless. An ass to write home about. Well worth the admission price. A spectacle a debacle a priceless prize, thuh filthy slut. Coco candy coloured and dressed all in au naturel she likes when people peek and poke. (16–17) This comment by a member of chorus is intended to appeal to the reader’s sense of justice and morality, and its clear social function is to prompt the ­audience to form their own opinion on the situation. In this particular case, 34

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, tr. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986): 142.

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the reader/audience must consider the discourse used in the description of Venus with all its implications. The derogatory term “filthy slut” invokes a typical abuser-abused relationship, in which the abuser projects his faults, fears and desires onto the abused, “punishing” the abused person for crimes she never committed. It also points to what Gilman refers to as one of the typical iconographies of the nineteenth century, namely a linkage of the icon of the Hottentot female (which also came to be taken as representative of any black female) and the icon of the prostitute, both of which came to represent sexualized women35 in a derogatory, negative sense. Accordingly, black sexual­ity is seen as illicit, negative, and deviant,36 and suggests that moral deformity lies with the black woman, not the person (typically a white male) gazing at her. In addition, it further invokes the black/white dichotomy, which implies metaphors according to which black is dirty, filthy, or soiled, and white is clean, pure and innocent. The metaphor is extended to race, obviously, since black, as Gilman explains it, is dirty and deviant. To achieve the desired alienating effect on the readers/audience as well as establish a connection with the present, Parks makes clever use of language. All protagonists speak in a mixture of jocularly or even mockingly intoned slang; they use elliptic sentences, exclamations, sighs and rhymed (morbid) poetry. The repetition of certain phrases is reminiscent of what Persley sees as a Hip Hop hook or chorus of a song.37 Characters’ utterances are short rather than long monologues because their speech is not meant to establish an emotional connection between them and the reader/audience. Rather, their jocular style and slang is meant to further remove the reader from the story and simultaneously colour those participating in the spectacle as immoral and selfish in their desires. The readers are aware of purposeful misspelling which represents an additional level of estrangement due to the readers’ surprise at the use of slang or improper spelling. Moreover, the use of contemporary slang unsettles the historical distance between the nineteenth century and today, suggesting that a symbolic Venus suffers abuse even today. The highly stylized language indicates that the actors are not meant to identify with what they are saying, but rather they offer their statements to us for criticism, helping us understand the causes of the events and protest against them; or as Brecht puts it, “The actress must not make the sentence her own affair, she must hand it over 35 36 37

Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” 206. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” 209. Persley, “Sampling and Remixing: Hip Hop and Parks’s History Plays,” 70.

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for criticism.”38 Parks’ specific use of comedic language and tone also highlights the physical and sexual aspect of the play/narrative. Every scene seems to represent a caricature of Venus’ life, turning the totality of the play into a burlesque, which Wetmore suggests39 may well be an echo of Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier’s vaudeville. For example, what the reader expects to be love poetry is perverted into morbid verses that celebrate science and knowledge, and express a desire for Venus’ death. She is a curiosity, a freak of nature that should be carefully studied, even if it means killing and dissecting her: THE MAN, LATER THE BARON DOCTEUR AND THE CHORUS. Hubba-hubba-hubba-hubba. … ANATOMIST FROM THE EAST. I look at you, Venus, and see: Science. You in uh pickle On my library shelf. THE VENUS. Uhhhhhh! Uhhhhhh! Uhhhhhh! Uhhhhhh! (17) Throughout the play, scientists watch over her, desiring her body both alive – as a sexual object; and dead – as an object of scientific curiosity. To highlight the tension between cold-hearted science’s interest in facts and numbers, but not lives, and the oversexualization of Baartman as the Venus figure, the play is equipped with two glossaries: one of medical terms and the other of chocolates. The former reveals the men’s malevolent interest in Venus’ body, which to them was an object of science and/or sex, stripped of personal agency. The latter lists the objects of Venus’ passion, and as such stands in contrast to the former which renders her merely as a body; the fact that she has desires and interests of her own, symbolized by chocolates, sheds a new light on her. Her voracious appetite for chocolate signals her desire for love and acceptance, since chocolates were both given and accepted as a substitute for the desired

38 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 98. 39 Wetmore, Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre, 34.

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but unattainable love. Furthermore, in her desire for chocolate she resembles a child. Like a child, she longs for love and acceptance, and is heavily dependent on the wishes and moods of her caretakers. Moreover, she lacks any human or civil rights, which was precisely the situation of children at the time.40 Her integrity and her wishes are completely ignored unless they are insignificant and do not question the authority of “adults” (that is, white men). On a final note, at the heart of Parks’ play is the desire to critically represent the practice of making a spectacle of black women based on white, male, patriarchal and heteronormative perceptions of black femaleness. To enable the readers’ and spectators’ criticism from a social point of view, Parks employs the techniques of epic theatre as presented and developed by Bertolt Brecht. The dominant effect of epic theatre is alienation (or estrangement), which enables constructive criticism and social action, as opposed to the identification and emphatic emotional response favoured by traditional (Aristotelian) theatre. The play shows that the construction of the concept of “freak” is based on engrained arbitrary standards of appearance to which the “freak” fails to conform. By an extended metaphor that views/represents the freak as lacking in certain physical features, he or she is also seen as lacking in integrity and human dignity. This, combined with the nineteenth-century European fascination with the Orient and the exotic, and the perception of people of colour as predominantly physical (sexual and sensual) beings rather than intellectual and moral ones, is the point of origin of exploitation. However, what Brecht proposes and Parks accepts as necessary is the fact that the contemporary reader/audience has the power to critically judge situations and change them. While Baartman’s circumstances ensured her exploitation, Parks’ twentiethcentury interpretation of her story implies that, in order to move forward, we need to abandon the mechanisms of thinking and behaving which have made it possible for Baartman to be turned into a spectacle. In fact, the characteristic form of Parks’ play and her use of the trappings of epic theatre contribute to such a change through the critical/cognitive awakening/mobilization of the spectator. By entitling the play Venus, Parks taps into this type of prejudice and stereotyping, highlighting the dreadful irony of the moniker. It obscures her real name, a sign of her identity, and fails to lift her up to the status of 40

This refers to the context of the nineteenth-century England, when children were considered to be the property of adults (parents or caretakers). Children were denied subjectivity, were hardly protected by the government, and were seen as having no rights. Many of Charles Dickens’ novels illustrate this point. For scholarly studies on this particular issue, see Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010). However, contemporary child protective laws point to the possibility of change.

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g­ oddess; rather it reduces her to a single trait of physicality or sexuality. Not only is Baartman’s situation completely unlike a goddess,’ but it also dispossesses her of human qualities (which Parks insistently highlights), rights, and the possibility of love. Her humanity is diminished into the spectacle of body and race, which takes place first in a freak show and then in a medical laboratory. As “Venus,” she is not loved, or treated as a goddess of love, but rather as a lab mouse, a curiosity, first studied and “poked” while alive, before finally being dissected and studied after death. Works Cited Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001). Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality, tr. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel & Sandrine Lemaire. “From Human Zoos to Colonial Apotheoses: the Era of Exhibiting the Other,” Africultures (December 2001), http:// www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=5265 (accessed 6 Aug 2015). Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988). Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and tr. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1983). Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Human Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978). Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York UP, 1996). Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in Critical Inquiry 12.1. (1985): 204–42. Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010). Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method (London & New York: Verso, 1998). Jameson, Fredric. “Reflections in Conclusion,” in Aesthetics and Politics (Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno) (London: Verso, 1980). Oddenino, Ilaria. “‘I Wanna Love Something Wild’: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” in Representation and Black Womanhood. The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 121–35. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Venus (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995).

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Persley, Nicole Hodges. “Sampling and Remixing: Hip Hop and Parks’s History Plays,” in Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010): 65–75. Reay, Barry. Watching Hannah. Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999). Švrljuga, Željka. “Hottentot Venus. Unsettling the Linear Time of History and Science,” in Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television and Other Media, eds. Marlene D. Allen & Seretha D. Williams (Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland, 2012): 126–44. Tromp, Marlene & Karyn Valerius. “Introduction. Toward Situating the Victorian Freak,” in Victorian freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008): 1–18. Wetmore, Kevin J. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre (Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland, 2003). Williams, Monte. “At Lunch With: Suzan-Lori Parks; From a Planet Closer to the Sun,” New York Times (17 April 1996), http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/17/garden/at-lunch -with-suzan-lori-parks-from-a-planet-closer-to-the-sun.html?pagewanted=all ­(accessed 18 March 2015). Young, Jean. “The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” African American Review 31.4 (1997): 699–708. Zarris, Venus. “Venus – Review,” Chicago Stage Review.Com (15 June 2011), http://www .chicagostagereview.com/venus-%E2%80%93-review/ (this page is no longer available).

Chapter 8

The Wild Woman, the Little Mistress, the Hottentot Venus, and the Pedestal Monster Living Curiosities and Their Counter-spaces in Two Texts by Charles Baudelaire Margery Vibe Skagen Abstract Drawing on nineteenth-century medicine and natural history, Margery Vibe Skagen compares the Hottentot Venus figure in Baudelaire’s prose poem “La femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse” with a dream of a monstrous male counterpart on display in a museum/brothel, which is recounted in his correspondence. The two texts have never previously been explored in relation to the figure of Black Venus. Both evoke sociocultural urban spaces associated with different kinds of spectatorship (the fair, the brothel, the freak show, and the museum), as well as the living curiosities or monsters these sites display. With reference to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, Skagen considers these spaces as “counter-spaces” which express a strong cultural critique that also targets imperialist power structures and enlightenment ideals. Her readings indicate how heterotopias challenge established scientific truths and the existing world order by inverting them. Thus, through a transference of meaning between the different spaces they mirror, Baudelaire’s texts raise questions of race, animality, gender, prostitution and violence, without giving any definite answers.

The “I” person in Baudelaire’s prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris) wanders through the public places of the French capital, which by the mid-nineteenth century had more than a million inhabitants. He walks alone on those regulated streets that had gained political significance as revolutionary scenes; follows macadam-covered, gas-lit boulevards trafficked by horse-drawn carriages and stray women; passes by tobacconist’s shops, picture and pawn shops along the avenues; enters crowded sidewalks with individuals of all kinds and classes. The aim of the solitary walker is to capture, in timeless moralities, the nervous vitality of the large, modern city; to magnify the significance of accidental situations in emblematic settings. Taverns or fairs, parks with open air concerts, hospitals, lupanars, and theatres, a shooting ground, a graveyard,

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a subterranean gambling den, an artist’s garret with a view over rooftops – all offer suggestive frames not only for deliberate daydreaming, but also, as we will see, for a real nocturnal dream documented in Baudelaire’s correspondence. Baudelaire’s was the mercantile Paris of modernity described by Walter Benjamin; a self-confident era of progress and growing taste for everything new, an era of marvelous exhibitions and curious gazes, mass distributed newspapers, caricatures, printed posters, and a coming photographic revolution. It was also a world of strict censorship and state supervision, where deviance was studied and institutionalized, and brothels ‘tolerated’ under medical–moral control. It was a society in which social regulation, commercialization, and prostitution took on new meaning: a prudish society with regard to poetry, but one in which a husband could “shackle his lawful wife as a beast” and display her at the fair “with the officials’ permission.”1 It was the constantly accelerating world we know today, which Baudelaire claimed must be coming to an end. This chapter will explore some characteristically ‘modern’ sites and the ambiguous lessons they convey to the observant eyes of the Parisian poet. Different kinds of visual prostitution will be addressed and various alienating gazes. The focus will be on the way the poet ironically and self-reflectively reconfigures the ‘exhibited monster’ motif. In accordance with this section’s epistemological theme, it will be shown how Baudelaire refers to scientific, artistic, and mercantile forms of profanation and appropriation, metaphorizing them into instruments of learning and unlearning. Through cross-readings of the prose poem, “La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse,”2 and a dream recounted in Baudelaire’s correspondence from 13 March 1856, it will be possible to demonstrate how these texts exploit the imaginary potential and heterotopical quality of certain distinctive spaces, namely the fair, the brothel, and the museum of natural history. These are scenes for the display of so-called ‘living curiosities,’ represented in the two mentioned texts by an animal-like “wild woman” and a male “monster” (the fantastically deformed offspring of a prostitute). Baudelaire’s staging of these ‘freaks of nature’ challenges ethical, aesthetic, and natural historical notions of the human, supposedly in response to mediated figures like the Hottentot Venus, which pertain to the same kind of urban spaces. The aim is to show how these texts transcend rather than revise the 1 Charles Baudelaire, “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” in Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008): 20. 2 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i–ii, texte établi, présenté et annoté par Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1971 and 1975): 289–90. The prose poem, published in 1862, was originally planned in verse and mentioned for the first time in Baudelaire’s correspondence from 1859 (Cf. Claude Pichois’ note in Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i, 1315).

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colonial, masculine gaze on Black Venus to interrogate the paradoxical nature of humankind. 1

Black Venus in Baudelairian Contexts

The wild woman was a well-known character of fairs and freak shows, a ‘living phenomenon’ like the two-headed calf or the bearded lady. But Baudelaire’s femme sauvage in “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress” has also been associated more specifically with Saartjie Baartman. Although the Khoisan woman known as the Hottentot Venus died before Baudelaire was born, we can presume that this figure was familiar to him. And he must have been aware of how black women were studied and depicted by naturalists and zoologists, including Georges Cuvier, the head keeper of the menagerie at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who dissected Baartman’s body in an effort to prove that her body traits closely resembled those of the orangutan. Baudelaire claims in one of his many anti-Belgium fragments that Cuvier would have placed the Belgian on a lower rung of the ladder of creation than the Hottentot. Debarati Sanyal notes interestingly that Baudelaire’s grand uncle, Francois Levaillant, was a naturalist whose travel journal, mentioned in the thirteen-year-old Charles’ correspondence to his mother, included descriptions and illustrations of Khoisan women referred to as Hottentots.3 In his Salon de 1846,4 Baudelaire praises the paintings of George Catlin’s heroic Ioway sauvages – who were exhibited live in Paris in 1845 – but we do not know if he ever witnessed African women on display.5 3 Debarati Sanyal, “Bodies on Display: Poetry, Violence and the Feminine in Baudelaire and Mallarmé,” New Faculty Lecture Series (1 January 2003), http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/1708f98g#page-17 (accessed 20 April 2016). 4 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes ii, 446. 5 Sander Gilman’s often quoted reference to the “Hottentote” assumed to have been the prize attraction at a ball given by the duchess du Barry as late as 1829, must be an anachronism. See Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 213. Madame du Barry, the last official favourite of Louis xv was executed in 1793, but was also a widely represented figure of aristocratic extravagance and debauchery, and subject to scandalizing pamphlets. The supposed memoirs, published in her name by Etienne Léon Lamothe-Langon in 1829, tell how she acquired a little black boy, Zamor, dressed in feathers and jewellery as a gift from Maréchal Richelieu. The very young page in turban, who is present in the portrait of Madame Du Barry by Gautier d’Agoty, is described in her memoirs as a cherished plaything in the same passage as her pet dog. But Zamor grew out of Madame’s balls and boudoirs, and joined the revolutionaries, and it was he who – according to the legend – denounced Madame du Barry to The Committee of Public Safety in 1793.

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Lautréamont famously refers to Baudelaire as “the morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus,”6 but the expression does not occur in Baudelaire’s own writings. Scholars have associated him with this figure primarily because of his long relationship with the Creole woman, Jeanne Duval, and because of the sensual poems she inspired, termed by critics the cycle of Black Venus. In various texts celebrating black women, Baudelaire exploits some of the stereotypical traits (like paresse and nonchalance) mentioned by Julien-Joseph Virey in his infamous article “Le Nègre” in Le Dictionnaire des Sciences médicales. The poem “Sed non satiata” describes the exotic mistress as an insatiable demon,7 but there are also white women with monstrous appetites, and white prostitutes in Baudelaire’s poetry, as well as in his notebook lists of bonnes adresses.8 His drawings and poetical renderings of la mulâtresse Jeanne Duval accentuate her breasts,9 and the poems “À une Malabaraise” and “La Belle Dorothée” accentuate these women’s broad hips in a praising rather than scabrous tone.10 The last two characters are idealized as proud and independent. Although they serve masters and may be slaves, they are not imprisoned in corsets, and stand in contrast to the bodily shame and unhealthy “chlorotic” appearance of their degenerate, over-civilized contemporaries who Baudelaire describes in “I like to recall that naked age.”11 The natural bestiality Baudelaire sometimes attributes to young, fertile women is not associated with race.12 The wild woman in the prose poem is compared to animals of significantly varied colouring: an orangutan, a tiger, and a white bear. She is presumably an animal because she is a woman, not because of her complexion. Turning from the voluptuous figure of Baudelaire’s Black Venus, it is interesting to consider the Hottentot Venus with her steatopygia and supposedly

The ­spectacular story of the former slave boy, Louis-Benoît Zamor, who sent Louis xv’s mistress to the guillotine might well have inspired caricatures of depraved aristocrats as Cœuré’s “Hottentote au bal de Madame du Barry” in revolutionary and abolitionist contexts as well. 6 Isidore Ducasse Comte de Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973): 289. 7 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i, 28. 8 Œuvres complètes i, 765. 9 Nadar describes Jeanne Duval as “particulièrement remarquable par l’exubérant, invraisemblable développement des pectoraux” (quoted by Claude Pichois & Jean Ziegler, Baudelaire: Biographie [Paris: Julliard, 1987]: 181). 10 See “A une Malabaraise,” “Tes pieds sont aussi fins que tes mains, et la hanche / Est large à faire envie à la plus belle blanche” Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i, 173. 11 “J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues” Œuvres complètes i, 11. If the translator’s name is not mentioned, all translations are mine. 12 “A woman is hungry and she wants to eat. Thirsty, and wants to drink. She is in heat and wants to be laid. […] A woman is natural, which means abominable. She is also always vulgar, the opposite of the Dandy” (Œuvres complètes i, 667).

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monstrous genitals; this caricature may serve as a counter-image to the monstrous figures in the chosen texts, particularly to the male figure on display in Baudelaire’s dream, which has not previously been explored in relation to the Hottentot Venus. We will see how the two texts’ respective monsters and their heterotopic settings can be interpreted both as ironic auto-reflections of the stereotypical poet (as précieux, melancholic or hysterical) and as modes of reflective resistance to emerging discourses on the nature of the human. 2

Cosmopolitanism, Prostitution, and Progress

In the urban sceneries of Le Spleen de Paris and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, the poet–artist collects glimpses of unknown faces, takes possession of them with his eyes and his imagination, as objects of aesthetic consumption rather than subjects of communication. Such imaginary and non-binding receptiveness to strangers, which is described in the “Crowds” as the poet’s undiscriminating capacity for multiple identifications, is in Baudelaire’s terms a “universal communion” and a “sacred prostitution of the soul.”13 The ‘father of modernity’ and fundamentally ambivalent to most things, Baudelaire is also, as Antoine Compagnon reminds us, the “anti–modern” who loathes democracy, scorns the religion of progress, and maintains an orthodox vision of humanity’s state of sin.14 Literature springs from evil, writing poetry for pay is prostitution, but “glory is to remain one, and to prostitute oneself in an individual manner.”15 Encompassing opposites as so many other Baudelairian notions, ‘sin’ is not only degradation, but also a source of charity and beauty, and God is the most prostituted of all beings.16 Baudelaire’s particular understanding of “divine cosmopolitism,” as it is cultivated by the solitary wanderer either in the Parisian multitude or in the midst of “deep forests and vertiginous prairies,”17 is also his recommended approach to the ‘bizarre’ (Gautier would say “monstrous”)18 aesthetics of foreign 13 14

Œuvres complètes i, 291. Antoine Compagnon, Les Anti-modernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 15 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i, 700. 16 “L’être le plus prostitué, c’est l’être par excellence, c’est Dieu, puisqu’il est l’ami suprême pour chaque individu, puisqu’il est le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour” Œuvres complètes i, 692. 17 See Baudelaire, “Exposition universelle (1855),” in Œuvres complètes ii, 576. 18 Théophile Gautier, “Collection Chinoise,” in Les Beaux-Arts en Europe 1855 (Paris: M. Lévy, 1855): 132.

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cultures. A universalistic critique is appropriately hailed in Baudelaire’s review of the Beaux-Arts pavilions at L’Exposition universelle of 1855, but perhaps not in the sense his commissioners had expected. Napoleon iii had ordered the inclusion of an international art exhibition for the first Universal Exposition in France, as a way of surpassing the great British achievement of 1851 in the race of competing empires. The glass and metal palaces, with their multiple stories and sections for the display of the products of all nations’ industries, technologies, sciences, and arts, were organized to reflect prevailing hierarchies of power and prosperity in the world. But when Baudelaire celebrates the Universal Art Exhibition of 1855, he makes a point of denying the conventional hierarchy of taste: “Beauty is always bizarre.”19 France – where, annoyingly, “everyone resembles Voltaire”20 – is never glorified by Baudelaire. He repeatedly argues against the idea of the superiority of the so-called civilized nations over the “savage.”21 And when he speaks of ‘universal harmony,’ it is not with reference to the idea of increased virtue and happiness for all peoples through material and scientific progress, but to mystical notions of universal analogy within the hierarchical realms of the natural and the supernatural. Like the I person in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, who sticks out his tongue at the Crystal Palace, the I person in one of Baudelaire’s prose poems takes hysterical pleasure in imagining “a crystal palace being shattered by a lightning-bolt.”22 Throughout the century, these ostentatious monuments of enlightenment would thrive on representing empires and their overseas possessions in rich detail. Strolling through galleries displaying the latest in musical and scientific instruments, corsets and crinolines, locomotives and spinning machines from world leading nations, the visitor of 1855 19 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes ii, 578. 20 Œuvres complètes i, 687. 21 “But, if one wishes to compare modern man, civilized man, with the savage, or rather a socalled civilized nation with a so-called savage nation, that is to say one deprived of all the ingenious inventions which absolve the individual of heroism, who does not see that all honor goes to the savage? By his nature, by very necessity itself, he is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined to the infinitely small regions of specialization. Civilized man invents the philosophy of progress to console himself for his abdication and for his downfall; while the savage man, redoubtable and respected husband, warrior forced to personal bravery, poet in the melancholy hours when the setting sun inspires songs of the past and of his forefathers, skirts more closely the edge of the ideal.” Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers, tr. and ed. Lois & Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (Bald Eagle Press, 1952). Cf. also Mon Coeur mis à nu: “Theory of the true civilization. / It is not in gas or steam or tableturning. It is in the diminution of the traces of original sin. / Nomad peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers and even cannibals may all be, by virtue of energy and personal dignity, superior to our races of the West.” Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i, 697. 22 Œuvres complètes i, 287.

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could suddenly find himself in the midst of a colonial environment with exotic products and models of ‘natives’ in enchanting attire. Later on, colonial exhibitions would make an even stronger impression with their display of live ‘ethnographic samples.’ In 1867, the year of Baudelaire’s death, the Paris Exposition universelle introduced tableaux-vivants, representing Egyptian and Tunisian scenes with real camels and Arab attendants.23 3 Heterotopias In “La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse,” the wild woman is displayed behind iron bars at a fair, while the dreamed male monster stands on a pedestal in a brothel which is at the same time a museum of natural history. Fair, brothel, and museum are among the examples Foucault mentions in a 1967 lecture in which he outlines the concept of “heterotopia,” and calls for a “hetero­ topology”: a systematic description and classification of what may be termed “actual” or “realized utopias.”24 These spaces of otherness exist in all cultures and societies, and have precisely determined functions and numerous relations to the remaining space. They are closed but permeable counter-spaces which mirror and contest the order of the remaining sociocultural sphere.25 Like utopias, heterotopias “relate to other sites by both representing them and inverting them, unlike utopias, however, they are localized and real.”26 These simultaneously concrete and phantasmagorical ‘other spaces,’ may also represent a temporality opposed to their surroundings. The Universal Exposition is an exemplary heterotopia.27 Centrally situated in the metropole, it represents the utopia of a self-assured imperialistic, 23 24

25 26 27

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998): 85. This concept is outlined in the preface to Les Mots et les Choses (Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses [Paris: Gallimard, 1966]), in a radio broadcast the same year, and in a 1967 lecture entitled “Des espaces autres,” published in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits iv.360 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994): 752–62. The quotes are (in my translations) taken from Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres” in Empan 2.54 (2004): para 17–8, https://www.cairn.info/ revue-empan-2004-2-page-12.htm (accessed 9 January 2019). Other examples mentioned by Foucault, include prisons, asylums, schools, gardens, vacation colonies, cemeteries. Peter Johnson, “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces,’” History of the Human Sciences 19.4 (November 2006): 78, http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/19/4/75.full.pdf+html (accessed 16 April 2016). According to Volker Barth, “While Foucault does not cite world exhibitions as examples of heterotopias, his definition of this concept fits them in an ideal–typical manner” Volker

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c­ apitalist world order. Its space is clearly differentiated by its palace-like architecture with marked thresholds where visitors pay to enter a different order of reality. These exhibitions also correspond to another principle of heterotopia, which is the capacity to juxtapose in one real place several sites that are in themselves incompatible. The Universal Expositions’ innumerable objects refer metonymically and phantasmatically not only to the whole world, but to the history of human societies, from the most ‘primitive’ to the hyper-civilized. Their classification systems, aspiring towards the pedagogic and encyclopedic, suggest complete rational finality and control. Typically, this specific kind of heterotopia deludes the visitor with commodified pleasures and dreams; or it  might reveal to the same visitor, in a moment of lucidity, the strangeness of it all. The brothel, the museum, and the fair in the two texts analyzed in this chapter can also qualify as situated utopias, where dream and practice merge, where ocular desires find imaginary satisfactions, and ironic lessons may be insinuated. While the museum generally juxtaposes exhibits from different cultures and periods, the fair juxtaposes stands with heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snake-women, and fortune-tellers. Whether the sites’ ideal function is recreational or scientific, their spatial organization reveals cultural norms and questionable assumptions. The museum and the fair are typical nineteenthcentury heterotopias but, according to Foucault, they pertain to opposite temporalities. The museum and the library reflect the utopia of a general archive, accumulating all times and places in one immobile space. These institutions of modernity are usually central, monumental edifices, made to preserve their collections for all time. In contrast, the fairgrounds are empty sites on the outskirts of cities that fill up with tents and caravans once or twice a year. The museum in Baudelaire’s dream stands for “progress, science and spread of enlightenment,”28 while the fair offers workers a well-deserved moment of liberation from the daily treadmill. The brothel’s function must be said to belong to a third category of ‘stolen’ time and space, morally prohibited, barely tolerated, and hidden from the public scene. The World expositions share the monumentality of the museum, while their valorization of the latest novelties

28

Barth, “The Micro-History of a World Event: Intention, Perception and Imagination at the Exposition universelle de 1867,” Museum and Society 6.1 (March 2008): 1, https://journals .le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/110 (accessed 20 April 2016). The quotation from Baudelaire’s dream narrative is taken from the English translation in Roberto Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, tr. Alastair McEwen (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Girous, 2012): 134.

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suggests the transitory character of the fair, and like the brothel, they commercialize desire. If heterotopias constitute simultaneously mythic and concrete reflections and contestations of the whole sociocultural sphere, what do Baudelaire’s textual heterotopias reveal? His merging of these different cultural and social sites suggests a symbolic unity which points to the Universal Exposition, combining the museum’s accumulation of knowledge, the fair’s entertainment, and the consumerism of the brothel under the banner of progress. Yet, Baudelaire introduces the dream to his addressee by saying that it is totally incomprehensible to him, “an almost hieroglyphic language, the key to which I don’t possess.”29 Although not pretending to have the key, what follows sketches possible readings of these allegorized spaces in the light of the extraordinary and also stereotypical characters that inhabit them. 4

The Orangutan Woman, the Little Mistress, and Their Tyrants

Parodying the form of a morality, the prose poem “La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse” sets up a scene of brutal edification with a highly ambiguous, apparently misogynistic and anti-egalitarian moral. Exasperated by his little mistress’ whining and whimpering, and especially by her melancholic pose, the poet–narrator proposes to teach her a lesson by showing her, at a fair, the “real suffering” of an encaged “wild woman”30: an orangutan-like figure who devours live animals and howls under the blows of her equally savage husband and keeper. The contrast is absolute to the little mistress, whose habitat is characterized by silken clothes, soft caresses, and cooked food cut up by a servant. The lesson conveyed to her (that she will be treated as a wild woman if she does not stop whining) re-enacts masculine superiority through sheer discursive brutality. In the penultimate paragraph of the poem, the little mistress is likened to a frog, while the first-person narrator and master places himself in the role of king by the grace of god, alluding to the classical allegory of how the clamours and complaints of the masses may open the way for tyrants. The narrator’s relation to his little mistress is transposed to La Fontaine’s fable about the frogs who asked Jupiter for a more dynamic king than the dead log he first threw

29 30

Baudelaire in Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, 132. Charles Baudelaire, “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” in Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie, 20–22.

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down to them, after which the god sent them a king crane “Who caught and slew them without measure, And gulp’d their carcasses at pleasure.”31 In Baudelaire’s text, the democratic ideal of equality is constantly undermined by the violently hierarchal relations between dominants and dominés, and by the allusions to the ladder of creation which suspends the human between the animal and the angelic, situating women closer to the animal than men. The critical question implicitly raised is which figure excels in brutishness between the savage and the civilized, man and woman, animal and ­human, Nature and God. The orangutan woman at the fair reflects grotesque aspects of the sociocultural order, but read in the light of the dream, it may be suggested that the wild woman’s too conventionally polished counterpart, the little mistress, becomes an even more grotesque caricature of the poet, which subsequently reverses the lesson he had intended for her. 5

The Dreamed Brothel Monster

The dream Baudelaire has related in his correspondence from 13 March 1856, to his friend Charles Asselineau32 stages a many-coloured male counterpart to the ferocious wild woman on display in the prose poem. This dreamed monster is a sad and timid creature with a fantastic excrescence (something like a grotesquely enlarged penis, or a hypertrophied brain) flowing from his head. Small and distorted, he “stands perpetually on a pedestal”33 in this grand house of prostitution, which is at the same time a museum of natural history. In the dream, the narrator enters the brothel from a cab in the street, and walks through vast galleries where girls are scattered around chatting with men and schoolboys. Feeling too sad and embarrassed by his indecent appearance (his penis and bare feet exposed), the dreamer dares not approach the girls, but visits instead the brothel’s zoological and medical exhibition of monstrous anatomies. He studies closely the annotated drawings and photographs of deformed fetuses, and learns that they have been conceived by the girls in the brothel. There are also pictures of birds, or halves of birds, with brilliant feathers and living eyes. 31 32 33

Jean de la Fontaine, “The Frogs Asking for a King,” in The Fables of La Fontaine, tr. E. Wright, Book iii, Fable 4 (London: William Smith, 1842). Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, tome premier: 1832–1860, texte établi, présenté et annoté par Claude Pichois avec la collaboration de Jean Ziegler (Paris: Gallimard, 1973): 338–41. Baudelaire in Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, 133.

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One of the malformed fetuses “has lived.”34 The brothel’s monster, its ‘living phenomenon’ exhibited for the curious public, is exotically burnished, pink and green, “not ugly,”35 but burdened by his long dark appendage, like a huge snake falling from his head and coiled around his body. The dreamer seems to recognize himself in the monster, who confides to him his sorrows and troubles. The embarrassing excrescence coming from his head brings to mind the sexualized excrescences of the Hottentot Venus, but opens for parallel readings beyond the gender dichotomy. 6

Burdensome Desire

Both of Baudelaire’s monsters have an indecent appearance, but they are not eroticized. In accordance with the exhibited images of aborted fetuses and other bizarre creatures in the brothel–museum, they are “certainly not made to inspire thoughts of love.”36 The two couples in the prose poem (the master narrator and his mistress, and the orangutan woman and her keeper) provide caricaturized examples of “conjugal behavior”37; their interaction is degraded to beatings and verbal abuse, howling and whining. The wild woman in the prose poem is initially presented using neutral or masculine nouns. She is no temptress; her primary characteristic is raging avidity. In fact, all of the figures throughout the poem are linked to some form of oral consumption as a matter of survival, domination or death, a matter of devouring or being devoured. The petite maîtresse, who only eats “cooked meats, carved into morsels […] by a doting servant,” is first contrasted to “the old beggar women who gather up crusts of bread outside tavern doors,” then to the voracious wild woman who is fed live rabbits and chickens by her keeper.38 Towards the end, the mistress is compared to the frogs gulped down by the crane, and finally to the “empty bottle to be thrown out of the window”39; the bottle is presumably what will remain of the little mistress, after the poet has consumed the brief ‘inspiration’ of her wine. Eating also plays a significant role in the dreamed brothel, a place normally associated with the satisfaction of sexual desire. A major ­concern of

34 35 36 37 38 39

La Folie Baudelaire, 133. La Folie Baudelaire, 133. La Folie Baudelaire, 134. Baudelaire, “La Femme sauvage et la petite-,” Œuvres complètes i, 289. Charles Baudelaire, “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” in Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie, 20 and 21. “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie, 21.

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the small and shy monster is that he may be obliged to dine next to a “tall and well-made” prostitute.40 In the same way as the communion of love is problematized through prostitution, the ritual of eating, as communion with the material world and with one’s companions, is problematized through the dehumanizing scientific display of ‘monstrous,’ animal-like bodies. The human exhibition in which the wild woman and the pedestal monster participate is also a form of prostitution, as is the degradation of Baudelaire’s poet: the humiliating necessity of publishing poems in mass media for pay. Figurative prostitution is the main activity at the dreamed brothel, primarily driven by the concupiscence of the eyes and the imagination. Like the divine prostitution of the soul described in “The Crowds,” the ‘communion’ is sans reciprocity, with one exception: the dreamer’s conversation with the brothel monster. The visit at the brothel is motivated by the dreamer’s obligation (which turns out to be a pretext) to give his latest publication to “la maîtresse d’une grande maison de prostitution.” I felt it my duty to offer to the madam of a great house of prostitution a book of mine that had just come out. On looking at the book I was holding in my hand, it turned out to be an obscene book, which explained to me the necessity to offer the work to that woman. Moreover, in my head, this necessity was basically an excuse, a chance to screw, on finding myself there, one of the girls of the house, and this implies that, without the need to offer the book, I wouldn’t have dared to go into a house of that kind.41 The dreamer’s emotional state – causing his identification with the sad brothel monster – is characterized as “très triste et très intimidé.”42 The visit to the fair in the prose poem also has a literary pretext, but here the self-assured poet is the intimidator of the petite maîtresse, providing a kill-or-cure remedy for “all these affectations” she has “picked up from books.”43 The way both texts expose the figure of the first-person poet, as self-important or self-effacing, in relation to intimidated or intimidating maîtresses, suggests many kinds of doubts regarding the essential value of literature or ‘books’: as prostitution, false excuse, source of misconception, or affectation.

40 Baudelaire in Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, 135. 41 La Folie Baudelaire, 133. 42 Baudelaire, Correspondance i, 339. 43 “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie, 21.

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Savagery and Preciosity

In both the poem and the dream, however, things are never what they seem to be, whether ‘fake,’ empty, or animated by some deep hieroglyphic meaning. Let us examine more closely the trivial or allegorical figures they present. The tone of the poem is satirical rather than symbolistic but, as we shall see, the dream is also ironic. La femme sauvage is a common nineteenth-century fair and vaudeville figure, but both the monstrous wild woman and the dainty little mistress refer to theatrical and often caricatured types. One notices the italic emphasis in the last paragraph of the poem that suggests that both the femme sauvage and précieuses should be taken as stereotypical roles. Several indications help the reader to understand that the petite maîtresse44 is a précieuse ridicule,45 an over-refined and over-sensitive woman, but lacking the tragic sublimity Baudelaire assigned to Emma Bovary. The nineteenth-­century equivalent to the seventeenth-century précieuse is the bas-bleu: a prudish and pretentious ‘literary lady,’ depreciated by writers and caricaturists such as Daumier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas defines Bas-bleu or “Bluestocking” as a “term of contempt applied to women with intellectual interests,” recommending the user of the term to refer to Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes, which brings to mind the associated comedy of Les Précieuses ridicules.46 In 1844, Baudelaire’s friend Daumier published a long series of caricatures entitled Les Bas-bleus in the satirical daily Le Charivari, attacking this ethereal version of the nineteenth-century feminist for neglecting housekeeping, husband and children for the sake of her bookishness. Baudelaire’s petite maîtresse corresponds strikingly to Daumier’s languishing bluestockings, being a cultured female who unconvincingly imitates the obsolete idealistic posture of a romantic poet, a self-complacent woman who “would have been a man,”47 but who does not possess the androgynous qualities Baudelaire admires in Emma Bovary. 44

45 46 47

See the definition of this expression in the Trésor de la langue francaise: “Petite-maîtresse jeune élégante aux allures et aux manières affectées et prétentieuses” (Trésor de la langue francaise informatisé; https://www.lexilogos.com/francais_dictionnaire.htm (accessed 21 October 2016). The adjectve précieuse is attributed two times to the little mistress in the original version of the prose poem. Cf. Molière’s satire over feminine pretention, The Ridiculous Précieuses or The Affected Ladies. Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues in Œuvres de Flaubert ii (Paris: Gallimard, 1952): 1001. Baudelaire repeats the same stereotype when he warns against bluestockings in his Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs: le bas-bleu is dangerous because: “c’est un homme manqué” (Œuvres complètes ii, 20).

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Honoré Daumier, Le Bas bleu déclamant sa pièce (The Bluestocking Reciting Her Play), 1844. © The Trustees of the British Museum

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The response to this figure, as expressed by Daumier and Baudelaire, appears aggressively anti-feminist. The I person of the poem, like the male figures in Daumier’s blue-stocking series, is an emasculated counterpart to the wild woman’s ostensibly virile keeper who beats her with a real baton. Before he threatens the petite maîtresse (rather pathetically) with the fable’s king crane, the poetic I identifies himself with the “meek and mild” log king for whom the frogs show no respect. One may wonder if his verbiage is any more efficient than her paroles inutiles. A simplistic Freudian interpretation of the series of masculine sexual metaphors offered by poem and dream – the wild man’s baton and hammer, the poet as passive king log, and finally the brothel monster’s snake-like excrescence – would spell out the poet’s lack of virility when confronted with ‘wild’ women. Another possible interpretation points to the metonymical displacement of desire in melancholia and hysteria. In the poem’s mock encounter between the savage and the civilized, the affected melancholy of the précieuse is ridiculed (she is like bottle without wine, devoid of any enchantment or genius), while a hint of spiritual dignity is ascribed to the savage woman’s corporeal expressions of pain, to her consciousness of playing a role, and her assumed pride as a performer. The wild woman imitates “an orangutan crazed by its exile,” while the languid mistress, her “eyes turned ethereally to the sky,” is compared to one of the fable’s frogs invoking a heavenly king.48 Although opposite, both females perform cultural roles, and both belong to the species “of those animals that one generally calls ‘my angel!’”49 Clearly, both are placed far below the angelic on the ladder of being; but if the orangutan woman is a ‘naturally’ degenerated descendant of Adam and Eve, the précieuse, corrupted by culture, stands even lower as a product of cultural waste, “an empty bottle” to be thrown out of the window.50 8

The Poet as Melancholy Genius or Just Hysterical

The petite maîtresse seems to parody both the romantic cliché of the ‘melancholy genius’ and the more modern medical and literary figure of the ‘hysterical poet,’ introduced by Baudelaire in his review of Madame Bovary.51 In his paraphrase of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poetic Principle,52 Baudelaire seems to adhere 48 “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie, 20, 21. 49 “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” 20. 50 “The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress,” 21. 51 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes ii, 83. 52 “La divine passion y paraît magnifique, étoilée, et toujours voilée d’une irrémédiable mélancolie” (E. Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres, Œuvres complètes ii, 312). See also Œuvres complètes ii, 114 and 334.

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to the idealist notion of melancholy and to neo-platonic spirituality. The “super­ naturalism” Baudelaire recognizes in Delacroix’s art is explicitly connected to a ‘noble’ kind of melancholy, which the painter refused to ascribe to women according to Baudelaire’s ironical anecdote.53 The claim that women could not experience authentic melancholy was also a medical assumption, which may explain why the poem’s condescending poet is particularly provoked by the little mistress’ affected pose; true poetical melancholy is a privilege of the male genius. But the poet’s own ideal of melancholic beauty is also exposed to the threat of cliché. In the poem, the Neo-platonic soul’s melancholic exile from paradise lost has its counter-image in the real pain of the tortured wild woman, in the real exile of the encaged orangutan that can still be seen at the menagerie of Le Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Baudelaire’s poetry and aesthetic writing also explores hysteria, the classical female malady which nineteenth-century medicine could ascribe to men.54 Disturbingly similar to the exaltation, or the deeply concentrated states of mind traditionally associated with creative melancholy, hysteria was the more recent label for forms of entranced hypersensitivity regarded as advantageous for artistic practices. But it was still a crude medical term, compared to the spiritual distinction associated with melancholy. Hysteria was generally understood as displaced sexual energy, while melancholic longing for the ideal could still be identified with the elevating drive of platonic Eros. In Baudelaire’s dualistic worldview, this binary is perceptible as an unresolved tension between supernaturalism and naturalism, metaphysics and medicine. In his prose poems there are four occurrences of the terms “hysteria” or “hysterical,” and all are closely connected to violent physical gestures. One occurrence is also at the fair.55 In these texts the ethereal poetic ideal is confronted with brutal reality; the question is “Which one is real?”56 Poetical idealism or medical naturalism? The two texts examined here reflect this tension ironically in spaces where science, desire and illusion converge. 53

54

55 56

See Baudelaire, L’Œuvre et la vie de Delacroix: “Je me souviens qu’une fois, dans un lieu public, comme je lui montrais le visage d’une femme d’une originale beauté et d’un caractère mélancolique, il voulut bien en goûter la beauté, mais me dit, avec son petit rire, pour répondre au reste: ‘Comment voulez-vous qu’une femme puisse être mélancolique?’ insinuant sans doute par là que, pour connaître le sentiment de la mélancolie, il manque à la femme une certaine chose essentielle” Œuvres complètes ii, 766–67. Cf. Margery Vibe Skagen, “Symptoms of Hysteria in Baudelaire’s Writing,” in The Human and Its Limits: Explorations in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, eds. Margareth Hagen, Randi Koppen & Margery Vibe Skagen (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2011): 219–38. “Le Vieux saltimbanque,” Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes i, 295. “Laquelle est la vraie?” Œuvres complètes i, 342.

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Daumier has many caricatures of crinoline ladies in urban settings, some hiding sheep or hens under their skirts, some hardly able to pass through doors. One can imagine a caricature of the Hottentot Venus as she was exposed in a cage with her protuberant buttocks, ironically mirroring and inverting the précieuses in cage crinolines gazing at her from the other side of the bars. In spite of their refinement, the précieuses also seem to conceal and expose at the same time some encaged monstrosity beneath their corseted waists. The brothel monster’s snakelike excrescence exaggerates human sexuality and human bestiality in the same caricatural or hysterical way. The précieuse and the précieux are too ethereal to acknowledge their bodies. When the ‘hysterical poet’ recognizes himself in the brothel monster, it may be as the ironic masculine inversion of the classical understanding of hysteria as a wild displacement of the sexual organ, obstructing and burdening the higher regions of the body with its irrepressible, animal-like presence. 9

Monstrous Decadence Obsessed with the Origin of Man

In both texts, the term monster (derived from monstrare: to show) is used several times. The antique Chimaera – the fabled creature with lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail – is a monster. But monster is also a medical term which was still in use in the nineteenth century for an abnormally developed individual or fetus of any species. Medieval art thrived on monsters, designed to symbolize evil and vices, most often luxuria, lust. Classicism was hostile to those chaotic deformations and combinations of anatomical parts from different species, but they flourished again in nineteenth-century literature (Hugo), art (Grandville) and caricature (Daumier), especially in the fin-de-siècle decadence. Conventional Christian allegorical monsters are also found in Baudelaire’s poetry, in which the bizarre, the imaginative, and the awareness of evil are essential esthetical principles, but his wild woman and brothel monster are new and indicate a new mythology of natural history and medicine. Baudelaire is one of the first to celebrate the ‘monstrous flowers’ of ­decadence – their morbid, melancholic, and bizarre beauty – defending his favourite artists when they were labeled decadent in a derogatory sense. But before it became an aesthetic movement, decadence was first a biological issue. Vladimir Jankélévitch defines decadence as “a fabrication of monsters, a teratogony.”57 Evanghelia Stead has pursued this view in her study of the 57

Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La Decadence” in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 90.4 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985): 435–61. The term teratogony is attested first time

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f­in-de-siècle obsession, identifying two significant kinds of monsters, namely fetuses and apes, figuring lower stages of evolution, ambiguous and uncanny siblings of the human.58 She relates this cultural craze to the fall of the gods, and the replacement of religion with a capricious and uncontrolled nature. The mere existence of so-called freaks or tricks of nature, challenges the conception of a good creator. Competing with the new sciences of evolution, the Christian theogony would, in the fin-de-siècle literature and art, be succeeded by the frightening teratogony of decadence. Baudelaire wrote throughout the mid-nineteenth century but did not live to see its end. As a forewarning of new collective frights and fascinations, it is significant that his wild woman monster is likened to an orangutan, while his dream monsters are clearly related to embryology. The dreamer studies a series of medical illustrations of monstrous fetuses, before he encounters the pedestal monster, who, as opposed to the aborted ones, is presented as one who has lived. His frail, distorted shape and hunkered down position may recall that of an unborn child, and his excrescence could have been suggested to Baudelaire from medical illustrations of fetuses with deformed heads as shown in Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s Philosophie anatomique: Monstruosités humaines (1822), or even from exhibited collections of unborn ‘monsters’ at the Paris Museum of Natural history. Some of the most burning scientific questions of Baudelaire’s time concerned embryology and transformism/evolutionism. Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, the term evolution was used primarily, if not exclusively, in an embryological sense to designate the development of the individual embryo. The experimental study of deformed fetuses (comparative embryology) had been introduced by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the first professor at the Museum of Natural History from 1793. His popular lectures and writings contradicted the concept of a fixed human species and led to an accentuation of the idea of human variability and animality. Saint-Hilaire applied transformist theory to the concept of race; the so-called Hottentot was the most degraded of races, just above the orangutans on the ladder of species. Following Buffon and Lamarck, Saint-Hilaire’s starting point is the unity of organic composition from which all (vertebrate) species have evolved, their different forms resulting from adaption to different environments. Saint-Hilaire is constantly referred to in the novels of Balzac, who frequented the public lectures given by

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in 1853. From teratogenesis: the production of monsters or misshapen organisms, the study of their development. Evanghelia Stead, Le Monstre, le singe et le foetus: Tératogonie et Décadence dans l’Europe fin-de-siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2004).

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the scientist at the Museum and applied his zoological theory to the novelistic study of society. Darwin in his turn cited both Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and his son Isidore as naturalists who had anticipated his theory to a certain degree. In 1856, when Baudelaire wrote down his dream and started formulating his poem, Darwin’s theory of evolution (The Origin of the Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man 1871) was yet to be published. It would take time before Darwinism was accepted in France, since Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had been succeeded by anti-transformist scientists, who supported the concept of the fixity of species. But, as Gillian Beer has shown, lurking suggestions and suspicions were perceptible everywhere in the years preceding the public scandal arising from notions of humankind’s animal descent and promiscuous kinship with apes.59 Daumier’s numerous caricatures of apelike humans, and stories of women being abducted by apes, document this obsession. 10

Progress and Primitivism: The Serpent Bites Its Tail

We recall that the brothel museum’s exhibition of monstrous medical images juxtaposed birds, and halves of birds, some with living eyes, some like aerolites, together with the fetuses. Charles Mauron has connected the brothel monster to the poem “L’Albatros.” The monster, staggering under the weight of his rubbery appendage, is like the albatross whose oversized wings render the bird’s movements on earth so awkward. The poet is likened to this “prince of the clouds,” exiled on earth.60 Curiously, the burdensome appendage dragged behind, forces the face of the monster to turn upwards, as if it were a reminder of Ovid’s human; created among animals with their gaze fixed upon the earth, human beings were given “an upturned aspect, commanding them to look towards the skies, and, upright, raise their face to the stars.”61 For Baudelaire, as for Pascal, the human is essentially incongruent halves, mi-ange mi-bête, part heavenly part earthly, and therefore monstrous: What a Chimera, then, is man! what novelty, what monster, what chaos, what a contradiction, what prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of 59

Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). 60 Charles Mauron, Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel (Paris: José Corti, 1962): 138. 61 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Anthony S. Kline, i.68–88, http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/ Metamorph.htm#488381092 (accessed 9 January 2019).

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the dust; depository of the truth, sink of uncertainty error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.62 Progress was the overarching obsession in both the World Fair’s hierarchy of civilizations and the poem’s fair, where the primitive woman is confronted with the over-civilized, bourgeois précieuse. According to the dreamer, it is the progressive newspaper Le Siècle which has “financed the speculation of this brothel, and the museum of medicine can be explained by its mania for progress, science and the spread of enlightenment.”63 ‘Progress’ is not only measured in the hierarchal order of more or less civilized peoples; it is also conceived in terms of the ladder of being, and emerging theories of evolution. The “mania for progress” defines itself against the backdrop of decadence and its production of monsters, reflecting liminal forms of the human, exploring frightening and fascinating origins. For Baudelaire, progress, the heresy of the century, was a sign of decline, so it may seem logical that his dreamed brothel museum should exhibit misconceptions. But the fetus and the snake motifs may also represent a return to the raw mystery of beginnings, a dandy’s reactionary response to the boring utopia of universal rationality, goodness and happiness. The brothel monster is not boring: “He’s not ugly. His face is even pleasing, very burnished, of an Oriental color. In him there is a lot of pink and green. He is hunkered down, but in a bizarre and contorted position […] I dare not touch him – but I’m interested in him.”64 Théophile Gautier’s review of the arts exhibition at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 evokes condescendingly the distorted, baroque figures from the Chinese section, dominated by monsters and dragons, in ways that recall the description of Baudelaire’s “Oriental” monster. According to Gautier, Chi­ nese art is “ugly,”65 but it excels in the realms of chimaera and imagination. Imagination is associated not with Chinese art, but with African primitivism in Gobineau’s influential Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, which was published the same year. Gobineau’s claim that black people are endowed with a stronger imagination than white, who have a stronger rational intellect, became a standard explanation of cultural difference.66 Imagination, ­considered

62 63 64 65 66

Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, selected and translated by Moritz Kaufmann (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013): 86. Baudelaire in Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, 134. La Folie Baudelaire, 135. Théophile Gautier, “Collection Chinoise,” in Les Beaux-Arts en Europe 1855 (Paris: M. Lévy, 1855): 131. Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985): 90.

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not only by Gobineau to be the privilege of the ‘primitive,’ children, and females, is for Baudelaire “The Queen of faculties.”67 Baudelaire does not refer to the contemporary race theorist, but seems to respond to his friend Gautier’s depreciation of Chinese art in his own article on the 1855 Exposition, in which he affirms that “Le beau est toujours bizarre,”68 and refuses to claim supremacy for one nation over another when it comes to art. As in Gautier’s account of the same exhibition, Baudelaire’s description of the typical Chinese object corresponds in some ways to his description of the brothel monster. Such artwork, writes Baudelaire, although “strange, bizarre, twisted in form, intense in colour, and sometimes delicate to the point of evanescence,” is nevertheless “a specimen of universal beauty.”69 Baudelaire’s monsters and their settings interrogate not only scientific and sociocultural discourses on human development, but also individual destiny. In the dream, he identifies with an undeveloped, almost unborn creature. The gentle brothel monster’s black excrescence is compared to a snake, an earthbound, primitive animal with rich mythical significance. Roberto Calasso compares the brothel monster to the Phanes-Chronos-Mithras, represented as a young man with a serpent coiled around his body.70 This figure brings to mind the prose poem “Le Thyrse,” dedicated to Franz Liszt, in which the feminine principle of creation, the spiraling fantaisie, is celebrated in its inseparable harmony with the straight and voluntary masculine principle; the composer’s genius is this undividable duality. In the light of Baudelaire’s thyrsos, the monstrous appendage becomes a hypertrophied imagination; but the body it is coiled around is not straight, the masculine principle of will is distorted. Lack of will is a recurrent issue in Baudelaire’s personal writings.71 Gazing at monsters, as well as the heterotopias they belong to, can allow us to rediscover certain evidences of the given sociocultural order, and make more perceptible the precarious limits and hidden obsessions of normality. Superimposed, the monsters of the fair, the brothel and the medical museum reveal analogy and difference, producing transference of meaning, but no definite key. Through these cross readings, it is evident that the museum, representing accumulated scientific, civilizing knowledge, becomes contaminated by the fleeting temporality of the fair and the illusiveness of the brothel. The brothel and the fair, sites of brutal exploitation, commodification and festive illusion, are in turn eternalized as monumental institutions of learning. 67 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes ii, 619. 68 Œuvres complètes ii, 578. 69 Œuvres complètes ii, 576. 70 Baudelaire in Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, 150. 71 See Baudelaire, “Hygiène,” in Œuvres complètes i, 668–75.

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We have seen how monsters and their heterotopias in Baudelaire’s texts, whether in the form of the Wild Woman, the Little Mistress, or the Pedestal monster, may express strong cultural critique as well as self-demystification. As Debarati Sanyal notes with regard to the male white poet’s celebration of Black Venus, it is too easy “to read Baudelaire as an exemplary voice for the nineteenth-century’s exoticist literary imagination and its symbolic collaboration with colonial conquest.” Sanyal’s readings show clearly that “his poetry’s ironic texture resists full cooperation by such critical scripts.”72 However, it would be inappropriate to reduce Baudelaire’s identification with the brothel monster, conceived as a counter image to the Hottentot Venus, to a critique of male dominance, colonialism, and capitalism. The brothel monster and the Wild Woman raise questions of race, animality, gender, prostitution, but the violence involved is not just an ironic expression of imperialist violence. Prostitution is a metaphysical term in Baudelaire’s vocabulary. Violence is eternally human. The outrage of progressivism is to disregard the eternal mystery of the human condition, to think that the charge of human monstrosity can be neutralized through enlightenment. Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes i–ii, texte établi, présenté et annoté par Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1971 and 1975). Baudelaire, Charles. Correspondance, tome premier: 1832–1860, texte établi, présenté et annoté par Claude Pichois avec la collaboration de Jean Ziegler (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, tr. Raymond N. MacKenzie (Indian­ apolis: Hackett, 2008). Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers, tr. and ed. Lois & Francis E. Hys­ lop Jr. (State College, PA: Bald Eagle, 1952). Barth, Volker. “The Micro-History of a World Event: Intention, Perception and Imagination at the Exposition universelle de 1867,” Museum and Society 6.1 (March 2008): 22–37, https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/110 (accessed 20 April 2016). Beer, Gillian. Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). 72

Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity. Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006): 128.

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Calasso, Roberto. La Folie Baudelaire, tr. Alastair McEwen (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Girous, 2012). Caron, Jean-Claude, Andrea Del Lungo & Brigitte Louichon eds. La Littérature en basbleus. Romancières sous la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet (1815–1848) (Paris: Garnier, 2010). Compagnon, Antoine. Les Anti-modernes : De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). Daumier, Honoré. Le Bas bleu déclamant sa pièce (The Bluestocking Reciting Her Play). https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_­ details.aspx?objectId=1654712&partId=1 (accessed 13 February 2019). de la Fontaine, Jean. “The Frogs Asking for a King,” in The Fables of La Fontaine, tr. E. Wright, Book iii, Fable 4 (London: William Smith, 1842): 15. Flaubert, Gustave. Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues in Œuvres de Flaubert ii (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits (1954–1988) (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Gautier, Théophile. “Collection Chinoise,” in Les Beaux-Arts en Europe 1855 (Paris: M. Lévy, 1855). Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 204–42. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998). Jankélévitch, Vladimir. “La Décadence.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 90.4 (1985): 435–61. Johnson, Peter. “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces.’” History of the Human Sciences 19.4 (November 2006), http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/19/4/75.full.pdf+html (accessed 16 April 2016). Lamothe-Langon, Étienne-Léon de. Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse du Barri (Paris: Mame et Delaunay-Vallée, 1829). Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse Comte de. Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985). Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke UP, 2008). Mauron, Charles. Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel (Paris: José Corti, 1962). Ovid Metamorphoses, tr. Anthony S. Kline, http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/ Metamorph.htm#488381092 (accessed 9 January 2019).

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Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts, selected and translated by Moritz Kaufmann (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013). Pichois, Claude & Jean Ziegler. Baudelaire: Biographie (Paris: Julliard, 1987). Sanyal, Debarati. The Violence of Modernity. Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). Sanyal, Debarati. “Bodies on Display: Poetry, Violence and the Feminine in Baudelaire and Mallarmé,” New Faculty Lecture Series (1 January 2003), http://escholarship.org/ uc/item/1708f98g#page-17 (accessed 20 April 2016). Skagen, Margery Vibe. “Symptoms of Hysteria in Baudelaire’s Writing,” in The Human and Its Limits: Explorations in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, eds. Margareth Hagen, Randi Koppen & Margery Vibe Skagen (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2011): 219–38. Stead, Evanghelia. Le Monstre, le singe et le foetus : Tératogonie et Décadence dans l’Europe fin-de-siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2004).

Chapter 9

Colonial Bodies in Display Cases and Spectating Bodies A Contemporary Art Critique

Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen Abstract Through readings of artworks by Iranian Fariba Hajamadi, South African Tracey Rose, and Americans Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen examines how contemporary visual arts have brought into play European museums’ ways of exhibiting the black body as a sign of otherness since the start of colonization. She argues that the traditional museum exhibition requires the viewer to adopt an aesthicizing and exoticizing gaze, closely associated with masculine agency and superiority, and epitomized by the display case. By practicing a tracing of learned habits and prejudices akin to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as ‘unlearning,’ contemporary visual arts make use of the display case in order to provoke a feeling that the object is looking back at the spectator, and thereby expose the colonial worldview written into the western mindset through centuries of education and institutionalization. The trope of Black Venus is thus inscribed into the very form of these artworks, through the way in which visual and bodily aesthetic practices either enhance or abolish the air-less, time-less bubble that separates the spectating body from the displayed body.

In the European museum tradition, as in Western culture at large, the black body is a sign of otherness and has been exhibited as such since the dawn of colonization. The 2011 exhibition, “Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage,” at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris documented in detail the visual history of displaying ‘other’ human bodies as scientific documentation and entertainment in European culture.1 In this chapter, I examine how the trope of the ‘Black Venus’ re-appears as a visual trope in contemporary art, in order to ­direct ­attention to the spectator in a museum setting. In the wake of p ­ ostcolonial 1 Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch & Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, eds. Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011).

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c­ritique, contemporary artists address this specific problem in works that adopt pedagogical strategies to decode viewing practices of the white (male) viewer. The works are especially sensitive to the superimposition of two discourses – Western knowledge and science and Western art’s display of the black naked female body – and to how aestheticization and exoticization work across these discourses. The figure of Black Venus is affiliated with another trope, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ that appeared in nineteenth-century culture. From the real story of South African Sara Baartman emerged the myth and image of the Hottentot Venus. In her own time, Baartman was referred to as the Hottentot Venus and, in cultural texts in general, the trope was disseminated and became a general term. To contemporary artists of other cultural backgrounds, this case is proof of how Western fantasy and self-declared supremacy have subjected non-European cultures, and black women in particular, to humiliating scientific scrutiny; the museum is of particular interest in this context because Baartman’s body was subject to musealization after her death. I would argue that the trope of the Hottentot Venus, or Black Venus, is evoked in the exchange between artwork and viewer in one of its places of origin: the museum. I introduce works by Iranian artist Fariba Hajamadi, who shares the indignation of South African Tracey Rose, and Latino-Americans Coco Fusco & Guillermo Gómez-Peña, at seeing representatives of their native cultures and their cultures proper on display in Western museums as oddities. In order to battle historical misrepresentations, they make interventions in the museum space that evoke the trope of Black Venus, hoping to evoke responses in the viewer. In works of art that address the gaze and body of the spectator, they practice what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as ‘un-learning’: the tracing of learned habits and prejudices. These contemporary projects are examples of how art can constitute a space for not only reflection, but also knowledge. If art is capable of prompting new imaginations, and if art is a space for un-learning, it must also be a space for learning; does this not make it a potential space for the production of new knowledge? 1

Knowledge and Desire in the Visual Space of the Museum

Let me start by examining the display case. It is my argument that the display case evokes and produces a certain gaze. It visualizes and embodies knowledge, but it also exhibits this knowledge in aesthetic and desirable objects. It stages a certain relation between spectator and object, in which the spectator becomes engaged in a playful act of desire – be it the desire for knowledge,

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sheer a­ esthetic desire or, better yet, a combination of both. In the museum, knowledge and aesthetics intersect, and the airless vitrine seems to bring about both the timeless consecration of knowledge and the neat arrangements in the display cases, which evoke the aesthetic gaze. The viewer’s position is one of control, as he is given a sense of overview that leaves him with a feeling of mastering what is under his gaze. Thus, the (traditional) museum positions the spectating body in a way that makes the viewer appreciate his superiority when confronted with ethnographic and exotic subject matter. It provides the Western position with masculine agency as opposed to the submissive, sometimes even primitive, feminised other as object. The display case is thus a mechanism for creating a certain aesthetic gaze, and like the museum proper, it is a metaphor for the production of knowledge in the West. In the following, I tie the aesthetics of the display case to the figure of Baartman, the first emblematic Black Venus, and prepare the way for contemporary artworks’ stagings of the relation between the display case and the desiring gaze of the spectator. The historical figure Sara Baartman is closely linked to all aspects of the European desire for displaying the exotic other in a showcase. Her story refers to the long tradition of exhibiting humans, dating back to the Ancient World. With the discovery of the New World, moreover, it became fashionable to exhibit Amerindians in the princely courts of Europe, and throughout the early modern era, the tradition of exhibiting the bodies of difference developed. At first the interest was ‘curious,’ as in cabinet of curiosities, then it became scientific, and finally, with the growth of mass culture, it developed into entertainment.2 Sara Baartman entered history at the moment when modern science and modern mass culture were beginning to develop. She embodies Black Venus, and she figures as a point of reference for the artists of the twenty-first century. As Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully stress, it is necessary to distinguish between Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, between the woman of flesh and blood, and the image.3 Her case was rediscovered in the 1980s and has since been thoroughly investigated in art, literature, academic studies, politics, etc. Sara Baartman is relevant to the present study, firstly, because her destiny in Europe is tied to the exhibition of her body in life, when she was put on show for the amusement of the masses; and its exhibition in death, when her 2 Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Böetsch & Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, Introduction, in Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Böetsch & Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011): 20–53. 3 Clifton Crais & Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus. A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009): 1–6.

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body parts were put on display. Secondly, her story haunts contemporary female artists of African (American) descent. In their hearts and minds, her personal destiny, thus the trope of Black Venus, figures as the ultimate horror story of what Europeans have been capable of in terms of the sexual objectification and exploitation of the exotic black female body.4 An enormous number of images of the Hottentot Venus were produced and disseminated; she became an icon and her presence in popular culture has lasted long after her death.5 In her lifetime, Baartman’s body also became the centre of attention for the new positivistic science. In Paris she was examined by scientist Georges Cuvier and, when she died, he not only dissected her, but also had a plaster cast made of her body, had her skeleton preserved, and had her ‘abnormal’ genital organs put in formaldehyde. These items were exhibited, first in Jardin des Plantes and later in Musée de l’Homme where they remained on display until 1974. Not until 2002 were her remains repatriated to South Africa and buried; thus, for the new post-apartheid nation, the destiny of the real woman Sara Baartman became a symbol of the historical offences committed against Africans. From the historians’ point of view and, in order to write her biography, Crais and Scully argue that it is important to separate the real Baartman from her image; from the point of view of the present art historical study, however, the fact that her real body and its image are confused in the minds of those who fantasize about her is of critical importance. Her story demonstrates the intricate ways of signification, of how real life and imagination become infiltrated in the image; at least this is the point of departure for contemporary artists when they appropriate her story. Baartman and her Hottentot image cannot be separated as they are one in the eyes of the desiring audience. The conservation and exhibition of her remains in tomblike circumstances in museum vitrines emphasize the link between the objectification of a subject and the

4 In 1994, Jamaican–American artist Renée Cox (born 1960) made a series of photographs where she posed as the cultural other. One of them, entitled HOTT-EN-TOT, mimics the way Baartman was depicted in her own time. In 2001, South African artist Tracey Rose (born 1974), referring to Cox, also posed as Baartman in the photographic series Venus Baartman, but she staged herself/Baartman as the missing link. In the understanding of Ayo A. Coly, these artists develop pedagogical strategies to decode the viewing practices of the primarily white male viewer (Ayo A. Coly, “A Pedagogy of the Black Female Body: Viewing Angèle Essamba’s Black Female Nudes,” Third Text, 24.6 [November 2010]: 653–64). 5 Debra S. Singer, “Reclaiming Venus. The Presence of Sarah Baartmann in Contemporary Art,” in Black Venus 2010. They Called Her “Hottentot,” ed. Deborah Willis (Philadelphia PA: Temple UP, 2010): Kindle.

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production of an image, as well as how death and eternity become associated; it also testifies to the intertwining of desire and knowledge in Western thought. Evidence of this objection to the display case could be that it has been gradually replaced by other means of passing on knowledge. Today, museums tear down the glass walls between artefacts and museumgoers in order to tell stories with the participation of viewers, a way to de-objectivize and animate the collection. This new turn towards involving spectators may even mirror the self-critique in which present-day curators are engaging, and therefore reflects the post-colonial situation in the West. The fact that the display case is losing ground, however, is not a sign that the mindset that produced this particular knowledge regime and its viewing practices has disappeared. Such acquired conduct is not transformed overnight. It is more likely that we are in a process of transition, and at best, on a course toward a more equal sharing of privileges. Spivak, however, is sceptical. Her critique of the privileged colonial position refers to its claim to knowledge. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she addresses the issue of representation, which becomes a problem when the intellectuals of the so-called First World speak on behalf of the so-called Third World.6 In her view, decolonization has failed because the West does not want to waive its privilege of defining the discourse. Her point is not that the subaltern cannot speak, or has no agency, but that the colonizer does not know how to listen, or does not want to know. An important part of her solution to the problem is the project of what she called ‘un-learning.’ Though Spivak has revised her project in recent years, I still see the relevance of her position as it is useful for my argument. To rephrase Spivak, un-learning one’s privilege as one’s loss is to trace the ingenious ways of racism, sexism, academic elitism, and ethnocentrism. It is the job of decoding learned habits and prejudices. It is to reverse the gaze and look back, and always acknowledge that we are part of a tradition, and that there is no such thing as a non-institutionalized position.7 We can understand the artworks very well, as they operate within the context of the museum, as different ways of un-learning the privileged position of the Western spectator, as articulated by the other. The artworks evoke an uncanny feeling of the object looking back at the spectator that confronts normalized viewing. The various artistic strategies are different attempts to defy the spectator and his secure position and endow him with a sense of discomfort. In different ways, 6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago IL: U of Illinois P, 1988): 271–313. 7 Ilan Kapoor, “Hyper-Self-Reflexive Development? Spivak on Representing the Third World ‘Other,’” Third World Quarterly 25.4 (2004): 627–47.

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the artworks trace the learned bodiless gaze, which has been cultivated in museums via aesthetic displays in glass cases, and try to un-learn it by pointing to its position as a construct and to its situation in a specific, ordinary body – a gendered and everyday body, one that moves around in social space. I have adopted the masculine pronoun ‘he’ to stress that the position of the superior Western gaze and the fact that its desires are coded male and that it is linked to a certain kind of sublime aesthetics of knowledge. 2

The Image in the Museum and the Spectating Body

Already in the mid-1980s, as part of the academic critique of representation and the art institution, Iranian-born Fariba Hajamadi (b. 1957) produced works that took the museum as locus for the investigation of Western misconceptions and maltreatment of non-Western cultures. According to art critic Dan Cameron, she presented the museum as “a kind of displaced ethnographic sideshow,” thereby questioning its authority.8 The focus of the present analysis is a series of three works from 1997 entitled un-Remembered/Dancer, unSleeping/Bride, and un-Begotten/Nude. These are photographic artworks that show display cases in ethnographic museums, containing female human mannequins that are surrounded by the artefacts of their culture; one is from India, a second from China and a third from the Amazon rainforest. Already in the titles, with their emphasis on the negating prefix ‘un-,’ the works evoke Spivak’s concept of un-learning. Hajamadi uses both the techniques of photography and painting in order to show the equivocality of the images, of fiction and reality, and of history in the present. She makes montages that mix her own photographs with other images; the montages are then re-photographed and transferred onto canvas and wooden panels, and are finally covered with a coloured filter, or retouched with an airbrush.9 The superposition of these layers enables her to produce a strange surreal quality. In the pictures, the viewers face the tableau of the display case, over-layered by the mirroring of the museum space – with shadows of visitors – in the case’s glass sides and, on closer observation, clouds in the sky, or a landscape with a horizon. On top of these different layers, the vividly coloured coverings of the photographs endow the images with the aesthetic of

8 Dan Cameron, “Reconciling Opposites,” in Echolot oder 9 Fragen an die Peripherie. Fariba Hajamadi, ed. René Block (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1998): 25. 9 Pascal Bouchaille, Fariba Hajamadi (Caen: frac Basse-Normandie, 1998): 11.

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Fariba Hajamadi, un-Remembered/Dancer, 1997. Cibachrome. © Fariba Hajamadi. Courtesy of the artist.

a painting, and create a dreamlike space that conveys the fact that what we are seeing in the images, as in the museum proper, is more fiction than fact. We are, as spectators, kept at a distance from the scenery, as the many layers of the image make it unclear what is the actual space and what is the object.

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Fariba Hajamadi, un-Sleeping/Bride, 1997. Cibachrome. © Fariba Hajamadi. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fariba Hajamadi, un-Begotten/Nude, 1997. Cibachrome. © Fariba Hajamadi. Courtesy of the artist.

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Dan Cameron maintains that Hajamadi “positions the spectator in relation to the framed artefact […] at a slight remove.” And he continues, “[…] we are locked into a middle-distance that does not permit us to enter into the frame for closer inspection.”10 In other words, we are faced with a reality that, from our position, we cannot really see; our perspective is like that of someone trying to see in the darkroom. In my interpretation of Cameron, referring to the visual culture argument that the world we inhabit today is one of the inscrutable interferences of images, Hajamadi raises an argument about the position of the spectator in her aesthetics that concretizes the Western link between viewing, knowledge, and desire. When we go to a museum we expect to be enlightened; this anticipation has been handed down to us through generations of exhibition practices. We do not expect to be left in the dark, but Hajamadi obstructs the (over)viewing position. Consequently, she shuts out the viewer of his controlling perspective. She also plays more deliberately on the kinship between museum and photography, and the feature they share in treating their objects as has-beens in a Barthesian sense.11 According to Roland Barthes, photography’s chief characteristic is its has-been-ness, always reminding us of death; the display case’s way of containing artefacts under airless and timeless glass conveys a similar sense of death. Hajamadi stages the female dancer, bride and nude to expose how they represent Western feminization of non-European cultures for the purpose of making them exotic and desirable objects. As such, the works address the containment and representation of the ‘oriental’ by dominating frameworks. According to literary theorist Edward W. Said, the ‘oriental’ and the ‘Orient’ are complex constructs of dominating discourses – mainly French and British – and intellectual power that was produced as a consequence of colonizing processes in the nineteenth century.12 The Orient was framed in classrooms, criminal courts, prisons, and illustrated manuals in order to ensure the study, judgement, disciplining, and governing of the other.13 We can add the museum and visual culture at large to the list of institutions already mentioned by Said. The European museum is an intellectual machine for governing the narratives of non-European cultures and the discourse of the Orient also cuts across these

10 11 12 13

Cameron, “Reconciling Opposites,” 26. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard (1980; London: Vintage Books, 2000): 96. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978): 40. Orientalism, 41.

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narratives. Hajamadi’s photographs negotiate the exchange of knowledge and gazes formed by that tradition. In nineteenth-century oriental painting we find a similar positioning of the viewer. Art historian Linda Nochlin’s analysis of the French orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s (1824–1904) painting Snake Charmer (late 1860s) demonstrates how the picture stages the viewer as one who observes a spectacle from a distance.14 The viewer is not inscribed into the setting in any way that would make him part of the scene; he is not invited to participate in the scene, as in works by Gérôme’s contemporaries Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Gérôme keeps the viewer at a distance, making him embody an outside perspective, clearing the way for the erotic ‘othering’ of the image. The motif is set in an Arabic marketplace where a group of elderly men watch a naked boy charming a snake. The men are placed in the background of the image with their backs against a blue tiled wall, looking in the direction of the viewer while watching the boy performing his snake act. The boy stands facing the men and, as a consequence, his naked back and buttocks confront the viewer. The fact that the viewer is excluded from taking part in the event but represents the mastering outside position paves the way for his erotic investment in the naked boy’s back and buttocks. This is enhanced by Gérôme’s delicate painterly treatment of all the details in the picture: from the exquisite Turkish blue tiles to the boy’s soft skin. According to Nochlin, Gérôme is trying hard to provide his images with many markers of realism (details, accuracy, and so on), but he fails in his endeavour; not only because his actual, possibly unwitting, objective is to convey an imaginative Orient, but also because the many layers of paint produce a velvet coat of veneer that seals the image off from real life. For my argument, Nochlin’s association of Gérôme’s aesthetics with the display case is noteworthy: Indeed, taxidermy rather than ethnography seems to be the informing discipline here: these images have something of the sense of specimens stuffed and mounted within settings of irreproachable accuracy and displaced in airless cases. And like the exhibits displayed behind glass in the natural-history museum, these paintings include everything within their boundaries – everything, that is, except a sense of life, the vivifying breath of shared human experience.15

14 15

Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision (New York: Harper & Row, 1989): 35. “The Imaginary Orient,” 50.

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It is conspicuous how Nochlin employs the analogy of the vitrine to illustrate how Gérôme’s style treats its subject matter. She suggests that the desire for the exotic other relies on the picture’s ability to contain its object in a timeless air bubble that hinders the viewer from entering the image. Hence, art history has its own discourse of othering based on the interplay of the gaze of the viewer, and the subject and treatment of the image. Usually it is a female body in Gérôme’s orientalist images, as in The Slave Market (early 1860s) and Moorish Bath (1880s); this is a trait he shares with his contemporaries Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and others. But as we have just seen, desire is also conveyed through the feminization of the body of a young boy. Linda Nochlin’s account of orientalism in nineteenth-century French art confirms Said’s argument that relates to the field of visual culture. It demonstrates how the body becomes a discursive visual sign, and how it is constructed as an exotic object of desire that addresses the viewer’s body in specific ways.16 Hajamadi’s interventions in the ethnocentric European museum space is an un-learning method, one that tracks the mechanisms of the museum machine. The mechanisms, Hajamadi reveals, transform living matter (i.e. cultures) into dead matter, by preserving it in an airless and timeless bubble. But Hajamadi’s intervention also seeks to wake up the slumbering viewer to the reality of the here and now, to the awareness of the viewer’s own bodily participation through his movements in the museum space. 3

The Origins of Art and Knowledge

The trajectories I have just sketched meet in three different but interrelated works by South African artist Tracey Rose (b. 1974). In performances, videos, and installations Rose follows in the footsteps of Sara Baartman. She addresses the display case in a performance that brings forth an actual black female body, as well as the colonial gaze, by inviting spectators to think about their interaction with ‘items’ exhibited behind glass. But she also questions the origins of knowledge and the thinking subject in opposition to Western hegemony. In 16

There exists a Nordic project somewhat similar to Hamajadi’s. Swedish–Sámi artist Mattias Olofsson (b. 1973) displays in his Artifacts (2006), a photo series that harks back to Stor-Stina (1819–1854), a Sámi correlate to Sara Baartman. Stor-Stina, or ‘Big-Stina,’ was exhibited in human zoos in Europe because of her extraordinary size. Olofsson has made a queer performance out of her story. Dressed in a traditional Sámi kofte and staged among the local species in glass vitrines, he poses as her. The photographs also evoke Linda Nochlin’s sense of taxidermy, desire, and death in the vitrine, demonstrating a striking account of the exotification and musealization of Sámi culture as ‘urfolk’ (indigenous population), which addresses the desires of the spectating body.

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the following, I discuss the artist’s works in chronological order for the purpose of clarity in my own argumentation. In the installation Authenticity (1996), Rose problematises the colonial position by considering the connection between art and knowledge.17 This work does not address the trope of the Black Venus directly, but is part of a larger argument, which is why I have included it here. Rose asks where the concept of modern art originates. This story, as it turns out, has to do with intellectual supremacy. The piece consists of what appears to be a found object – a bronze statuette, a small souvenir copy of the French artist Auguste Rodin’s (1840–1917) sculpture The Thinker – accompanied by a text, that is presented as a statement by a certain Mrs E. Roberts who is supposed to have owned the object. Mrs E. Roberts is, of course, part of the fiction as is the idea that the statuette was found by accident. Everything about the story is fiction, but the text provides a frame for turning the power relations in art upside down, in respect to both gender and culture. Rodin’s monumental sculpture symbolises the union of Western intellectual power and modern art. It is considered a masterpiece, as are other works by the sculptor, and he is considered a transitional figure between classical and modern sculpture in authoritative works on Western art history. In Rose’s work, the figure has been reduced in size to a small statuette, accompanied by a denigrating explanatory fictional text that sounds more like an excerpt from a popular magazine than a caption in an art gallery. First of all it was bought back-door … (laugh), and the man that sold it to me died. His name was Eric Wright, and then he died, he was murdered. I bought it in 1976. To me at first it was just a bronze ornament. As years went by, I saw the man was thinking… sitting like a man who thinks, and I baptised it ‘The Thinker.’ It was just sitting here and I used to whack my brother-in-law over the head with it, that is why it has a chip on, so it was an ornament and a weapon – so I hit Raymond with it, he wanted to poke me with a knife so I [?] him with the Thinker on his head – it was on a Saturday afternoon it happened. It always held a special place on the piano or a corner, where it could be seen. The thing is old too, and still its still thinking one way. – Generously lent by Mrs E Roberts.18 The un-learning lies in the turning upside down of the authority of the speaking subject, or rather the thinking subject, but it also revolves around power relations in the material world. Mrs E. Roberts’ total lack of respect for this 17 18

Kellie Jones, “Tracey Rose. Postapartheid Playground,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 19 (Summer 2004, Duke UP): 26–31. “Tracey Rose. Postapartheid Playground,” 28.

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refined item, her slapstick handling of the ‘truth,’ is a way to break down its authority. She treats it as if she were its creator, but she also uses it to hit her brother-in-law. She, presumably a black woman, uses the work of art in a violent act against a man. The work conflates knowledge, violence, and gender in the same way that it systematically takes place in the history of colonialism, only to break it down. The text questions who is doing the thinking, the naming or ‘baptising’ of works of art. It questions the authenticity of the origin, supposedly European, supposedly French, of modern art. Contemporary African artists have dealt with this issue of privilege in terms of ‘whose story’ – like Western feminists have done since the 1970s.19 Whereas feminists have challenged masculine art history, African artists dispute Western hegemony as to who invented the concept of Modern art. They claim that the notion of the birth of modern art in nineteenth-century Paris is just another Eurocentric narrative. In making the spectator an active party in the question, through its direct appeal, this small piece transforms power relations in relation to gender, culture, and knowledge. If Authenticity stages the problem of Western art history’s supremacy, the video Ongetiteld (1996), in which Rose shaves her whole body, opens the Pandora’s box of the female exotic body. The video is shot in a narrow bathroom with a surveillance camera, where Rose is seen shaving off all of her body hair. The surveillance camera is a reference to the colonial master gaze and has been used by other South African artists for the same purpose.20 But it is also a way to reject the desiring gaze on the female body. The camera is placed in the ceiling of the bathroom looking down on Rose’s body. This top-down angle makes it impossible for the onlooker’s desiring gaze to find its way across her naked body. This is a way to dismantle how the European art tradition stages the relation between the female nude and the desiring gaze of the spectator. In the same way as Hajamadi’s work locks out the viewing gaze, Rose’s video also hinders the viewing gaze from enjoying the anticipated pleasures. According to Rose, this obstruction of the desiring gaze, together with the shaving off all of her body hair, was an act of de-sexing her body, an attempt to make herself unattractive and un-appealing.21 It was an attempt to get to the point zero of cultural inscriptions, to wipe the slate clean, to eliminate all the bodily signs that mark the black female body as culturally other and Hottentot. Ironically, however, she only found out that she became appealing in other ways. ­Whether 19 20 21

See “Tracey Rose. Postapartheid Playground,” 26–31. See “Tracey Rose. Postapartheid Playground,” 30. Sue Williamson, “Tracey Rose,” Artthrob, 43 (March 2001), http://www.artthrob.co.za/ 01mar/artbio.html (accessed 1 April 2016).

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Tracey Rose, Ongetiteld, 1996. Screen grab from slide film from video. Copyright the artist, courtesy Dan Gunn Gallery, London and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

a failed attempt or not, the video is a decisive move towards her next work in the cycle of post-colonial critique. In fact, this shaved and completely naked body, presumably without signs, is the centre of her performance Span ii (1997), which took place at the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. Rose is seated in a big display case, with her profile to the audience, on a television set that shows excerpts from Western

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Tracey Rose, Span ii, 1997. Performance installation, video monitor turned on side, video loop, glass box, artist’s hair, performed by the artist at Johannesburg Art Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Dan Gunn Gallery, London and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

art history, viz. reclining nudes and odalisques. But she is not idle; she is absorbed in the act of meticulously knotting a string from her shaved-off, leftover hair from the production of the video Ongetiteld. With her silent, absorbed pose and profile, she does not return the gaze of the viewer; rather she ignores it. If she returned the gaze, she would admit the viewer’s objectification of her. Instead, she is playing a double game: she plays the role of the ethnographic object in her time bubble, and she is undoing the exoticization of the female black body by transforming the sign of her sexualization into something useful, related to women’s work. She works through the body, the site of the double difference of being both female and black. The fact that she is alive and moves, showing agency in the display case, is itself a confrontation, and the objectification effect of the vitrine stands out with remarkable clarity. The stunning effect of an object that starts to move before your eyes is always a very strong image, and in this case, it harks back to death in the vitrine, as described earlier with the help of Roland Barthes’ concept of death and photography. Tracey Rose’s work resonates with the performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians, also known as The Couple in the Cage, by Cuban-American Coco Fusco (b. 1960) and Mexican–American Guillermo Gómez-Peña (b.1955). The event was part of the festivities commemorating the Columbus quincentenary

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in 1992. The first performance took place in Columbus Plaza in Madrid, and later travelled to the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. The intention was to confront the Western audience with its deep-rooted feeling of white, Western superiority that the artists thought still existed.22 They created yet ‘undiscovered’ natives, whom they called the Guatianauis, from the imagined land of Guatianaui and performed as two Guatianauis in a cage. During the performance, Fusco and Gómez-Peña dressed in accordance with signs identified with native authenticity, and during the display, they performed various rituals viewers expected to belong to Amerindian culture, as well as modern-day daily tasks. They would watch television, use a computer, and dance to pop music if asked (by the audience). Staff would feed them and, in accordance with how people from other cultures were displayed at princely courts, in zoos and marketplaces in Europe and North America until the beginning of the twentieth century, their origin and act were introduced to the audience by a show master. In using maps, guides, and museum jargon, the piece also made reference to the common vocabulary of the museum.23 Obviously, the mixing of both museum and mass-culture modes of production was meant to address both regimes. There are obvious differences between the two performances; Fusco and Gómez-Peña refer to the zoo-exhibitions and Rose to the display case. But both unravel the exhibition and sexualization of the exotic body and seek to shock the spectating body by moving about in the cage/ case framed by the museum space and its history. By the way, The Couple in the Cage can also be seen to refer to the Hottentot Venus biographically, as Sara Baartman was forced to perform in a cage at her first appearances in London. The un-learning of this performance was, with the use of satire, to produce a counter-narrative to the major celebrations in order to evoke the colonial attitude, and thereby wake up the audience to their unconscious colonial mindset. However, it turned out that many viewers believed the set up; they did not understand its critical dimension. This is well recorded in the documentary film made of the events by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, and in Fusco’s own account of the performance and its reception. Instead of producing a critical stand in the audience, “the cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are” as formulated by Fusco.24 Visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued that the performance left little room for interpretation since the only way the audience could respond 22 23 24

Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” The Drama Review, 38.1 (Spring 2004, The mit Press): 143–67. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 143–67. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 152.

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to it ‘correctly’ was with a knowing smile.25 Even though he is critical of the performance, Mirzoeff acknowledges that the audience’s reactions testify to what he calls the ‘impossible viewing’ of Two Undiscovered Amerindians and thinks it suggests that the encounters of the seminal year of 1492 is still unresolved. The two moving, living bodies caught in a cage had the same startling effect and power as Tracey Rose’s moving body in the display case, though Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s performance was a much more action-like performance. Whatever the explanation for the reception, the image of a human body (living or dead) in a cage is always a shock to another on-looking human being. 4

Concluding Remarks

In these different art projects, the trope of the Black Venus is scrutinised as a prism through which historical and cultural power relations emerge. They place the European museum and its display case at the centre of the ideological exploitation of other cultures and peoples, and show how deeply the idea of the subaltern and the Orient is entrenched in the staging of objects and the viewing practices cultivated in the museum space. The un-learning processes of the Western gaze take place through involving the spectating body; but they also demonstrate that there exists a non-arbitrary relationship between the enunciating body, that is the body of the artist, and the critique being articulated. In these cases, the ethnicity of the artist is crucial for the authentication of the connection between the speaking body and its membership in a specific culture. This particular critique would not have been the same had it been a white body in the cage or glass vitrine. In these cases, the material body makes a difference. The visual arts have a unique ability and opportunity to aesthetically stage how people in their social and common behaviour act out discourses with complex histories in social and cultural structures such as the museum. Across disciplines in European museums, narratives have been created around material cultures for the joint purpose of curiosity, scientific study, and pedagogy. Again, these narratives have cultivated certain ways of conduct in visitors that are best un-learned through the concrete and physical form of visual art. Or at least, if not addressed in a better way, then in a different and specific way. These behaviours have to do with how bodily movements in social space become 25

Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture. Second Edition (London & New York: Routledge, 2009): 59.

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a­ ssociated with ways of processing knowledge. By this I mean that looking at objects and moving around in the museum is a process of learning who we are, which we associate with a feeling of power and privilege, of being enlightened and placed in a privileged position. When this method of acquiring privilege happens based on the systematic exploitation of living peoples and their heritage, the violation seems obvious. Like Spivak, who advocates the un-learning of privilege, the works discussed in this chapter approach the problematics of privilege from the exact physical locations where it is constructed: the museum. To deconstruct the privileges associated with white male supremacy in the museum, one has to rearrange subject–object positions, that is, the positioning of the spectating body in relation to the object of its viewing. This is, for example, achieved by spectator participation, by raising awareness of the fact that viewing and reception are active and responsible processes, upon which we must all, as visitors in museums, reflect. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard (1980; New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Blanchard, Pascal, Gilles Boëtsch & Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, eds. Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011). Bouchaille, Pascal. Fariba Hajamadi (Caen: FRAC Basse-Normandie, 1998). Cameron, Dan. “Reconciling Opposites,” in Echolot oder 9 Fragen an die Peripherie. Fariba Hajamadi, ed. René Block (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1998). Coly, Ayo A. “A Pedagogy of the Black Female Body: Viewing Angèle Essamba’s Black Female Nudes,” Third Text 24.6 (November 2010): 653–64. Crais, Clifton & Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus. A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009). Fusco, Coco. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” The Drama Review 38.1 (Spring 2004): 143–67. Fusco, Coco & Paula Heredia, directors. The Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui. usa: Authentic Documentary Productions, 1993. Hajamadi, Fariba. un-Begotten/Nude, 1997. Cibachrome. Hajamadi, Fariba. un-Remembered/Dancer, 1997. Cibachrome. Hajamadi, Fariba. un-Sleeping/Bride 1997. Cibachrome. Jones, Kellie. “Tracey Rose. Postapartheid Playground,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 19 (Summer 2004, Duke UP): 26–31. Kapoor, Ilan. “Hyper-Self-Reflexive Development? Spivak on Representing the Third World ‘Other,’” Third World Quarterly 25.4 (2004): 627–47.

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Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. Second Edition (London & New York: Routledge, 2009). Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). Rose, Tracey. Ongetiteld, 1996. Video still. Rose, Tracey. Span ii, 1997. Performance. Said, Edward W. Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Singer, Debra S. “Reclaiming Venus. The Presence of Sarah Baartmann in Contemporary Art,” in Black Venus 2010. They Called Her “Hottentot,” ed. Deborah Willis (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2010). Kindle Edition. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988): 271–313. Williamson, Sue. “Tracey Rose,” Artthrob 43 (March 2001) http://www.artthrob.co.za/ 01mar/artbio.html (accessed 1 April 2016).

Chapter 10

Gazes, Faces, Hands

Othering Objectification and Spectatorial Surrender in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Vénus noire and Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc Jorunn S. Gjerden Abstract Jorunn S. Gjerden addresses viewing behaviour induced by cinematography in ­Abdellatif Kechiche’s portrayal of Sara Baartman by comparing Vénus noire (2010) with Carl Th. Dreyer’s silent masterpiece La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). The juxtaposition of Dreyer’s figuration of the epitomised androgynous and virginal white woman and Kechiche’s critique of the typecast hyper-feminine and over-sexed black female body reveals that despite their alleged contrast, the protagonists of both films appear as dehumanised constructs of a similar white male gaze associated with institutional power abuse and knowledge production. With reference to Gilles Deleuze’s theories of haptic visuality and the affection–image, Gjerden argues that facial close-ups, camera and frame mobility, lightning and kinaesthetic patterns at the same time undermine such objectifying diegetic gazes on the level of reception in the two films. Their cinematographic techniques activate the viewer’s response performatively by way of an optical loss of perspective and an increased bodily involvement. Consequently, drawing on insights from Dreyer’s film, Vénus noire challenges the objectifying gaze on Black Venus through its concrete formal structure, as it replaces the cognitive mastery corollary to Western typecasting with a bodily spectatorship of surrender and immersion.

Released in 2010, Vénus noire is Abdellatif Kechiche’s portrayal of Sara Baartman. The film is centred on her years of performing as the Hottentot Venus in London and Paris, the legal process against her “manager” Cezar, and the anatomical examinations performed by French naturalists prior to her death and posthumously.1 1 The film relates to Baartman’s colonial and postcolonial afterlife through a circular composition starting and ending in the auditorium of L’Académie Royale de Médecine, where Professor Cuvier presents his analysis of Baartman’s anatomy two years after her death, as well as through an epilogue after the closing credits featuring news clips from the vote in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004407916_011

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Rather than focusing on Baartman’s biography, this reading will turn to the history of cinema in its approach to Kechiche’s film, in order to highlight the interplay of epistemology and visual aesthetics acted out by its cinematography. I propose to investigate the French–Tunisian director’s way of relating to the black woman typecast as hyper-feminine and oversexed by cross-referring to a parallel figuration of an opposite Western female stereotype: the white, androgynous and virginal saint as depicted in Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). This silent film classic focuses on Joan of Arc’s last days of imprisonment, her trial, the torture she suffered, and her public execution in Rouen in 1431. Since the enigma and pathos related to the rise and fall of an iconic female figure and to her reinterpretation through history thematically link the two films, similarities between Kechiche’s and Dreyer’s films have been pointed out by critics.2 For instance, Kenji Fujishima notes in a review of Vénus noire: Kechiche details [Baartman’s] sad, slow erasure of dignity with an impassive eye, though not without compassion or empathy. And he has in Yahima Torres an actress nearly as astute in expressing delicate female emotions under enormous stress as Renée Maria Falconetti was in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, another sobering chronicle of a martyr’s persecution.3 In his short comparison, Fujishima establishes parallels between plot structure (“a martyr’s execution”), narrative tone (“sobering chronicle”), and the acting style of the lead actresses of the two films. Despite the symbolic anti­ thesis that sets their protagonists in opposition, both focus on women who, at different moments in history, suffer physical maltreatment, are put to trial and must finally face death in order for the European males’ self-image and conception of reality to be confirmed and secured. This accentuates the fact that a main element the films share is the gazes that establish in each case the female icon’s gendered and/or racialized otherness, which emphasizes the L’Assemblée Nationale in 2002 on the law enabling the repatriation of her remains, and from her burial ceremony arranged in South Africa in 2003. 2 But to my knowledge not yet by scholars. 3 Kenji Fujishima, “New York Film Festival 2010: Black Venus and Post Mortem,” Slant Magazine (30 September 2010), http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/new-york-film-­festival2010-black-venus-and-post-mortem (accessed 22 May 2019). See also Kathleen Murphy’s similar remarks in her review entitled “Abdellatif Kechiche’s Moveable Feast,” Parallax View (4 November 2013), http://parallax-view.org/2013/11/04/abdellatif-kechiches-moveable-feast/ (accessed 22 May 2019).

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purely ­constructed nature of Sara Baartman and Jeanne d’Arc’s contrasting symbolic statuses.4 It is this objectifying Western male gaze, associated in both films with desire, institutional power abuse and knowledge production, that will constitute the starting point for my reading and reflections. Like Kenji Fujishima, I am struck by the problematic “impassivity” corollary to the represented othering gaze in Vénus noire. Not only is the unbearable outcome of the historical plot made explicit from the start, but the typecast convictions and control of diegetic male characters that cause this outcome are not contradicted or outweighed as the narrative proceeds. Film blogger Didion comments: In recreating Baartman’s story, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus [...] raises the question: to what extent was she in control of her fate? The answer is not. at. all. And that made my feminism hurt. […] That’s right: this is a very long film about a depressed woman exhibited as a freak in cultures that despise Black people. Is there another way to tell this story, except to underscore Saartjie’s abjectness?5 Although profoundly unsettling, the repetition of what it critically exposes seems an inevitable dilemma for Kechiche’s film,6 as Didion accurately points out. However, what she does not take into account is the role played by the impact of the film’s visual structure on the viewer in this regard. I will argue that the way we visually experience the suffering of Kechiche’s female protagonist constitutes the major factor that destabilizes the re-enacted male gaze in the film. Rather than attributing increased and undocumented agency and control 4 Consequently, whether intended by Kechiche or not, the parallels to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc that Vénus noire evokes inevitably read as a statement with an obvious political edge, considering how the far right in France today has taken possession of Joan of Arc as their symbol. This is epitomized by the parade organized every year the on May 1 by the Front National to her statue in Paris through which the saint’s association with whiteness is explicitly racialized, since she, as the mother of the French nation, is cited in support of anti-­ immigration and anti-globalization, for instance in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s speech on 1st May 2012, at the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, documented in several amateur videos on Youtube. 5 Didion. “Black Venus (2010): Can I Recommend a Film I Hated Watching?” Feminéma (29 September 2013), https://feminema.wordpress.com/?s=venus+noire (accessed 22 May 2019). 6 In an article co-written with Kari Jegerstedt and Željka Švrljuga, I examine how Vénus noire deals with the dilemma of repeating/revising the typecasting of the past through strategies of opacity (Glissant). See Jorunn Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt & and Željka Švrljuga, “‘The Venus Hottentot is Unavailable for Comment’: Questioning Representation through Aesthetic Practices,” in Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation, eds. Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild Muriaas & Brita Ytre-Arne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 281–303.

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to the Baartman character, Vénus noire decreases that of the viewer. This effect is largely achieved by the crucial cinematographic technique of the facial close-up. Considering the importance that the close-ups of faces has for Kechiche’s film aesthetics, remarquably few readings of Vénus noire make this issue their main concern. However, in a recent article, Mara Mattoscio also addresses “the surprising prominence and potential subversiveness of Sara’s face” in the film,7 asserting that “[w]hile Sara’s body is continually exposed and violated, Vénus noire relies on her face, shot in recurrent extreme close ups, as a haunting presence potentially exceeding violence” (56). As Mattoscio sees it, Kechiche’s configuration of Baartman’s face “leaves the spectator with no right to access the character’s unrecorded and thus mysterious inner life” (66), thus allowing Vénus noire to advance a “successful historical critique” (66) of contemporary political impact, while at the same time hinting at “possible alternative selves for this hyper-constrained and hyper-constructed woman” (72). In my opinion, Vénus noire also borrows the facial close-up from Dreyer’s silent masterpiece. With La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Dreyer was the first to fully investigate the power of this particular filmic strategy. The film remains a work of reference in this respect, and no filmmaker, especially not a French one, can make use of it without relating to his work in some way. The close-up face shot is also connected by optical necessity to a set of other cinematographic characteristics thematised in recent years in theories of embodied cinematic spectatorship. Taking such theories as well as La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc as a starting point, I will examine the cinematographic practices of Vénus noire, thus allowing Dreyer’s classic to provide an aesthetical framework, but with the underlying conviction that the considered aesthetic parallels have epistemological and ethical implications inseparable from the aforementioned plot-driven thematic backdrop. Thus, my purpose is to envisage how viewing modes inscribed in the form of Kechiche’s and Dreyer’s films shape the viewer’s ocular behaviour in ways that distinguish it from that of the diegetically represented male gazes of both narratives. More specifically, drawing on the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and the phenomenological aesthetic theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I will consider the way in which viewing modes have the performative capacity to pull us closer, with the purpose of discussing how the viewer’s embodied involvement in the film experience may generate a 7 Mara Mattoscio, “What’s in a Face?: Sara Baartman, the (Post)colonial Gaze and the Case of Vénus noire,” Feminist Review 117 (2017), https://link-springer-com.pva.uib.no/article/10.1057/ s41305-017-0090-7 (accessed 21 November 2018): 58. Further page references are in the main text.

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s­ pectatorial ­surrender capable of undermining the othering, typecasting gaze and grasp that dominate the plot of Vénus noire. 1 Gazes This first section examines the gaze. After an account of its various articulations in Kechiche’s and Dreyer’s films, I will briefly relate them to feminist and epistemological theories of the act of looking and to some relevant aspects taken from the history of visual arts in order to address the ways of looking that are in play in the two films, the acts they perform, and their effects and consequences. The plots of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire both accentuate looking relations. Diegetic (predominantly) male characters such as priests, soldiers, guards and judges in the first case, and “managers,” audience (male and female), judges, brothel clients and men of science in the second all unite in the gazes they direct towards the female protagonist. In fact, varieties of othering gaze structure both plots, whether they appear in each case as religious, judicial, scientific or merely (erotically) thrill-seeking.8 The Hottentot Venus obviously constitutes the ocular centre of attention of her performances, as well as of the naturalists’ anatomical examination, and of the legal proceedings against Cezar. Similarly, during her trial, torture and execution, Joan of Arc is constantly surrounded by groups of beholders inspecting her every move and utterance. The presence of contortionists and sword-swallowers performing at a fair outside her prison cell during the scene where her head is shaved suggests that these curious gazes make her suffering into a freak show as well, staging her in a spectacle that reduces her to the construct of a dominant male gaze’s aims and desires. In Vénus noire, the naturalist’s gaze is thematised as a specific variant of the gaze of othering objectification. As T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes, the nineteenth-century scientific discipline of naturalism relied precisely on ocular observation as the sole methodological tool through which the objects of study were ordered “into a totalizing system of representation, that allow[ed] the seen body to become the known body.”9 Interestingly, it is this gaze that 8 In his thorough analysis of Dreyer’s film, David Bordwell also notes its extensive use of “the act of looking to define characters’ spatial and dramatic relationship.” See David Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Bloomington, London: Indiana UP, 1973): 32. 9 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, New York: Duke UP, 1999): 22–23.

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Abdellatif Kechiche, Vénus noire, 2010. © 2009 MK2 SA – france 2 cinéma

emerges as most unequivocally male in Vénus noire. This is particularly evident in the scene relating the examination of Baartman at the Jardin des Plantes in the spring of 1815, where the camerawork serves to emphasize the naturalist’s scrutinizing gaze, accentuated by careful measurements of every inch of the Baartman character’s almost naked body, with special attention being paid to female attributes like buttocks and breasts. When the inspecting eyes of the scientists continue to follow Baartman’s every move as she, still half naked, sits down to eat her lunch, she gathers some food and a bottle of wine and escapes into the garden, thus accentuating the impossibility of executing normal and prosaic activities as a subject while remaining the object of an othering gaze. Furthermore, when the scene ends with her screaming and running to escape and get dressed after violently refusing to remove her beaded apron to reveal her genitals, Henri de Blainville sneaks after her and tries to catch a glimpse of them by spying on her from behind a folding screen, thus suggestively transforming scientific observation into peep-show. Although clearly critical of such ocular power abuse, Dreyer’s and Kechiche’s plots do stage gazes that recall the standard objectifying cinematic gaze analysed by Laura Mulvey in her seminal feminist article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in the sense that both films allow the male

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characters to “articulate the look and create the action”10 without hindrance. The depictions of Joan of Arc and the Hottentot Venus also clearly connote the iconic and contemplative quality that Mulvey terms to-looked-at-ness,11 that is shaped by male desire and accentuated by the lingering shots of the suffering heroines appearing as objects of action and bearers of assigned meaning rather than agents of action and makers of meaning. This leaves the viewer in a profoundly uneasy position in terms of how to relate to the films’ ocular power structures. In mainstream cinema, according to Mulvey, viewers are encouraged to identify with the masculine point of view, and to objectify feminine characters. In the case of Vénus noire, however, identification with male characters becomes impossible as the gazes of characters like Réaux (animal handler, and Baartman’s second “manager”) and the brothel clients are so closely linked to sexualized power abuse and economic exploitation that they cannot provoke anything but antipathy and repulsion. But at the same time, the plot does not offer the viewer any alternative. The looks the Baartman character displays come across as aggressively beastly in her performances, or as completely empty or closed whenever they appear offstage. As such, although they seem to be the diametrical opposition of the expressive glances of Joan of Arc’s widening eyes, directed upwards at something only she can see, both heroines’ ways of looking back prevent the viewer from identifying with them as subjects, serving rather to further defamiliarize and marginalize them. As a result, narratively speaking, in Vénus noire in particular, the viewer seems left only with the disturbing option of visually adapting and psychologically identifying with the represented abusive male gaze of the past – or with no one at all.12 This is why an understanding of spectatorial involvement which focuses on the way in which visual power dynamics materialize in cinematic form becomes so important. As such involvement activates the viewer’s bodily awareness independently of plot-driven character identification, it may provide alternative counter effects. 10 11 12

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, eds. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson & Karen J. Shepherdson (London, New York: Routledge, 2004): 62. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 61. Mara Mattoscio nuances such an interpretation of the film’s emphasis on the male gaze by pointing to the potentially subversive effects of its filming and cutting: “Kechiche’s camera frequently changes its visual angle [...], thus preventing the spectator from identifying with an abstract, supposedly neutral viewing position, and rather calling attention to the different individuals simultaneously looking at Sara.” See Mattoscio, “What’s in a Face?: Sara Baartman, the (Post)colonial Gaze and the Case of Vénus noire,” 63.

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So, how may purely aesthetic visual structures also be regarded as power structures with ideological, political and/or ethical impact? Film scholar Laura Marks argues that cinematic visuality must be envisaged against the backdrop of a wider discussion of how epistemology and aesthetics converge. In line with the relationship between the gazing and knowledge production of the priests in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and of naturalists in Vénus noire, she points out that instrumentalizing viewing modes are corollary to the heritage of the Enlightenment, and to Cartesian rationalism and ocularcentrism in particular. In her view, this implies “a destructive desire for self- and social control.”13 Similarly, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, the Cartesian self establishes a binary inside/outside thinking and a connection between conquering and knowing that has had extensive aesthetic repercussions, in addition to political and ideological ones for Western societies: Along with the separate self-conscious ego (“Cogito ergo sum”) goes the separation of each ego from all the others, the opacity of the other person’s ego, along with various other inside/outside splits (subject/object; inside the house/outside the house; inside the national borders/beyond them; inside a certain language/outside it; inside a certain gender, race, or class/other to it). The subject/object opposition generates the system of representation that reaches its apex with realism in the novel. The world is out there. The responsibility of art is to represent it accurately by way of language or some other medium.14 As I see it, Miller’s reflections neatly delineate how detached- and cognitively– based aesthetic representational modes, far from being ideologically neutral, are closely related to Western inside/outside splits, and hence to racialized and/or gendered typecasting. With regard to the visual arts, Renée van de Vall presents perspectivalism as a corresponding detached representational mode concomitant to instrumental visuality in a broad sense. Renée van de Vall emphasizes that the central linear perspective that structures modern visuality is not physically given evidence, but a historical and cultural construct of Western societies. Like Marks, she argues that this construct is closely related to Cartesian subjectivity and to the disconnection of the material and immaterial worlds it establishes:

13 14

Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, London: Duke UP, 2000): 133. J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Standford UP, 2001): 60.

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Two elements of Cartesian thought are important here: his conception of the knowing subject as res cogitans as distinct from the known world as res extensa, and his optics which is based on this distinction. It is quite conceivable that […] the viewpoint of a perspective painting […] was compatible with a subject considered as an immaterial, and thus nonextensive, mental substance facing a spectacle of material substances extended in space and time: the thinking Ego was the perspectivalist’s eye.15 According to van de Vall, the Cartesian perception of the world that the central linear perspective establishes (in paintings, but subsequently also in photo­ graphy and cinema) must be considered to be disembodied, distanced, rationalized and mastering. One could even argue that it is not perception at all, but abstraction: a mere assigning of meaning that passes over the perceived. Such an interpretation is actually suggested by the original Latin definition of the word “perspectiva,” which, as van de Vall reminds us, literally means “seeing through.”16 In her analysis of the relationship between Cartesianism and perspectiva­ lism, Renée van de Vall thus clarifies in general terms how a specific visual mode may enable typecasting. Providing distance and overview, elements that favour mastery, perspectivalism establishes inside/outside splits that understate the viewer’s kinship with the material world. It insists on the absolute transparency of the represented reality to which the perceiving subject ultimately does not have access qua subject. As a consequence, the central linear perspective paradoxically installs a way of looking that appears to be disconnected from actual perception, in the sense that it misses out on the perceived as texture, materiality, and living flesh. In sum, Marks, Miller and van de Vall elaborate on how the visual structuring of a film may function independently of its narrative level, also in terms of its ideological impact. They also help to clarify the ways in which concrete visual modes and power structures converge, as exemplified by the indicated affinity between perspectivalism and typecasting, which is particularly relevant for my purpose here. Returning to the cinematography of Vénus noire, it then remains to consider more closely how the film denies us the opportunity to maintain perspective, and the role its inheritance from La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc plays in this respect.

15 16

Renée van de Vall, At the Edges of Vision: A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship (London: Ashgate, 2008): 18. At the Edges of Vision: A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship, 21.

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2 Faces In optical terms, observers lose perspective when they get closer. In cinema, this implies that as the photographed object draws nearer to the viewer, the background of the shot disappears or becomes blurred. Such lack of depth is an important characteristic of both La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire, and is cinematographically achieved through framing, i.e. the extended use of close-ups, and reinforced by camera mobility and lighting. The result is footages that appear to be flat and to lack a clear distinction between foreground and background. In addition, the possibility of maintaining perspective or the risk of losing it depends on the nature of the object that visual perception focuses on. In this respect, the fact that the close-ups of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire primarily show faces is crucial, as confirmed by the Deleuzian concept of the affection—image. Deleuze starts his influential analysis of the affection–image by presenting it as synonymous with the close-up of the face: “The affection–image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face.”17 With precisely Dreyer’s film as a major reference and inspiration, he defines the affection–image as any shot in which the narrative progression of the story line is paused, and the photographed object is intensified on its own terms, or given emphasis exceeding the needs of the plot.18 In the more technical terms of Ronald Bogue, “the affection– image occupies the interval between an incoming perception and an outgoing action.”19 The intense suspension of action that results from the affective processing of impressions materialises in the close-up as the combination of an immobile surface and the micro-movements of facial expression. An example is Jeanne’s immobile face in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc – the affective film par excellence according to Deleuze20 – shot close up with only her eyes widening, a tear running down her cheek, a muscle imperceptibly twitching or her nostrils slightly vibrating. In Vénus noire, this effect seems to be explored even further as the female protagonist shows virtually no facial expression at all during the numerous lingering close-ups of her face that amplify affectively charged

17

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Mouvement–Image (London, New York: Continuum, 2005): 89. 18 Jakob Ladegaard, “Spatial Affects: Body and Space in Philippe Granddrieux’s La Vie Nouvelle,” in Exploring Text and Emotion, eds. Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo & Julien Zanetta (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2014): 160. 19 Ronald Bouge, Deleuze on cinema (New York, London: Routledge, 2003): 76. 20 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Mouvement–Image, 109.

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moments in the film.21 Deleuze states that “[i]t is this combination of a reflecting, immobile unity and of intense expressive movements which constitutes the affect.”22 Thus, the affection—image relates the loss of Cartesian perspective (with all its epistemological and ideological impact) to a weakening of cognitive mastery triggered purely by the visual practices of film aesthetics. In addition to the affective mobilization of the viewer, or indeed as an integral part of it, the facial close-up, Deleuze asserts, abstracts from spatiotemporal coordinates and provokes an abolishment of the perception of space (98). The ways in which this effect is achieved in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire seem strikingly parallel. The opening trial scene of Dreyer’s drama cinematographically sets the tone for the rest of the film as its characteristic tracking shots sweep at close range over the faces of priests seated in a line next to each other, thereby hindering spatial overview and depth. Similarly, close-ups of Jeanne’s face during her cross-examination are cross-cut with close-ups of the priests’ faces reacting to her answers, but have been cut in a way that does not respect the 180-degree axis rule, hence further aggravating the sense of spatial disorientation. The trial scene in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc strikes one as being an intentional point of reference for three specific scenes in Vénus noire, thematically and compositionally as well as cinematographically. These scenes are the opening unveiling of the Hottentot Venus statue in the auditorium of L’Académie Royale de Médecine, Baartman’s first stage show in London, and the court case against her “manager” Cezar, where she is summoned as a witness to appear before the judges. They all show Baartman facing her “audience” seated in a horizontal line in front of her – be they men of science, vaudeville audience, or judges. In each case, the long tracking shots that slide closely along the faces of the characters looking at her are cross cut with close-ups of Baartman’s face, emphasizing the interplay of action, expression and reaction between them.

21

Also with reference to Deleuze, but to his Mille Plateaux co-written with Felix Guattari, Mara Mattoscio convincingly argues that the close-ups of Vénus noire in which Baartman’s face appears to be the most inexpressive should be classified as “reflective images.” Defined as “undynamic and unexciting, collapsing inward,” the reflective image, Mattoscio asserts, is characterised by its “very inexpressiveness and nudity [that] allow […] for the emergence of an ‘imperceptible,’ ‘clandestine’ alternative humanity. […] [T]he ‘empty’ face invites the viewer to question reality and imagine different subjectivities, alternative selves for its bearer, as well as different modes of encounter.” See Mattoscio, “What’s in Face?: Sara Baartman, the (Post)colonial Gaze and the Case of Vénus noire,” 68. 22 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Mouvement–Image, 90. Further page references are in the main text.

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In the scene of the London stage performance, in particular, there are few long shots overviewing the space in which the action is set. The 180-degree axis is not crossed the way it typically is in Dreyer’s film, but our sense of space is nevertheless disturbed by the constant slightly swaying movements of the handheld camera, which appears to never be quite in sync with the movements of the characters upon which the camera is focusing.23 Some cuts also bring us into footages that are first blurred before being brought back into focus, and that come across as point of view shots of Baartman looking at the audience. Such footages recall similar ones in the trial scene in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, for instance where a soldier who is shouting at Jeanne is filmed from her point of view “zooming with dizzying speed in and out.”24 In both cases, spatial disorientation and affective discomfort are the result. Finally, the vertiginous impression of space created in the scene of Baartman’s London stage show is reinforced by poor lighting. Set at night, only candles and flaming torches light up the dark, windowless venue, which yet again hampers focus and depth vision. In this way, in accordance with Deleuze, the face shot close up is not only abstracted from the space in which it appears, but also from parameters permitting the identification of social roles and individuality. In fact, Deleuze goes as far as to claim that the roles of individuation, socialization and communication attributed to the face in real life are lost in the cinematic facial close-up.25 Instead, close-ups become pure potential, power or quality “considered for themselves, without reference to anything else, independently of any question of their actualization” (100). Performatively sucking the viewer into its destabi­ lizing power, the affection–image disables individuation as such: “The closeup does not divide one individual, any more than it reunites two: it suspends individuation. Then the single and ravaged face unites a part of one to a part of the other. […] It absorbs two beings, and absorbs them in the void” (102). It is interesting to note that Deleuze’s arguments here recall Laura Mulvey’s account of the way in which the close-up breaks down spatial coordinates and social roles. Mulvey relates this effect to a fetishizing fragmentation of the female body that empowers male desire and makes the sexual typecasting of

23

In fact, throughout the entire film, as a result of hand-held camera filming, footages very often seem to be imperceptibly shaking both vertically and horizontally without any apparent diegetic motivation. 24 David Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Bloomington, London: Indiana UP, 1973): 34. 25 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Mouvement–Image, 101. Further page references are in the main text.

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women possible.26 By emphasising the dynamic relationship between cinematographic structures and viewer, Deleuze stresses instead how the fragmentation, the loss of perspective, the affective mobilization and the desubjectivation – visually brought about by the affection–image – fundamentally alter the viewer’s relationship to the film. He asserts that, as the temporal, spatial and cognitive structuring of the plot is suspended by the affection–image, so too is typecasting – and ultimately representation as such. In Deleuze’s terms, the affection–image instead becomes pure expression and performing agent of affect that ceases to “exist independently of something which expresses it.”27 Since the viewer can no longer look straight through the image in order to situate it in relation to structuring or identifying parameters of any sort, it “ceases to be translation” (98) and translatable. Instead, as acting performative, “it stares at us [il nous dévisage],28 it looks at us…” (90), thus operating a breaking up of subject/object correlations and an inversion of power relations that causes the viewer to lose control and to surrender, visually as well as epistemologically. In her discussion of scopic modes other than optical mastery, Renée van de Vall argues that a similar spectatorial surrender, performatively brought about by visual arts, mimics our way of relating visually to faces in real life. Echoing Deleuze’s argumentation, she maintains that looking at a face differs from looking at any other object because of our awareness of the face’s ability to look back. This implies that we avoid staring while remaining attentive and receptive, which provokes “peripheral seeing,” unfocused and constant movements of the eyes as we alternate between looking straight at the face and alongside it.29 Thus, the face triggers an attention to the margins of our visual range that is associated with a sense of loss of control, which “by demanding to give up – momentarily – the effort to focus” in fact also “demands a surrender” (61). It is van de Vall’s argument that visual arts may bring about similar experiences through techniques that require the spectator to have a corresponding visual involvement. An example is the moving and unfocused gaze mobilised by the fuzziness of Rembrandt’s brushwork, or by older religious paintings whose 26 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 61. 27 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Mouvement–Image, 99. Further page references are in the main text. 28 Two different significations of the French verb “dévisager” give Deleuze’s formulation a double meaning that is lost in the English version. “Dévisager” means to stare attentively or intensively into somebody’s face, but also to deteriorate or destroy the face or facial traits of someone, literally or figuratively. 29 Van de Vall, At the Edges of Vision: A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship, 60. Further page references are in the main text.

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compositional breadth necessitates opposite sideways movements of the eyes which make focusing virtually impossible. Spatially disorientating close-range tracking shots seem to produce analogous visual involvement for the spectator of Dreyer’s and Kechiche’s films. Renée van de Vall also describes peripheral seeing as possessing a tactility that brings materiality back into perception and hence supplements the way we register reality, revealing to us both the inexhaustibility of perceptive objects and our own entanglement with the world as bodies (29). Thus, peri­ pheral seeing enables us to materially sense the visible instead of merely seeing through it. The camerawork of Vénus noire also establishes such a hesitant and tactile spectatorship, in striking opposition to the film’s diegetic representations of the hand. 3 Hands In addition to close-ups of gazes and faces, the hand is a visual and thematic leitmotif that characterises Vénus noire. In the film’s prologue, Professor Cuvier presents the results of his research on Baartman to the members of L’Académie Royale de Médecine two years after her death. They are all seated in a large lecture theatre forming a high and sloped half circle in front of the professor, who is standing facing them next to the cast of Baartman’s dead body. As Cuvier gives his speech on the Hottentot as the lowest specimen of the human race (through actual quotations from his autopsy report), detailed scientific drawings of Baartman’s genitals and of female ape genitals are shown on big charts. Simultaneously, her genitals and brain, preserved in jars of formalin, are passed around in the auditorium. A handheld camera follows the jars in close-ups and medium close-ups as new hands grab them and pass them on, and the hand footages are cross cut with shots of the illustrating charts, and with the all male audience’s attentive looks directed towards them. A long shot from the top, left corner of the auditorium, showing the audience applauding at the end of the lecture, provides a second emphasis on the coordinated, rhythmic and noisy movements of the hands of everybody present, and is strikingly cross cut with an extreme close-up of the silent and immobile face and closed eyes of Baartman’s cast that ends the scene. In this way, this first scene of the film associates the gripping or grasping of hands with the mastering gaze of science. The cutting accentuates how eyes and hands join in a visual, gestural and conceptual appropriation of the black female body through which alleged knowledge production and political and ideological power abuse converge.

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A different yet associated grasp is included in the Hottentot Venus’s stage performance. At the end of each show, in a parody of the naturalist’s scientific gathering of information, the audience are encouraged to touch Baartman’s rear end in order to collect the physical evidence for themselves that it is in fact “real.” Chaotic close-ups of greedy hands reaching for her body as her back faces them and she is held firmly by Cezar are cross cut with glimpses of her face as she again closes her eyes, in apparent discomfort. In the first spoken dialogue in the film, Baartman protests specifically against this particular part of the show, stressing clearly that she does not want to be touched by the spectators. The emphasis on grasping hands reappears in the scene where Baartman is being scientifically examined by Cuvier, Henri de Blainville and a group of assistants at the Jardin des Plantes in the spring of 1815. Close-ups and extreme close-ups focus on hands measuring one body part after another, and on other hands writing down the numbers. Hands hold Baartman’s head in a tight grip as her teeth are examined through a magnifying glass, while Cuvier attentively runs his fingers over her cheek and jaw to form an impression of the form of her skull. Baartman remains motionless and silent throughout the entire examination and only minuscule changes in facial expression or in-drawn breaths, also shot and recorded close-up, suggest her uneasiness. However, as she firmly and repeatedly refuses to remove the beaded apron covering her genitals (a refusal recounted in Cuvier’s autopsy report) and hands try to remove it by force, they are stopped by hers pushing them away. Finally, as Cuvier literally orders her to reveal this last and essential part of her body to his inspecting gaze – “We want to see you!” – her hands respond by returning and inverting his grasp and glance as she walks straight at him and firmly grabs his genitals while uttering the words “See you,” for the first and only time looking right into his eyes. This brief hold on Cuvier, however, provides only a moment of comic relief for the viewer and of privacy much sought after for Baartman, and is ultimately countered by the autopsy scene at the end of the film. Here, still in close-ups, we see how the professor’s hands can finally spread the legs of Baartman’s dead body without hindrance in order to inspect her “Hottentot apron.” With a scalpel, the hands remove the genitals from the body, and physically grasp and take possession of them, before finally washing up in a basin in which the water is stained red with the dead woman’s blood – hence tellingly allowing the shot to materialize an emblematic symbol of guilt in Western culture. However, through these very footages that associate the diegetic grip of hands with gendered and racialized typecasting and abuse through which the colonial practices of science and popular culture intertwine, framing and camera movements simultaneously establish visual patterns that prevent the eye

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of the viewer from acting as an instrument of classification and appropriation. This way of looking may be qualified as haptic, a term first launched by art historian Aloïs Riegl. As explained by Laura Marks, haptic visuality favours the perception of the textures of surfaces at the expense of the distinction of forms and spatial orientation by pulling the viewer closer to the filmed object, and by moving instead of focusing.30 Hampering representation and involvement in the narrative, haptic visuality instead “connects directly to sense perception” (162) by confronting the viewer with the sheer materiality of the image. According to Marks, the haptic image can be regarded as a form of affection– image in the Deleuzian sense, encouraging an embodied spectatorship that blurs the distinction between viewer and image: “[I]t is not proper to speak of the object of a haptic look as to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image” (163). In Vénus noire, a paradoxical effect of the close-ups that accentuate grasping hands and devouring gazes is in fact that the surfaces of the hands and faces are simultaneously brought to the fore. As the photographed object is shot too close to be properly accessible to vision, other senses must be activated in order to perceive it, and most prominently the sense of touch. The close range of the shots foregrounds the skin’s materiality, amplifying its pores and irregularities. This effect is reinforced by the fact that the actors in the film do not wear any makeup – an idea possibly originating directly from La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, where makeup was strictly forbidden for the actors on set.31 Dreyer further emphasizes the texture of skin through oblique angles, filming the priests, in particular, “demonically from the ground up” in extreme close-ups that bring out the wrinkles and fat of their faces.32 Similarly, in Vénus noire, the minimal lighting, particularly during the stage performances in London, creates reflections that highlight the sweaty surface of skin, foregrounding its stickiness. When accentuated in their own terms, rather than being motivated by the demands of the plot, qualities such as moistness and graininess, although perceived visually, appeal to and mobilize the viewer’s tactile sense. The same effect is achieved by the extreme close-ups showing the hands of Cuvier’s assistant, Berrier, as they polish the cast of Baartman’s dead body, making circular movements on the plaster cast’s cheeks and around her navel on the now dry, 30 Marks, The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, 162. Further page references are in the main text. 31 See Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 17. 32 Bodil Marie Thomsen, “On the Transmigration of Images: Flesh, Spirit and Haptic Vision in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc and von Trier’s Golden Heart Triology,” in Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema, ed. Claire Thomson (London: Norvik): 56.

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Abdellatif Kechiche, Vénus noire, 2010. © 2009 MK2 SA – france 2 cinéma

chalky white surface on which her skin has left its imprint. And interestingly, the tight-fitting body suit Baartman wears during her stage acts, skin-coloured and all revealing though it may be, actually has the opposite effect of masking and evening out the texture of her skin, in order to better emphasize her body as stereotyped figure and form. Hence, it should come as no surprise that the body suit encourages greedy grasps rather than hesitant touches. The appeal to tactility established by framing and lighting is reinforced by camera and frame mobility in both La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire. As close range pans and tracking shots move along the surface of the photographed object, denying easy focus, they also enact the horizontal movements of a touching hand by virtue of their sheer closeness. Such movements may seem akin to caresses,33 or to fingers trying to feel their way through a dark and unknown space. Whichever is the case, when shots of haptic visuality dominate a film, it is not easy for the viewer to see through the image by acceding to it cognitively as signification or stereotype. Instead, it becomes a dense surface which may appear to be both impenetrable and strangely absorbing.34 33 34

See Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 2009): 32. In another recent article, I discuss the effects of the haptic visuality in Vénus noire by con­ trasting it with the disembodiment and anonymity that characterize debates on the film

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The evocation of cinematic perception as akin to the touch of a hand hampers conventional plot-driven identification with characters and establishes an embodied spectatorial involvement through which we are paradoxically kept at a distance by virtue of getting too close. According to Jennifer Barker, the viewers become materially and physically immersed in haptic cinema in a way that “call[s] into question, without entirely collapsing, the boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ and between ‘us’ (the viewers), ‘them’ (the characters) and ‘it’ (the film).”35 Thus, haptic cinema visually and performatively blurs the Western inside/outside thinking corollary to gendered and racialized typecasting.36 Barker further asserts that the viewer’s corporeal immersion in cinema through camerawork is even established kinaesthetically, or on a muscular level: “When the film swivels suddenly with a whip pan, or moves slowly with a long take or a tracking shot, or stretches itself out in widescreens to take in a vast landscape, we feel those movements in our muscles because our bodies have made similar movements.”37 Thus, the film’s gestural patterns demand and provoke a muscular response, thereby establishing a dynamic reciprocity with the viewer twitching in his seat as an involuntary response to sudden movements onscreen in which s/he is caught up. Such kinaesthetic involvement can be profoundly unsettling, as Barker exemplifies by referring to cin­ ematic car chases, which on the one hand apparently empower viewers by heightening their everyday perception (by way of cameras attached to speeding cars), while on the other hand, depriving them of their will, leave them to cope with a physically unsafe and ungrounded position.38 Although on a smaller and more human scale, the vertiginous and tranceinducing dancing scenes in Vénus noire provide obvious examples of such

in social media. See Jorunn Gjerden, “Negociating Cinematic Staging of Colonial Past in the Blogosphere: Abdellatif’s Vénus noire,” in Exploring Text, Media, and Memory, eds. Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo & Sara Tanderup Linkis (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2017): 121–24. 35 Barker, The Tactile Eye, 7. 36 As Barbara Kennedy points out, there is a difference here between accounts of the cine­ matic experience that respectively take Merleau–Ponty and Deleuze as their starting points. Whereas Merleau–Ponty’s phenomenology maintains the notion of subjectivity, while merely redefining it in more embodied or material terms, Deleuze’s film theory and philosophy imply a more radical abolishment of individuation as such. See Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002): 50–62. 37 Barker, The Tactile Eye, 75. 38 The Tactile Eye, 110–14.

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kinaesthetic effects on the spectator.39 In addition, the hand-held camera in all scenes produces an overall impression of constantly unstable or trembling shots, always delayed with regard to the movements of the actors. The camera acts as if it has been surprised or caught off-guard by the actor’s cues rather than the other way around. During the court case, for instance, abrupt camera pans seem provoked by persons suddenly starting to move and talk somewhere else in the room, as if we were watching dramatic direct footages of a TV news report, or as if the shooting of the scene has been loosely prepared and is therefore improvised on the spot. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, Kechiche’s cameraman Sofian El Fani confirms that, in fact, their working methods were what produces this effect, in the sense that sudden emotional changes in the actors’ performances during the long takes required rapid reactions from the cameraman, such as having to zoom in to capture an unforeseen development.40 Thus, the actor-induced abrupt camera movements replace conventional cutting that strives for continuity and invisibility. For the viewer, the pattern and rhythm of these camera movements provokes an attitude of attention to constant gestural unexpectedness, a corresponding increased muscular awareness of and empathic engagement in the onscreen movements, and, as a result, a fundamental loss of ocular and spatial mastery and control. This becomes particularly powerful in the scene where a coughing and stumbling Baartman falls to the floor and dies alone in her small Parisian loft room. No one else is present, not a word is uttered, no contextualising explanation is provided. Not having any melodramatic effects, the scene owes its entire impact to the way in which the viewer’s muscular presence is enhanced by the camerawork. As a direct response to Baartman’s coughing, the camera moves in violent horizontal twitches which cause the frame of the image to agitate in a manner similar to the way coughing makes our bodies shake and become unsteady. Physically felt, her final loss of balance and 39

40

Jim Morrissey also discusses the way in which the dancing performances in Vénus noire resist the objectification of the Baartman character. His reading is, however, based on a psychological–realistic analysis of the main character rather than on the performative capacities of the film’s cinematography. See Jim Morrissey, “Objectification and Resistance. Dance Performances in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet (2007) and Vénus noire (2010),” French Cultural Studies 24 (2013), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ abs/10.1177/0957155813489248 (accessed 22 May 2019). “[M]ême si l’on a des tailles de plan différentes au depart, on se retrouve vite dans une configuration où chacun essaie de capter quelque chose en se rapprochant. Généralement on travaille avec des zooms pour changer de focale rapidement. On commence un peu large pour voir les mouvements, mais comme les prises sont longues, l’émotion peut monter brusquement et il faut être prêt à réagir.” See Cyril Béghin, “Les secrets du gros plan. Entretien avec Sofian El Fani, chef opérateur,” Cahiers du cinema 693 (2013): 19.

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breath at the end of the scene thus also becomes ours. Cinematographically immersed in the film as bodies, we end up losing grip of Black Venus as Vénus noire instead takes a hold of us. 4

Body and Presence

The cinematography of Vénus noire and of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc pulls us closer as viewers, activating a presence of our entire bodies that undermines diegetic grips and gazes. However, another gaze that the two films also have in common, and that remains to be taken into account, is that of their male directors. Kechiche has been severely attacked in the media for his on-set treatment of actors. In this respect, he seems to have a lot in common with Dreyer, also a director who “dominated his casts, tirelessly rehearsing his actors in order to extract exactly what he wanted.”41 He was notably criticised for “immersing Falconetti too deeply into her role, of torturing her no less cruelly than the judges tortured Jeanne” (18). Eyewitness accounts report how Dreyer would have his lead actress kneeling on the stone floor for hours during endless takes in which she was being insulted and spat on, until finally she “wept real tears. Then the director slowly approached her, gathered up some of her tears in his fingers, and carried them to his lips” (19). In view of the foregoing consideration of the cinematographic characteristics of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire, such affective, embodied and haptic intensity that breaks down distances between actor, character, director, and spectator sounds familiar. In addition, for everyone having followed the debate in the media concerning Kechiche’s controversial working methods, the parallels seem striking. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, when accused of behaving brutishly toward his actresses, Kechiche insists on talking about a “relâchement,” or a necessary letting go of control and facade.42 Denying that his methods entail an alienation of the actresses, he maintains instead (in strikingly Deleuzian terms) that they are intended to cause a liberation from the self in which he also wishes to include the viewer.43 41 Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 9. Further page references are in the main text. 42 Jean-Philippe Tessé, “Tomber le masque. Entretien avec Abdellatif Kechiche,” Cahiers du cinéma 693 (2013): 15. 43 See Maud Hagelstein & Antoine Janvier, “Le problème de la vie dans le cinéma d’Abdellatif Kechiche,” Cahiers du grm 5 (2014), http://grm.revues.org/416 (accessed 22 May 2019).

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Nevertheless, there are some serious ethical dilemmas involved here, to the extent that Kechiche’s footages (like Dreyer’s) have required the infliction of actual agony and distress by a renowned male director upon young unexperienced actresses. Are such working methods in any way justifiable, or merely abusive? Does a convincing account of historical atrocities necessitate their re-enactment? My answer is no – I cannot endorse such a choice. But I also acknowledge that if the exhausting of the actresses on the film sets of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Vénus noire actually brings about an abolishment of acting, it may contribute significantly to the undermining of representation. As the real suffering of bodies causes representation to dissolve into affective, haptic and kinaesthetic presence and performance, it encumbers, by the same token, mastering and detached spectatorship. This makes in particular Vénus noire unbearable to watch, since it makes the viewers feel as if they were participating, performatively, in physical mistreatment. Against this backdrop, an interesting line from the film is provided by the counsel for the defence during the court case. He argues that the spectator of Baartman’s show takes pleasure in it because it allows him to attribute a certain reality to what he knows is not real, whereas a part of him the whole time remains fully conscious of the “unreality of the performance,” and of the distinction between representation and reality. As a mise en abyme of the aesthetic practices of the film, this speech takes on a deeply ironic signification, emphasizing that the powerful impact of Vénus noire on the viewer relies on the very abolishment of such a distinction, and on the utter disgust this experience provokes. Curiously, then, my reading of Vénus noire that was triggered by the disturbingly silent, impassive and absent portrayal of Sara Baartman has ended up revealing an equally overwhelming and almost unendurable sense of presence and closeness brought about by the film’s cinematography. In Vénus noire, drawing on the aesthetic insights of Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, Kechiche apparently chooses to repeat the Western male objectifying gaze on the black ­female body. Not in order to subscribe to it, however, but to expose and accentuate how this sexually typecasting gaze, which reduces the black woman to her body, actually and ironically sees through her physical being and instead leaps straight to the safety of the abstracted stereotype. My analysis has emphasized how affective, peripheral and haptic visuality at play in the film enables, at the same time, the cinematic form to counterbalance this diegetic gaze, and thereby challenges a detached spectatorial position. This establishes a closeness between viewer, character and film that materializes as affective and ­embodied involvement and spatial disorientation, and in the breakdown of binary oppositions. All of these processes serve to replace optical and ­cognitive mastery with a spectatorship of surrender and immersion. As a consequence,

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the cinematography of Vénus noire enacts a loss of perspective that must ultimately be considered a gain. As Kechiche himself states in the Cahiers du cinéma interview, his long, close-range takes allow the palpable to express and give access to something impalpable44 – hence paradoxically reintroducing the bodily into the film discourse while revealing the black woman as more and other than her objectified body. Works Cited Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 2009). Basaran, Aylin. “Representation and the Dominant Gaze,” JGCinéma (2010), http:// www.jgcinema.com/single.php?sl=dominant-gaze-colonialism-representation, (accessed 10 September 2013). Béghin, Cyril. “Les secrets du gros plan. Entretien avec Sofian El Fani, chef opérateur,” Cahiers du cinéma 693 (2013): 18–9. Bordwell, David. Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Bloomington, London: Indiana UP, 1973). Bougue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema (New York, London: Routledge, 2003). Cahiers du cinéma, 693 (2013). Didion. “Black Venus (2010): Can I Recommend a Film I Hated Watching?” Feminéma (29 September 2013), https://feminema.wordpress.com/?s=venus+noire (accessed 22 May 2019). Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1: The Mouvement–Image (1983. London, New York: Continuum, 2005). Del Rio, Elena. Deleuze and the Cinema of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008). Dreyer, Carl Th. “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” (1928), Youtube, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=CxJSGMK9yRE&spfreload=1 (accessed 28 September 2016). Fujishima, Kenji. “New York Film Festival 2010: Black Venus and Post Mortem,” Slant Magazine (30 September 2010), http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/ new-york-film-festival-2010-black-venus-and-post-mortem (accessed 22 May 2019). Gjerden, Jorunn. “Negociating Cinematic Staging of Colonial Past in the Blogosphere: Abdellatif’s Vénus noire,” in Exploring Text, Media, and Memory, eds. Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo & Sara Tanderup Linkis (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2017): 115–42. Gjerden, Jorunn, Kari Jegerstedt & Željka Švrljuga. “‘The Venus Hottentot is Unavailable for Comment’: Questioning Representation through Aesthetic Practices,” in 44

“Grâce au palpable, quelque chose d’impalpable s’exprime. On y a accès.” See JeanPhilippe Tessé, “Tomber le masque. Entretien avec Abdellatif Kechiche,” 13.

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Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation, eds. Hilde Danielsen, Kari Jegerstedt, Ragnhild Muriaas, & Brita Ytre–Arne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 281–303. Hagelstein, Maud & Antoine Janvier. “Le problème de la vie dans le cinéma d’Abdellatif Kechiche,” Cahiers du GRM 5 (2014), http://grm.revues.org/416 (accessed 22 May 2019). Kechiche, Abdellatif. Vénus noire. Un film d’Abdellatif Kechiche. (Paris: MK2, 2010). Kennedy, Barbara. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002). Ladegaard, Jakob. “Spatial Affects: Body and Space in Philippe Granddrieux’s La Vie Nouvelle,” in Exploring Text and Emotion, eds. Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo, & ­Julien Zanetta (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2014): 151–75. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, London: Duke UP, 2000). Mattoscio, Mara. “What’s in a face?: Sara Baartman, the (Post)colonial Gaze and the Case of Vénus noire,” Feminist Review 117 (2017), https://link-springer-com.pva.uib .no/article/10.1057/s41305-017-0090-7 (accessed 21 November 2018). Miller, J. Hillis. Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Standford UP, 2001). Morrissey, Jim. “Objectification and Resistance. Dance Performances in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet (2007) and Vénus noire (2010),” French Cultural Studies 24 (2013), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0957155813489248 (accessed 22 May 2019). Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1974), in Film Theory. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, eds. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, & Karen J. Shepherdson (London, New York: Routledge, 2004): 56–67. Murphey, Kathleen. “Abdellatif Kechiche’s Moveable Feast,” Parallax View (4 November 2013), http://parallax-view.org/2013/11/04/abdellatif-kechiches-moveable-feast/ (accessed 22 May 2019). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, New York: Duke UP, 1999). Tessé, Jean-Philippe. “Tomber le masque. Entretien avec Abdellatif Kechiche,” Cahiers du cinéma, 693 (2013): 10–16. Thomsen, Bodil Marie. “On the Transmigration of Images: Flesh, Spirit and Haptic Vision in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc and von Trier’s Golden Heart Triology,” in Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema, ed. Claire Thomson (London: Norvik): 43–57. Van de Vall, Renée. At the Edges of Vision: A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship (London: Ashgate, 2008).

Index A-effect. See V-effekt, Verfremdungseffekt Abolition 37, 45, 49, 51 Abolitionism 28–29, 151n5, 152 Danish 45, 56–57 Adonis 9, 19, 28–29, 33, 35–36, 38 Aesthetic 4n10, 19, 21, 22, 27, 35, 41–2, 65, 109, 150, 153, 164–5, 194, 213 practice 5, 10–13, (feminist) 111, 173–75, 178, 182–83 representation 36, 63, 84, 200 regime 111, 115, 117, 121, 123 See also Rancière desire (Baudelaire) 120 of the theatre 130–31, 138–40 of the museum. See Display case, Museum Aesthetics 5–6, 8–9, 11–13, 40, 60, 110, 116 of excess/exaggeration 65, 79 of “doubled-voiced discourse,” 66–68 film 196, 203 Affection-image 193, 202–205, 208 Affective 202–205, 212–13 Agency 12, 32, 134, 145, 177, 188, 195 historical 110–11, 114–15, 121, 123 masculine 173, 175 reader/spectator 134 Alienation 55, 94, 129, 141, 146 See also Verfremdungseffekt Allegory, (H.C. Andersen) 42–45, 48–50, 52–53, 60, 157 (Baudelaire) 157, 161, 165 “Anaconda” (Minaj). See Minaj Andersen, H.C. 41–60 Andersen, Jens 45, 49 Archive 4, 7–8, 20 Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 5 transatlantic slave trade 23 Art 1–8, 11 contemporary 2, 12, 173–91 history 105, 184–88 See also Visual art Ashcroft, Bill 119 Aunt Jemima 9, 63, 65, 67, 71–74, 76, 79, 81–63 “Old Aunt Jemima” (song) 69–70

Baartman, Sara 1–4, 7–9, 42–4, 52–5, 59, 67, 79, 95n23, 151, 184 autopsy report 3–4, 7, 11 exhibition 56, 174–76 portrayal in Venus (Parks) 129–47 portrayal in Vénus noire (Kechiche) 13, 193, 195 (Saartjie) 199, 204–13 “Baby Got Back” (Sir Mix-a-Lot). See Sir Mix-a-Lot Barker, Jennifer 210 Barthes, Roland 123, 182, 188 Bas bleu déclamant sa pièce, Le (Daumier) 162 Baudelaire, Charles 10, 12, 108–109, 111–15, 116–18, 120, 124, 149–70 Beaumont, Mme de 48n21 Beer, Gillian 167 Behn, Aphra 31 Benjamin, Walter 67, 111, 122–24, 135n19 Birth of Venus, The (Botticelli) 93, 142–43 Blackface 65, 67–71 Black female body 1–8, 13, 26–7, 30–4, 91–6, 105, 193 See also Walker, K., Minaj, Desire Black Venus 1–13 contemporary parody.  See Walker, K., Minaj in fairy tale. See Andersen, H.C., Fairy tale Italian imperial propaganda 89–105 theatre and the spectacle. See Parks semantic re-figurations. See Gilroy short story. See Carter in Baudelaire. See Baudelaire displayed bodies. See Display case, Museum in film. See Kechiche, Dreyer Blake, William 9, 19, 24–26, 30, 37 Europe Supported by Africa and America 25 Body 1, 3, 52, 64, 102, 151, 165, 169, 129–47, 173–91, 196–98, 204, 206–9, 212–14 See also Black Female Body, Desire Brecht, Bertolt 22, 129, 133, 137, 140, 144–46, 141n29 See also Epic theatre, Verfremdungseffekt

218 Camerawork 198, 206, 210–11 Calasso, Roberto 169 Campassi, Gabriella 92n11 Caponetto, Rosetta Giuliani 95 Carter, Angela 10, 108–15, 118–24 Cartesian 200–201, 203 Certeau, Michel de 110n7 Chambers, Ross 110, 121 Cinema, (narrative) 4, 11, 98, 193–214 See also Deleuze, Cinematography, Gaze Camerawork, Haptic, Kechiche, Dreyer Cinematography 13, 193, 196–214 Christian viii of Denmark 45, 56 Close-up 13, 193, 196, 202–204, 206–207 Cognitive 11, 13, 129–31, 146, 193, 200, 203, 205, 209, 213 Colonial 5, 8–12, 19–21, 23–4, 37, 41–6, 54–6, 58–60, 65, 79, 89–94, 104–5, 133n11, 142, 151, 155, 170, 177, 184–6, 189, 193n1, 207 imagery 92 fantasies 96–100 power dynamics 111–13, 119–20, 123 See also Gaze, Universal Exhibition Colonialism 9, 19, 170, 186 Denmark 44–45, 51, 55–56, 59 Italy 90–105 Compagnon, Antoine 153 Conrad, Joseph 50 Contact zone 27 See also Pratt Cuvier, Georges 3–5, 7, 43n7, 137n23, 151, 176 in Vénus noire 193n, 206–208 Daumier, Honoré 161–63, 165, 167 Le Bas bleu déclamant sa pièce 162 Decadence 165–66, 168 Decolonization 177 Degeneration 89, 91, 94–95, 102, 104 Deleuze, Gilles 193, 196, 202–205, 210n36 Deserts of Libya, The (Il deserto di Libya, Tobino) 89–90, 96–100, 105 Desire 3, 8–9, 13, 19–20, 29–30, 34, 36–7, 43–4, 82, 142, 144–46, 163–64 and repulsion 5, 52, 95, 137 object of 31n18 and knowledge production 65, 79, 83, 111, 174–95 male 69, 78, 97–99, 101, 103, 112, 114, 120, 123, 197, 199, 204

Index ocular 156–59, 200 See also Gaze Displacement 19, 22–24, 31–32, 163, 165 Display case 12, 173–84, 187–90 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 13, 193–94, 196–98, 202–204, 206, 208, 212–13 Dundes, Alan 46 Duval, Jeanne 10, 108–109, 111–15, 118–23 Duve, Arne 54 Embodied 9, 63, 67, 72, 82, 108 spectatorship in cinema 196, 208, 210, 212–13 See also Walker, K. Epic theatre 11, 129–31, 133n11, 138, 141, 146 See also Theatre Epistemology 8, 10–11, 129, 131, 194, 197, 200, 203, 205 Ethical 5, 11, 13, 134, 150, 196, 200, 213 Europe Supported by Africa and America (Blake) 19, 24–25 Exposition universelle. See Universal Exposition Face 97–98, 193–213 Fairy tale 9–10, 41–44, 49, 108, 121–24 See also Folklore Falconetti, Renée Maria 194, 212 Felsenstein, Frank 21n, 22n, 23n7, 27n14 Flaiano, Ennio 10, 89–102, 104–105 Feminism 76, 109, 195 Feminist 1, 10, 111, 114–15, 118, 161, 186, 197–98 “Anaconda,” 2–3 See also Minaj post-feminist 65–67, 76, 78 black feminist thought 74 film criticism 98 white 108–109, 121, 124 Figure 4–5, 7 See Black Venus, Hottentot Venus, Spivak Figuration 2, 5–8, 10–11, 13, 19, 27, 129–47, 193–94, 196 Flaubert, Gustave 117, 161 Focalizer 5, 26–28, 91, 97, 99–101 Folklore 46–48, 121, 123 Foucault, Michel 12, 149, 155–56 Freak 130–32, 134, 145, 150, 195 phenomena 137, 146, 166 See also Freak show

Index Freak show 11–12, 43, 64–5, 129, 132, 136–40, 147, 149, 151, 197 Frederik vii of Denmark 51 Fusco, Coco 12, 173–74, 188–90 Gamble, Sarah 110 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis 66, 79, 84 Gautier, Théophile 153, 168–69 Gaze Colonial and imperial 5, 10, 12, 103, 151, 186 male, objectifying 13, 26, 30, 31n19, 89–90, 97–105, 132, 197–99 and the museum 12, 173–78, 183–84, 186, 188, 190 white 63, 65, 70 oppositional 75, 84 to, defined. See Schroeder alienating 150 and the cinema 193–199, 203n21, 205–208, 212–13 Gender 13, 19–23, 28n15, 34, 37, 91, 93–95, 105, 109, 130–31, 134–35, 137, 159, 170, 185–86 performance 29 in blackface comedy 69 See also Masculinity, Looking relations, Feminism Gendered Gendered 8–9, 11–13, 178, 194 division of labor 31 power dynamics 67, 186 typecasting 200, 207, 210 See also Gender Genre 8–10, 19, 23n8, 27n14, 42–43, 50, 60, 75, 108, 113–14, 121–24, 131 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Étienne 166–67 Gilman, Sander L. 1, 6, 35, 55n51, 95n23, 144, 151n5 Gilroy, Beryl 9, 19–24, 27–38 Gjerden, Jorunn S. 96, 108n1 Glass case. See Display case Glissant, Édouard 195n Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 12, 173–74, 188–90 Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha 8, 52, 54–55 Gould, Stephen 1, 8 Grønbech, Bo 46–47

219 Hajamadi, Fariba 12, 173–74, 178–84, 186 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 142 Hands 193, 206–11 Hansen, Thorkild 42n6, 47n16, 51, 56–57, 59 Haptic 13, 193, 208–10, 212–13 Henderson, Mae G. 4n10, 14 Heterotopia 12, 149, 155–57, 169–70 Hip hop 4n10, 75–78, 144 Historical context 5, 8, 20, 42, 44, 49, 54, 59, 83, 109, 113 representation 9, 66, 115, 174 novel 22–23 romance 23n8 fabrication 55 “imagined” Baartman 135 construct 123, 200 History 11–12, 19, 24, 63, 70, 72–74, 79, 81–84, 111, 113–14, 117–18, 142 African American  63–84 post/colonial 3, 9–10, 23, 41–42, 44, 55–56, 59–60, 89, 109 of Black Venus 5, 8 repackaged, remixed 6–7, 24, 131–32, 135 alternative 20–21 natural, scientific 12, 149–51, 155–56, 158, 165 visual and art 65, 173, 178, 183–86, 188–89, 194, 197 See also African American, Historical, Colonial Hottentot apron 1, 31n19, 54–55 Hottentot Venus 3n8, 8, 12, 31n19, 34n20, 64, 67, 77, 79, 82, 84, 95n23, 135n19, 136, 142, 144, 174–76, 189, 193, 197, 203, 199, 207 in Baudelaire 149–159, 165, 170 Hutcheon, Linda 66, 112n11, 113n, 114, 120 See also Repetition, Parody Hysteria 163–65 Ideology 8, 20–21, 27–28, 32, 36, 42n5, 68–69, 123 blackness as construct 34n20 fascist 89, 94 bourgeois 124 Imagination 7, 10, 108–10, 122–23, 133n11, 137, 143, 168, 174–76 in Baudelaire 115, 150, 153, 156, 160, 169, 170 Imaginary. See Imagination, Colonial

220 Immersion 13, 82, 193, 210, 213 Imperialism 9, 10, 41–42, 49, 108–21, 124, 133, 137, 155–56, 170 Italian 89–92, 102–105 Imperialist. See Imperialism Irony 21–22, 28, 30, 36, 38, 53, 56, 96, 100, 105, 113, 140, 143, 146, 150, 153, 156, 161, 164–65, 170, 213 Italiani brava gente 104 Jeanne d’Arc 13, 193–97, 200–204, 208–209, 212–13 Jegerstedt, Kari 59, 96, 195n6 Jezebel 9, 63, 65, 67, 74–77, 80–84 Joan of Arc See Jeanne D’Arc Jørgensen, Aage 56 Kaplan, Ann E. 103–105 Kechiche, Abdellatif 2, 13, 193–98, 199n12, 206, 209, 211–14 Kinaesthetic 193, 210, 211, 213 Knowledge production 8, 11, 13, 174–75, 193, 195, 200, 206 Kofoed, Niels 53–54 Land of the Covenant 58–59 Larsen, Ebba Kathrine 57 Legend 19, 23–24, 27–28, 151n5 of Sara Baartman 42, 55, 59 “Les Épaves” (Mme Reybaud) 46, 49 Literature 8–11, 19–38, 41–60, 89–105, 108–25, 129–147, 149–70 See also Poetry Lewis, Robin Coste 6–7 Ligon, Richard 21n, 23 Looking relations 103–105, 197 See also Gaze Ma Rainey 67, 70–76, 79 “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” 70–76, 79 Magubane, Zine 34n20, 44, 55n51 Marker, Frederick J. 51 Marks, Laura 200–201, 208 Masculinity 10, 29, 69, 75, 89, 94, 101, 104 Materiality 201, 206, 208 Matoaka 19–20 Matus, Jill 111, 112n12, 113n13, 114–15, 120 Mauron, Charles 167 Mbeki, Thabo 1, 14 Medicine show 64

Index Melancholia 153, 154n21, 157, 163–65 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 196, 210n36 Metaphor. See Replacement Metonymy. See Displacement Michelet, Jules 117 Miller, J. Hillis 200–201 Minaj, Nicki 2–3, 9–10, 63, 65–69, 74–79, 82–84 “Anaconda,” 2–3, 9, 75, 77, 78 Minstrel show 64, 68–69, 70–72, 79, 83 Minstrelsy 65, 67–70, 74 Modernity 91, 150, 153–56 anti-modernity 153 Monster 12, 149–70 See also Freak show Mortensen, Klaus P. 54 Moses 49, 57–59 Mulvey, Laura 98, 103, 198–99, 204 Munford, Rebecca 114–15, 120 Museum 7, 11–12, 64, 156–59, 173–91 Madame Tussauds 65, 76, 84 of “living curiosities,” 149–60, 166–70 Mute speech. See Rancière Myth 142–43, 157, 165, 169, 174 of racial hierarchy 4, 102, 104–105 of Venus and Adonis 9, 19–21, 29, 35, 37 Egyptian mythology 54 See also Adonis, Aunt Jemima, Carter Nadar, Félix 113, 152n9 Napoleon iii 154 Narrative 6–10, 19, 21–23, 26–38, 52, 91, 97, 103, 108, 112–13, 115, 145, 156n18 “Black Venus narrative” (Sharpley-Whiting) 43 slave 37 travel 71n36 cinema 98, 194–96, 198–99, 201–202, 208 Western, hegemonic 110, 182–3, 186, 190 counter- 189 Nochlin, Linda 183–84 Objectification 77–78, 84, 132–34, 137, 142, 176–77, 188, 193–214 Oral tradition 10, 108, 121–23 Ongetiteld (Rose) 186–88 Onlooker 74–76, 82–83, 186 See also Gaze Opacity 195n6, 200

Index Orient 43, 58, 99–100, 183–84, 190 Oriental 8, 57–58, 98, 100, 102, 104, 140, 146, 148, 168, 182 Orientalism 8, 57n2, 58, 98–114, 120, 133n1, 184 Orientalist, 114, 120, (Gérôme) 183–84 Origin of Man 165–70 Other 4n10, 10, 21–23, 28, 65–66, 82, 84, 97, 101, 103–105, 109, 119, 133, 136–37, 139 Spivak 112, 114, 120 See also Othering Othering 183–84, 193–95, 197–98 imperialist (Spivak) 120 Oxfeldt, Elisabeth 41–42, 49, 58 Palma, Silvana 92 Parks, Suzan-Lori 11, 82, 129, 129–47 Parody 4n10, 9, 28, 63, 66, 73, 77–79, 111, 142, 157–58, 163, 207 See also Signifyin(g), Hutcheon Perception 26, 129, 135, 146, 201–206, 208–10 See also Cartesian, Haptic Performative 13, 193, 196, 204–205, 210, 211n39, 213 Peripheral seeing 205–206 Perspective 193, 200–205, 214 Phantasm 42, 49, 53 Pascal, Blaise 167–68 Pocahontas. See Matoaka Poe, Edgar Allan 163 Poetry 149–170 Polezzi, Loredana 90n5 Ponzanesi, Sandra 92–93 Postcolonial 2–3, 8–10, 44, 90, 105, 108, 177, 193n1 critique 173–74, 187 See also Colonial, History Pratt, Mary Louise 27n13, 90 Preciosity (précieuse) 161–63, 168 Progress 150, 153–57, 167–70 Prostitution 12, 34, 78, 149–55, 158–60, 170 Qureshi, Sadiah 43–44 Rose, Tracey 173–74, 176n4, 184–90 Race, (intersectionality) 9, 12, 19–22, 32–34, 43n7, 70, 79, 94, 109, 130, 132, 133n11, 137, 144, 149, 152, 170, 200, 206 mixed 44–45, 49, 53, 56, 95n23

221 as spectacle 131, 135, 143, 147 theory, (Gobineau) 166, (Gautier) 168–69 See also Racialized, Racism Racialized 1–2, 9, 11, 13, 20–21, 123, 194, 195n4, 200, 207, 210 markers 6 See also Race Racism 66–67, 78–79, 83, 95n23, 133n11, 177 Rancière, Jacques 10, 24, 124 distribution of the sensible 26, 110 aesthetic regime 111, 115–16 mute speech 117–18 Rape 29, 35–36, 42, 77, 79, 101, 104 Regeneration 91, 94, 100–102, 104 “Repetition with critical difference” (Hutcheon) 9, 63, 66, 77–79, 81, 84 Replacement 19, 22–23, 32, 34, 37 Representative regime 116, 118 See also Rancière Re-presentation 108 Re-vision. See Rich Mme Reybaud 46 See also “Les Épaves” Rice, Thomas D. “Daddy,” 68 Rich, Adrienne 66 Robecchi-Bricchetti, Luigi 89–90 Ross, Alison 117 Rothenberg, Molly Anne 7, 7n20, 15 Rømer, Ludewig Ferdinand 51 Sage, Lorna 109 Said, Edward W. 120n34, 182, 184 Sanyal, Debarati 151, 170 Schmid, Susanne 120 Schneider, Marcel 102 Schroeder, Jonathan 97–98 Schyff, Karlien van der 59 Scopophilia 65, 82 Sega, Maria Teresa 92n2 Scandinavian 5, 41 Sexism 24, 83, 177 Sexuality 5, 20, 26, 28n15, 29, 31–32, 35, 37, 42–44, 71, 77, 109, 137, 165 deviant 48 and love 52–54, 55–56, 59 and taboo 57 black female, 63–70, 144, 147 (Baartman) 9, 143, 146–47

222 Sexualized 9, 20–21, 32–36, 49, 63–65, 70, 81, 108–11, 129, 133, 159 See also Black female body, Desire, Gaze Sexual violence 45, 46, 60, 79 Shakespeare, William 33 See also Hamlet Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean 4, 5, 11, 43, 55n51, 197 Short Cut, The (Tempo di uccidere, Flaiano) 90, 104–106, 105 Signifyin(g) 9, 63, 66, 79 See also Gates Sir Mix-a-Lot 2–3, 78 Sideshow 64, 137n20, 178 Slavery 7–8, 20–23, 26, 31, 33, 37, 45, 47n16, 49, 51, 53, 79, 82–84, 91, 134 See also Abolition, Abolitionism Smith, John 19 Sòrgoni, Barbara 95n23 Stead, Evanghelia 165–66 Stefani, Giulietta 10, 89, 93–95, 101 Space 7–8, 12, 27n13, 120, 156, 164, 174, 178–79, 184, 189–90, 201, 203–204, 209 narrative 28 imaginary 115 colonial 119 for the Other 133 counter- 149–50, 155 allegorized 157 See also Museum, Spatial Span ii (Rose) 187–88 Spatial 10–11, 115, 156, 203–208, 211, 213 See also Looking relations, Affective, Close-up, Space Spectacle 11, 65, 83, 112, 129–47, 183, 197, 201 Spectating bodies 131, 146, 173–91 Spectator 11–12, 26, 65–66, 78–79, 82–84, 98, 129, 139–47 object looking back at 173–75, 177, 182, 184–91 of dialectical theatre 134–35, 139, 141 and visual involvement 197, 199, 205–207, 210–13 See also Spectatorship, Gaze, Kinasthetics Spectatorship 11–13 theatrical 130 urban space 149

Index bodily 193 cinematic 196, 206, 208, 213 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 8, 124–25 on the figure 5, 20, 59n69 postcolonial reason 109, 112, 114, 120 un-learning 173–74, 177–78, 191 See also Unlearning, Other, Othering Stedman, John Gabriel 23, 31n17, 37 Stefani, Giuletta 10, 89, 93–4, 101, 104 Stereotype 4n10, 8–11, 13, 20, 26–27, 38, 65, 67, 71–73, 77, 81–84, 89, 95n23, 111, 131, 139–40, 161n47, 194, 209, 213 Subtlety, A. See Walker, K. Sugar Baby. See Walker, K. Svalesen, Leif 53n43 Švrljuga, Željka 96, 108n, 135n19, 195n6 Symbolism 9, 24–26, 28, 36–37, 42, 45, 47, 54, 63, 74, 78, 92n11, 140, 142, 144–45, 194 in Blake 24–38 of Baartman 59, 135, 176, 195, 207 degeneration, 102, 104, (evil) 165 of social unity 157, 185 See also Aunt Jemima, Black Venus Tabula rasa 119–20 Tactile 206, 208–209 Theatre 5, 11, 45–53, 56, 129–47 See also Andersen, H.C., Brecht, Epic theatre, Parks Transatlantic slave trade 9, 23, 29, 46–47, 51, 53 Tobino, Mario 10, 89, 90, 101–103, 105 See also Deserts of Libya, The Topsøe-Jensen, Helge 44, 52 Torres, Yahima 194 Typecast(ing). See Stereotype Un-Begotten/Nude (Hajamadi) 178, 181 Universal Exposition 154–57 Unlearning 8, 11, 12, 150 See also Spivak, “un-learning” Un-Remembered/Dancer (Hajamadi) 178–79 Un-Sleeping/Bride, (Hajamadi) 178, 180 Vall, Reneé van de 200–201, 205–206 V-effekt. See Verfremdungseffekt Venus (Parks) 129–47

223

Index Venus Hottentot. See Hottentot Venus Vénus noire, scene (Kechiche) 198, 209 Verfremdungseffekt 11, 133n13, 139 Viewer. See Spectator Virey, Julien-Joseph 152 Vitrine. See Display case Visual arts 2, 11–12, 63–84, 173–91, 197, 200, 205 Visual pleasure. See Mulvey

Voice 10, 27n14, 32, 36, 38, 77, 84, 88, 91, 101–102, 104, 108–24, 136, 170 “double-voiced discourse” See Aesthetics. Also see Hutcheon Walker, Barbara G. 54 Walker, Kara 2, 9, 63–70, 73–74, 78–84 A Subtlety 64, 79–80, 163 Warner, Marina 51, 57n62, 60 Willis, Deborah 2, 8