Black Beauty

From African bodies of evidence: Dartmouth's gutsy 'Black Womanhood' probes old wounds:

In 1810, an English ship's surgeon brought Saartjie Baartman, a young South African woman, to London. She was displayed on stage and made to squat to show her genitals. After she died in 1816, her brain, skeleton, and genitals went on exhibition in Paris, where they remained until 1974.

Baartman, dubbed the "Hottentot Venus," was a victim of colonialism at its most vulgar. She plays a generative role in "Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body," a sweeping, gutsy, and provocative exhibition organized by curator Barbara Thompson at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

I'd never heard of Baartman. But now I'm fascinated -- in that ashamed awareness of those who rubberneck in ignorance which is combined with anger and sorrow for the woman herself.



It wasn't until 2002 that she returned home -- nearly two centuries later. (See also: The Life and Times of Sara Baartman "The Hottentot Venus", a film by Zola Maseko.)

The exhibition looks right up my alley -- to bad the museum isn't in my alley.

However, the catalog itself is apparently worth seeing. (You can purchase it from the museum.)

From a collector's standpoint, the following reminds me how many nude African female postcards I see:

Partial nudity was common in 19th-century Africa, but imagine the reaction of Victorian-era Europeans landing there, greeted by bare-skinned natives. They deemed Africans primitive and erotic, applied anthropometry - the measuring of body parts - to attempt to understand them, and sent postcards home, many with photos and captions intended to titillate and reinforce presumptions of white racial superiority.