Representation and Black Womanhood

Chapter 1 Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp

Chapter 2 “Body” of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman and the Archive

Chapter 3 “My Tongue Softens On That Other Name”: Poetry, People, and Plants in Sarah Bartmann’s Natural World

Chapter 4 “Rude” Performances: Theorizing Agency

Chapter 5 Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure that Has Been Looked at Too Much?

Chapter 6 Placing and Replacing “The Venus Hottentot”: An Archeology of Pornography, Race, and Power

Chapter 8 “I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

Chapter 9 “Just Ask the Scientists”: Troubling the “Hottentot” and Scientific Racism in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Chapter 10 Staging the Body of the (M)other: The “Hottentot Venus” and the “Wild Dancing Bushman”

Chapter 11 Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of Michelle Obama in the Twenty-First Century