Representation and Black Womanhood

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York.

• Claiming Sarah Baartman: a Legacy to Grasp Natasha Gordon-Chipembere * PART I: The Archive: Disrupting the Colonial Narrative * 'Body' of Evidence: Saartjie Baartmann and the Archive Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu * 'My Tongue Softens on the other name': Poetry and People in Sarah Baartmann's Natural World Yvette Abrahams/ Khib Omsis * Coercive Performances: Sarah Baartman and Slaves for Auction Hershini Bhana Young * Baartman and the Private Gabeba Baderoon * Placing and (Re) placing the 'Venus Hottentot': An Archeology of Pornography, Race and Power * Sheila Smith Mckoy * PART II:  Troubling the 'Truth': Corporeal Representations * Sara Baartman, Biography and the Modalities of Truth Desiree Lewis * "I Wanna Love Something Wild"-A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus Ilaria Oddenino * "Just ask the scientists": Troubling the 'Hottentot' and Scientific Racism in Bessie Head's Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy Z'étoile Imma * Staging the body of the (M) other:the "Hottentot Venus" and the "Wild Dancing Bushman" Karlien van der Schyff * Under Cuvier's Microscope: the Dissection of Michelle Obama in the twenty-first Century Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

"Apart from examining archives on Sarah Baartman, the book functions as an archive itself. The inclusion of poetry, song, visual art, and building projects lend a depth to the articles by solidifying the idea of Sarah Baartman as being more than a subject of scholarly research. This book is important in that it affords the opportunity to look back, not only at Sarah Baartman, but at social and political traditions that characterise human behaviour, the discourses employed to make sense of it, and aspects of our various pasts that were found wanting, and in this way, chart the path forward to new discourses and understandings. The text is as much about a figure long departed as it is about those that are currently living." - Nwabisa Bangeni, Lecturer, Department of English, Stellenbosch University, South Africa"Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman is a provocative and timely collection of essays on Sarah Baartman. At the same time, this is a collection that has much to say about enduring discourses on Black women that find circulation today. Gordon-Chipembere and her contributors engage and expand the registers used to speak about Black women’s bodies and subjectivities across epochs. It is a conversation on the discourses on Black women by scholars from across the globe, connecting areas of Black feminist scholarship that often speak past each other rather than in exchange." - Pumla Dineo Gqola, PhD, author of What is slavery to me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa