UCLA

The term Black Venus most often conjures a racist label used to overwrite Black women’s humanity with stereotypical assumptions about their alleged primitive and overdeveloped sexuality. This is because studies of the Black Venus overwhelmingly focus on the figure’s most iconic iteration—Sarah Baartman. Billed as the Hottentot Venus, this South African woman was put on display in London and Paris as an exotic oddity for her ample posterior (1810-1815). She later became instrumental in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference designed to affirm the allegedly superior virtue of white women. The Black Venus has since become a potent icon of the material and symbolic violence of slavery and empire at the intersection of race and gender. Black feminist scholars and artists in particular use the Black Venus to expose the ongoing legacies of this violence and to repair it through projects of archival recovery. This dissertation argues that, in reducing her to a sexual stereotype, engagements with the Black Venus have overlooked more flexible and equally influential versions of the figure, both in her own moment as well as in her contemporary afterlives.Regardless of the historical period grounding their inquiry, interpretations of the Black Venus largely situate her within anachronistically rigid conceptions of racialized womanhood. However, in the eighteenth century, and even during Baartman’s lifetime, racial categories were still fairly fluid, and representations of the Black Venus throughout the Atlantic world were fraught with contradiction. She personified freakishness and exotic beauty, African atavism and savvy entrepreneurship, abject victimization and seductive power, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Black and white women. Focusing particularly on the racially ambiguous Black Venuses of the eighteenth century—Imoinda, Yarico, and the Sable Venus—I radically redefine the figure against her stereotypical function as a hypersexual foil to virtuous, white womanhood, and read her instead as an embodied contact zone between domestic intimacy and imperial commerce. I contend that, rather than reaffirming racial categories already in place, the Black Venuses of this period index the porousness between Black and white womanhood as an expression of the unprecedented scale on which commercial capitalism—with slavery at its center—was transforming the social fabric of English domestic life. Redrawing the contours of the Black Venus paradigm opens new ways of understanding her contemporary afterlives because it foregrounds how profoundly Atlantic societies past and present have filtered their experiences of capitalist modernity through the circulating cipher of Black womanhood. Tracing her appearances across a vast range of genres—including staged drama, ethnography, the periodical essay, poetry, visual culture, and parliamentary proceedings—I contend that the Black Venus’s persistence across three centuries has never been the result of her simple or static character. Instead, it reflects her capacious adaptability to diverse and even opposing ideological positions in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries: she has been marshalled to critique and excuse slavery, to celebrate commerce and warn of its perils, and, most recently, to recover the voices and humanity of Black women reduced to types in colonial archives, and to assert the impossibility of such recoveries. Upending established critical accounts of the Black Venus as a simple construct easily dismantled by a more enlightened present, I consider how different versions of the Black Venus layer onto one another to form a living record of the way histories of race, gender, commerce, and intimacy accumulate into the present, as well as the way that contemporary legacies of slavery and empire shape our engagements with the past.