We Need to Talk about Sarah Baartman: Black Bodies, White Voices, and the Politics of Neo-Victorian Authorship

Helen Davies

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Chapter 3 We Need to Talk about Sarah Baartman: Black Bodies, White Voices, and the Politics of Neo-Victorian Authorship

In: Black Neo-Victoriana

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Helen Davies

Helen Davies
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 74–95

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004469150_005

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Abstract

This chapter studies the representation of Sarah Baartman, exhibited in the nineteenth century as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, in two novels: Diane Awerbuck’s Home Remedies (2012) and Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Girl/White Girl: A Novel (2006). Whilst neither text is strictly neo-Victorian, as neither as set in the nineteenth century, or in Britain, the cultural afterlife of Baartman informs the representation of racial power inequalities in both. Crucially, both novels feature white women writers who appropriate the image of Baartman for their own agenda. I argue that this cultural appropriation stages a racist perpetuation of the dichotomy of white voices/black bodies which set the terms of Baartman’s exhibition in life and death.

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Black Neo-Victoriana

Series: Neo-Victorian Series, Volume: 8 and Neo-Victorian Series Online, Volume: 8

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004469150

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 15 Nov 2021

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 3 We Need to Talk about Sarah Baartman: Black Bodies, White Voices, and the Politics of Neo-Victorian Authorship

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Black Neo-Victoriana

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