Saartjite Baartman & Beyond The Advent of Black Female Visual Tropes
The reality that some of the earliest photographs of Black people were created to depict people of African descent as a separate and inferior race is a tragic truth not always unpacked when discussing visual history. While visual representation can serve as an educational tool for the development of a counter-hegemonic consciousness, contrarily, unproductive representations can “maintain oppression, exploitation, and the overall domination of black people” by perpetuating damaging images created by a racist imagination. These images further inscribe “colonial ways of looking and capturing the images of the Black ‘other’” and corrobate myths about an identity or group’s inherent subordinacy. (hooks, The Oppositional Gaze, 392). Myths gain credence when they are validated by visual representations. This is graphically revealed in the image and legacy of Saartije Baartman, a young South African woman whose exhibition served as a visual embodiment of a myth of African racial inferiority and societal difference. Europeans paid to see Baartman, “The Hottentot Venus,” so they could see an indivdual who supposedly personifed “the essential black, the lowest rung on the great chain of being.” Her image and legacy now serves as a defining moment in the historical misrepresentation of the visual Black female body.
When Saartije Baartman was twenty years old, she was taken from her livelihood in Dutch-colonized South Africa and smuggled into Europe by her master’s brother. In 1810, she supposedly signed a contract with William Dunlop which detailed that Sara was to be exhibited in fairs across Europe. Promised a portion of the proceeds, Baartman would be paraded in fairs for and circuses for years—usually in a flesh-colored costume designed to tightly conform to her body, and sometimes in a cage.
While her high cheekbones, and flat nose and “unusual coloring” intrigued European gazes, her voluptous physique and even her genitalia became evidence of an African women’s innate, hypersexual nature. Soon, Baartman became an object of ridicule, curiosity, scientific inquiry; ultimately she became a testament to rigid racial difference and a “justifiable” racial hierarchy. “The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in the black, and the essential black, the lowest rung on the great chain of being, is the Hot- tentot. The physical appearance of the Hottentot is, indeed, the central nineteenth- century icon for sexual difference between the European and the black.” --Sander L. Gilman
For 19th century audiences, Saartjie Baartman was exhibited as the ultimate “Other,” an embodiment of their fantasies of a savage African woman from a “world populated by grotesque monsters—fat-arsed females, blood-thirsty warriors, pre-verbal pinheads, midgets and geeks.” Baartman was all but a physical object, a place onto which the visitors’ racialized fantasies could be projected (Werbanowska, 19). By the time Baartman completed her European circuit, the image of Black female body was undersored by a matrix of widely disseminated stereotypes and misrepresentations. As an object of science and deviance, Baartman scrutinized in every meticulous detail. Her body, exploited and commodified when she was alive, was subject to the same treatment after her premature death. After she passed, her nude body was immortalized in plaster and her brain, skeleton, and genitalia was cut out and preserved for display in France’s Museum of Man. Up until 1976—160 years after her death—the exhibition remained.
Across time, colonial gazes have been renovated and demonstrated in recurring visual references to Black female primitivism and hypersexuality. A potent example of this is seen in the work of photographer, Jean Paul Goude.
His images depicted here (top right, bottom left) are from “Jungle Fever,” an photobook created in response to his ardent obsession with Black women. In the book, he describes how he desires his images to “emphasize the savage aesthetics of the face” as well as the ways in which he “appreciates” Black women’s backsides. “I had always admired black women’s backsides, the ones who look like racehorses. Toukie’s [his girlfriend at the time] backside was voluptuous enough but nowhere near a racehorse’s ass, so I gave her one. There she was, my dream come true, in living color...I saw her as this primitive voluptuous girl-horse” (Drayton) While openly confessing to a fetish for Black women’s bodies, he also likens Black women as feral, animalistic, and uncivilized. This is explicity depicted in the cover photo of “Jungle Fever” which depicts his longtime muse, Grace Jones. In the image, Jones is encaged, scantily clothed, and positioned next to pieces of raw meat. In another version of the image, a “Do Not Feed The Animal” sign is place in front of the cage, further elucidating Goude’s intention.
Goude’s photography is further problematized by his recent work that appears to be a renovation of “Carolina Beaumont,” a photo which shows a naked Black woman with her backside noticeably exaggerated and whose posing mimicks the imagery of Sarrtije Baartman. In the Paper Magazine’s Winter 2014 cover, Kardashian’s hair and jewelry are both styled in a manner eerily similar to the stereotyped images of the “Black Jezebel,” a trope of young, Black female hypersexuality originating from American slavery and extending from Baartman’s tragic legacy.
“Her necklace, though pearled, covers the base and length of her neck similar to African tribal beaded jewelry. Her hair stands on end in an up-do. In her full-frontal photo, Kardashian’s mouth is agape as she stares into the camera with a blank stare — a look far too commonly used to depict Black female hypersexuality” (The Urban Daily)
The image and the account of Saartije Baartman remains important, its proven integral to schloarship dedicated to unpacking misconceptions of surrounding Black womahood and Black female sexuality, as well as in debunking assertions that colonial, bigoted imaginations fail to inform visual representations contemporarily. Since its inception, the problematic image of Baartman has been accompanied by other forms of visual, historical misrepresentations such as the devoted household family servant, the “mammy,” (personified in the fictional figure of Aunt Jemima) and the Black “welfare queen.”
Works Cited Chambers, Seve. “Before #BreakTheInternet: Jean-Paul Goude’s Unsettling History Of Exploiting Black Women.” The Urban Daily RSS. N.p., 18 Nov. 2014. Web. Drayton, Tifannie. “More Thoughts On Jean-Paul Goude, The Black Jezebel Stereotype & That Racist Kim Kardashian Photoshoot.” The Frisky. N.p., 14 Nov. 2014. Web. Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End, 1992. Print. Willis, Deborah. “Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot.” Ed. by Deborah Willis (review).” Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” 1 (2010): n. pag. Web.