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The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2017

Kellen Hoxworth
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Extract

Six African students enact a somber, silent dance. They stage a series of striking images at the base of South African artist Willie Bester's sculpture Sara Baartman, in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their faces and bodies smeared with black paint, the students articulate their protest of Sara Baartman in explicitly racial terms, aligning their critiques of economic, colonial, and racial oppression under the sign of blackness.

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Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 275 - 299
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Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2017 

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References

Endnotes

1. The term “black” has a complex history in South Africa where it has dual meanings both as a referent to skin color and “a mental attitude” of antiracist resistance ( Biko, Steve, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, ed. Stubbs, Aelred [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 48–53, at 48Google Scholar). Whereas the former meaning shares much in common with conceptions of transnational and diasporic blackness, the latter refers specifically to a multiracial, coalitional politics among nonwhite South Africans that stemmed from the 1970s Black Consciousness movement in South Africa. As we shall see, the usage of “black” in South Africa is contentious and confounding, and cannot be simply defined.

2. UCT: Rhodes Must Fall, “Saartjie Baartman Performance Art Today in UCT Library,” Facebook, 25 March 2015, www.facebook.com/RhodesMustFall/videos/1559324747676351/, accessed 5 June 2017. Photography of the performance also circulated on social media. See, for example, @vaderproductions, Instagram, 25 March 2015, www.instagram.com/p/0pYhUKi_B1/, accessed 13 May 2017.

3. Koela, Ernie, “The History of the Black Body Has Been Exoticized and Fetishized in a Pornographic Fashion,” Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Salon 9 (2015): 101Google Scholar, http://jwtc.org.za/the_salon/volume_9.htm, accessed 29 October 2016.

4. The term “born-frees” designates the generation of South Africans born after 1994, the year of the first democratic elections in the country's history. On the Black Consciousness movement, see Biko, esp., “We Blacks,” 27–32; “White Racism and Black Consciousness,” 61–72; “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” 87–98; “What Is Black Consciousness?” 99–119; and “Definition of Black Consciousness.”

5. Mbembe, Achille, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Dubois, Laurent (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Altick, Richard D., The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 268–72Google Scholar; see also Gould, Stephen Jay, “This View of Life: The Hottentot Venus,” Natural History 91.10 (1982): 20–7Google Scholar.

7. Fittingly for a historical subject animated through multiple, often contradictory narratives, Baartman has been referred to by several names: Sara, Sarah, Saartjie, and the “Hottentot Venus.” Though “Saartjie” and “Sara” are both recognized as Khoekhoe variants (in contrast to the Anglicized “Sarah”), I prefer “Sara” to “Saartjie” due to the historical resonances of the diminutive “-jie” suffix with the naming systems of slavery and indenture in South Africa. See Gqola, Pumla Dineo, What Is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 66Google Scholar. Her surname has been the subject of further orthographic variation, including Baartman and Bartmann, among others. I follow historians Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully in using “Baartman,” which means “bearded man” in Dutch, a language in which Baartman spoke proficiently; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 9Google Scholar; by contrast, “Bartmann” was likely a German-inspired misspelling of her Dutch name (107). Therefore, I refer to her as “Sara Baartman,” though I retain variant spellings in quotations and citations.

8. Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4Google Scholar.

9. Textual biographies include Holmes, Rachel, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789—Buried 2002 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007)Google Scholar; and Crais and Scully. Documentary films include two by Maseko, Zola, The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, rel. 1998 (Brooklyn: First Run / Icarus Films, 1999)Google Scholar and The Return of Sara Baartman (Brooklyn: First Run / Icarus Films, 2003)Google Scholar. The sole commercial film (to date) is Kechiche, Abdellatif, Vénus noire / Black Venus, rel. 2010 (Toronto: Mongrel Media, 2011)Google Scholar. Two major plays have drawn from Baartman's life: Parks, Suzan-Lori, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997)Google Scholar; and Diamond, Lydia R., Voyeurs de Venus, in Contemporary Plays by African American Women: Ten Complete Works, ed. Adell, Sandra (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 291–342 Google Scholar. In dance, examples include Urban Bush Women's Batty Moves (1995) (see Chatterjea, Ananya, “Subversive Dancing: The Interventions in Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Batty Moves ,” Theatre Journal 55.3 [2003]: 451–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 456–9); Nelisiwe Xaba's They look at me and that's all they see (2009) (see Loots, Lliane, “Voicing the Unspoken: Culturally Connecting Race, Gender and Nation in Women's Choreographic and Dance Practices in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies Many Voices Many Stories, ed. Friedman, Sharon [Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2015], 51–71, at 65)Google Scholar; Robyn Orlin's … have you hugged, kissed and respected your brown venus today? (2011) (see Steven Van Wyk, “Ballet Blanc to Ballet Black: Performing Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South African Dance,” in Post-Apartheid Dance, 31–50, at 37–8); and Slyvaine Strike's collaboration with several South African artists—Georgina Thomson, PJ Sabbagha, Concord Nkabinde, and Fana Tshabalala—in CARGO: Precious (2014). In visual and performance art, Elizabeth Alexander, Renée Cox, Renée Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roshini Kempadoo, Simone Leigh, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Lorna Simpson, Penny Siopis, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Carla Williams, Deborah Willis, and Hank Willis Thomas have mobilized Baartman as a black diasporic signifier: see The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), ed. Willis, Deborah and Williams, Carla Google Scholar; and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot,” ed. Willis, Deborah (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

10. Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36Google Scholar.

11. “To effigy” means “to body something forth,” and is a verb central to performance (Roach, 36–41, quote at 36).

12. “Hottentot” was, and remains, a colonialist term for nonblack indigenous peoples of southern Africa, especially the Khoekhoe. “Khoisan” served as an umbrella classification for the Khoekhoe and San (and, often, the Griqua), who were considered separate from the “black” Bantu peoples. “Coloured” or “Cape Coloured” denotes a racial category particular to South Africa. The apartheid government applied the classification of “Coloured” to mark South Africans that exceeded the binary logics of “white” and “black”; however, the color “brown” is not coextensive with “Coloured” identity, as “brown” South African Indians were categorized separately.

13. Throughout, I use the terminology of “racial identity” advisedly. Sociological critiques of the proliferating usage of “identity” as an analytical category advocate for a move “beyond identity” ( Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29.1 [2000]: 1–47 Google Scholar). However, such a move too easily overlooks the charged affective and psychic imbrications among identity, identification, and social formations, particularly as they are animated through performance. Therefore, I use the terms “identification” and “categorization” to signal specific, active, intersubjective processes with clear agents—entities who identify (with) and/or categorize others. In contrast, I use “identity” and “category” to mark the reification of such processes into durable, transhistorical social realities. “Identity” here is double-edged, for it not only traces identification as an agential, affective, and affirmative mode of “self-identification” but also as enforced acts of “external identification” (Brubaker and Cooper, 15). Baartman left no unambiguous trace of her self-identification; nevertheless, her many effigies circulate as though she has a definite racial identity. My analysis of her “racial identity” refers to the multiple acts of racial identification projected onto her and the several claims of racial injury channeled through her absent figure.

14. “Hottentot Venus,” Morning Post (London), 29 November 1810; Samuel Solly and John George Moojen, “The Following Is the Result of the Examination of the Hottentot Venus—27th Nov. 1810,” an appendix (41–2) in Strother, Z. S., “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Lindfors, Bernth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–61 Google Scholar, at 41.

15. “Law Report. Court of King's Bench, Saturday, Nov. 24. The Hottentot Venus,” Times (London), 26 November 1810, 3.

16. Ibid.

17. Crais and Scully, 148. The plaster cast of Baartman's body was evidently still available for private viewing as recently as 2003, as footage of it is featured in both Maseko documentaries (see note 9).

18. Morning Post (London), 20 September 1810.

19. See, for example, Fausto-Sterling, Anne, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Terry, Jennifer and Urla, Jacqueline (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 19–48 Google Scholar; Hobson, Janell, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar; Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Willis; Willis and Williams.

20. Gilman, Sander L., “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Louis, Henry Gates Jr (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 223–61Google Scholar; Young, Hershini Bhana, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press [Hanover, NH and London: UPNE], 2006)Google Scholar.

21. Gilman, 235.

22. Magubane, Zine, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender & Society 15.6 (2001): 816–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 817; see also Nyong'o, Tavia, “The Body in Question,” review of Venus in the Dark, by Hobson, Janell, International Journal of Communication 1 (2007): 27–31 Google Scholar, at 29.

23. Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?” 822; see also Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha Maria, “‘Even with the Best Intentions’: The Misreading of Sarah Baartman's Life by African American Writers,” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 68 (2006): 54–62 Google Scholar; Qureshi, Sadiah, “Displaying Sara Baartman, The ‘Hottentot Venus.’” History of Science 42.2 (2004): 233–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strother, 37–9.

24. H. B. Young, 2.

25. Ibid., 5–6.

26. Qureshi, 249.

27. Hartman, 3.

28. Ibid., 57.

29. Gordon-Chipembere, “‘Even with the Best Intentions’,” esp. 54–6.

30. For instance, the slippage of Baartman from “Hottentot” to “black” also emerges clearly in Sharpley-Whiting's text Black Venus, in which the author fashions a constellation connecting the “Hottentot Venus,” the “Black Venus” of Baudelaire (that is, Jeanne Duval), and Josephine Baker (see esp. the “Introduction,” 1–15). See also Hobson; Willis; H. B. Young.

31. Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha, “Introduction: Claiming Sara Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Gordon-Chipembere, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon-Chipembere, “‘Even with the Best Intentions’”; Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?”

32. Abrahams, Yvette, “Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain,” South African Historical Journal 35.1 (1996): 89–114 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Gwyn, “Slave Trades and the Indian Ocean World,” in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms, ed. Hawley, John C. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 17–51 Google Scholar; Ross, Robert, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983)Google Scholar; Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, ed. Worden, Nigel and Crais, Clifton (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

33. Whereas Sara Baartman was brought before a London court in postabolition Britain in 1810, nonwhite South Africans remained subject to potential enslavement until the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834. The temporal disjuncture between the extension of “freedom” to nonwhites in the metropole and the colonies marks one of many ways that racial histories unfolded unevenly, inscribing differential injuries and enacting manifold traumas.

34. Gordon-Chipembere, “‘Even with the Best Intentions,’” 55.

35. On the inboek system, see Abrahams, “Disempowered to Consent,” 92–3; on the civilizational discourse of Khoekhoe colonization, see Magubane, Zine, “Labour Laws and Stereotypes: Images of the Khoikhoi in the Cape in the Age of Abolition,” South African Historical Journal 35.1 (1996): 115–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 120.

36. Adhikari, Mohamed, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 2Google ScholarPubMed.

37. Ibid., title.

38. Wicomb, Zoë, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Attridge, Derek and Jolly, Rosemary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 91.

39. Ibid., 91–2.

40. Nyong'o, “Body in Question,” 29–30. See also Biko, “Definition of Black Consciousness,” 52; Biko, “Quest for a True Humanity,” 97–8.

41. Writing of a similar movement to build solidarity among nonwhite minority populations in 1980s Britain, Kobena Mercer observes the tenuousness of a “coalition-building identifications in which the racializing code of ‘color’ is put under erasure, cancelled out but still legible” ( Mercer, Kobena, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies [New York & London: Routledge, 1994], 28Google Scholar; italics his). Within this British movement, many South Asians identified politically as “black,” with the unintended effect that their subjectivities were often rendered invisible within the new, binary racial logic of black and white.

42. Nuttall, Sarah, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 1Google Scholar; see also Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 2001), 14Google Scholar.

43. Chow, Rey, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Abrahams, Yvette, “Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Pierson, Ruth Roach and Chaudhuri, Nupur, with McAuley, Beth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 220–36Google Scholar, at 224.

45. Zachary Macaulay, Thomas Gisborne Babington, and Peter Van Wageninge, “Transcripts of the Sworn Affidavits Filed during the Trial of 1810,” in Strother, 43–5, at 43.

46. Strother, 27.

47. The most the most well-documented antecedent of blackface minstrelsy in Britain, Charles Mathews's Trip to America, did not premiere until 1824. Nevertheless, the blackface mask was a familiar theatrical device on the eighteenth-century British stage. Indeed, eighteenth-century Anglophone comedies such as The Blackamoor Wash'd White signal a deep familiarity with the blackface mask as a symbol of theatrical, racial duplicity. See Nussbaum, Felicity A., “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Wilson, Kathleen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–90 Google Scholar.

48. Schechner, Richard, Between Theater & Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 110–11Google Scholar, 123.

49. G[eorges]. Cuvier, “Femme du race boschismanne,” in Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères, 4 vols., ed. Saint-Hilaire, Geoffrey and Cuvier, Frédéric (Paris, 1824), I: 1–7Google Scholar; quoted translations taken from Edwards, Paul and Walvin, James, Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 178CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The original French describes Baartman's complexion (“teint”) as “fort basané,” and her skin color (“la couleur générale de sa peau”) as “brun-jaunâtre” (Cuvier 3–4).

50. M. Musard, l’émigré, “Feuilleton,” La Quotidienne (Paris), 15 January 1815, 1–3, at 2–3; translation mine.

51. Notably, in his detailed account of Baartman's physiognomy, Cuvier makes no mention of facial “cicatrices,” suggesting that they appeared only in the imagination of this spectator. The sole mention of “cicatrices” in Cuvier's report places them on Baartman's buttocks rather than on her face.

52. Young, Harvey, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Goffman, Erving, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 1Google Scholar.

54. Goffman, subtitle and 5.

55. Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1Google Scholar.

56. Moten, 2; cf. Hartman, 3; Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, 1845 Google Scholar; repr., New York: New American Library, 1968), 25–6.

57. Moten, 5, 14.

58. Moten, 6. Here, I would like to note that “ancestry” is not clearly separable from racial identity, identification, or classification. Quite the opposite: tracing one's ancestry often involves relying on the unspoken racial beliefs and practices of previous generations, combining past racial assumptions with a biological, positivist apprehension of racial affinity. Such attempts to resolve the ambiguities of “race” may have perverse effects, asserting that some racial identities and identifications are more real or legitimate than others, tacitly reifying the systems of racial classification that they critique. It is instructive to return to the source from which Moten draws his theorization of the “break”—that is, Nathaniel Mackey's articulation of the “sexual ‘cut’” as “a ‘broken’ claim to connection” incessantly marked by “an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion” ( Mackey, , Bedouin Hornbook, Callaloo Fiction Series, no. 2 [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986], 34–5Google Scholar; as quoted in Moten, 259). If Baartman is claimed as “black,” such a claim is also “broken,” marked by the “break” of “insistent previousness” that evades any definite biological racial origin.

59. Rhodes Must Fall, statements, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Salon 9 (2015): photograph on 112, see also 6–12, http://jwtc.org.za/the_salon/volume_9.htm, accessed 29 October 2016.

60. The #RMF movement inspired further student protests, particularly the #FeesMustFall (#FMF) campaign. Another campaign, #ZumaMustFall, took up the revolutionary spirit of these student protests to mobilize opposition against South African President Jacob Zuma.

61. Ibid.; see also Biko, I Write What I Like.

62. UCT: Rhodes Must Fall, “Saartjie Baartman Performance Art Today,” Facebook, 25 March 2015. The original orthography of the postings that follow has been retained.

63. See @gregorymakama, Instagram, 25 March 2015, www.instagram.com/p/0paukwliqz/, accessed 13 May 2017.

64. UCT: Rhodes Must Fall, “Saartjie Baartman Performance Art Today,” Facebook, 25 March 2015, 5:15 am. This post has since been deleted.

65. Bester's father was Xhosa; his mother, Cape Coloured. Under the apartheid regime, they were categorized as black and Coloured, respectively. Bester was categorized as “Other Coloured” due to his parents’ different racial categorizations ( Godby, Michael and Klopper, Sandra, “The Art of Willie Bester,” African Arts 29.1 [1996]: 42–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 43, 45).

66. UCT: Rhodes Must Fall, “Saartjie Baartman Performance Art Today,” Facebook, 25 March 2015, 4:31 pm.

67. Ibid., 26 March 2015, 4:15 pm.

68. Ibid., 26 March 2015, 5:55 pm.

69. Ibid., 25 March 2015, 7:06 am.

70. Ibid., 26 March 2015, 3:56 pm.

71. Ibid., 26 March 2015, 4:18 pm.

72. Ibid., 28 March 2015, 9:12 am.

73. Koela; orthography, including emphasis, has been retained from the original.

74. Ibid.; emphasis mine.

75. Crais and Scully, 42, 73. Crais and Scully trace Cesars's ancestry to Cape slaves hailing from present-day Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Despite his non-African roots, Cape racial orders classified him as a “free black,” which designated him as neither a slave nor fully a citizen. Upon his arrival in postabolition Britain, he would have been nominally a free man; however, it is unclear how he was perceived, racially.

76. Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2d ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 76–106 Google Scholar. Since the 2015 #RMF protests, the doek (headscarf) has become more popular among South African women as a marker of “tradition,” marital status, and social rank.

77. The 2015 student protest of Bester's Sara Baartman may have been inspired by Memory Biwa's 2001 opposition to the statue, which advanced a similar argument regarding the retraumatizing potential of the statue (see Gqola, 65). The student protest's critique echoes Jean Young's famous criticism of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, in which Young asserts that the play reobjectifies and recommodifies Baartman ( 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 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

78. The protest perpetuated the framing of South Africa's Coloured communities consolidated by the “apartheid regime[, which] could only refer to [them] through a language of exscription, as not white and not black” ( Erlmann, Veit, “Foreword,” in Haupt, Adam, Static: Race and Representation in Post-apartheid Music, Media, and Film (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012), vii–xi Google Scholar, at viii–ix).

79. Brown, Wendy, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 27Google Scholar.

80. See Willie Bester, Sara Baartman (2000), www.williebester.co.za/a14b.htm, accessed 25 May 2017.

81. Quoted in Natalie Pertsovsky, “Sarah Baartman Sculptor Speaks Out Against Art Censorship,” GroundUp, 5 June 2017, www.groundup.org.za/article/sara-baartman-sculptor-speaks-out-against-art-censorship/, accessed 11 June 2017.

82. Quoted in Buikema, Rosemarie, “The Arena of Imaginings: Sarah Bartmann and the Ethics of Representation,” in Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture, edited by Buikema, Rosemarie and van der Tuin, Iris (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 70–84 Google Scholar, at 79.

83. Hobson, 78–9.

84. McKittrick, Katherine, “Science Quarrels Sculpture: The Politics of Reading Sarah Baartman,” Mosaic 43.2 (2010): 113–30Google Scholar, at 126.

85. Buikema, 81.

86. Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87. Cuvier, 2–4; cf. Edwards and Walvin, 178.

88. Wicomb, 91.

89. Nyong'o, Tavia, “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance,” Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002): 371–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 383 (emphasis mine).

90. Ibid., 389.

91. Quoted in Christen Torres, “My Interview with Willie Bester: The Statue of Sara Baartman,” 3 May 2016, posted on YouTube 5 May 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=whzwHMqHWi0, accessed 9 May 2016.

92. [Christen Torres], “Art at UCT: Does It Serve to Offend, Educate or Challenge?” Visuality Defined, 6 May 2016, https://visualitydefined.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/art-at-uct-does-it-serve-to-offend-educate-or-challenge/, accessed 29 October 2016.

93. “Search on for Sarah Baartman Plaque Vandals,” EyeWitness News (South Africa), 26 April 2015, http://ewn.co.za/2015/04/26/EC-police-search-for-Sarah-Baartman-statue-vandals, accessed 9 May 2017.

94. “Khoi Leaders Fume over Desecration of Baartman Memorial Site,” SABC [South African Broadcasting Company] News, 28 April 2015, www.sabc.co.za/news/a/02543b80482cdc5e86b1ff4d1170398b/Khoi-leaders-fume-over-desecration-of-Baartman-memorial-site-20150428, accessed 29 October 2016. The 2015 vandalization also repeated defacements of the Baartman memorial that have persisted since the inauguration of the site in 2002 (see Crais and Scully, 167–8).

95. Abrahams, “Images of Sara Baartman,” 223.