Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography | 
| Authors: Clifton Crais, Pamela Scully
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 55176
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 248
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0691135800
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.896104092
EAN: 9780691135809
ASIN: 0691135800
Publication Date: November 23, 2008
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Product Description
Displayed on European stages from 1810 to 1815 as the Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman was one of the most famous women of her day, and also one of the least known. As the Hottentot Venus, she was seen by Westerners as alluring and primitive, a reflection of their fears and suppressed desires. But who was Sara Baartman? Who was the woman who became the Hottentot Venus? Based on research and interviews that span three continents, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus tells the entwined histories of an illusive life and a famous icon. In doing so, the book raises questions about the possibilities and limits of biography for understanding those who live between and among different cultures. In reconstructing Baartman's life, the book traverses the South African frontier and its genocidal violence, cosmopolitan Cape Town, the ending of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, London and Parisian high society, and the rise of racial science. The authors discuss the ramifications of discovering that when Baartman went to London, she was older than originally assumed, and they explore the enduring impact of the Hottentot Venus on ideas about women, race, and sexuality. The book concludes with the politics involved in returning Baartman's remains to her home country, and connects Baartman's story to her descendants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus offers the authoritative account of one woman's life and reinstates her to the full complexity of her history.
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| Customer Reviews:
 B E Conekin, PhD in History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor January 6, 2009
B. E. Conekin
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an extremely well-written and evocative book based on research in five countries conducted over a number of years by two eminent scholars of African history. It sheds light on not only on one woman's life, but on all sorts of fascinating intellectual questions, including how one should read biography, how to write biography, problems with access to archives, etc. In addition, it also encourages its readers to think very seriously about the big questions -'Enligtenment' questions, if you will - about identity, nations, science, the novel, display and story-telling at its finest. I recommend this book to all intelligent readers. It should reach a very wide audience. READ THIS BOOK FOR YOURSELF!
 Above and beyond rhe call of booty January 2, 2009
Harry Eagar (Maui)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
So who was the person behind the Hottentot Venus, the bootylicious Khoisan woman who created a sensation in London and Paris in 1810-1815? You won't find out in "Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus," despite assiduous excavation in archives by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully.
Why should we care? As regards Sara Baartman, a washerwoman, no reason at all. She lived a hard life but not exceptionally so for a woman in a premodern world. No particular personal quality of hers threw her temporarily on a world stage. However, we learn something about ourselves by studying the ridiculous status that Baartman has been given by various ax-grinders today: "Mother Africa" to some, although she had no surviving children, and "almost a sacral object" in the words of Crais and Scully, whatever that means.
Enlightenment Europeans were interested in the rest of the world, to a degree unknown among any people since the Classic period of Greece. Not so much in personalities but in categories. They had inherited Plinian stories about fabulous near-humans, and, remarkably compared to their ancestors, wanted to know which, if any, of these marvels were real.
We are, of course, invited to think this immoral, to wonder whether a different-looking woman from a distant land was exactly human like an Englishman. This posturing is silly. Baartman, a Gonaqua, very likely did not clearly distinguish her own species (to the extent she thought in such a category) from the antelopes. Cuvier (not the first comparative anatomist, although C&S say so, one of scores of simple factual errors in the book) wondered whether Baartman was closer to Europeans or to orangutans. This did not, as C&S think, make him a racist. The Malays also did not clearly demarcate a species line between themselves and the orangutans.
It would have been immoral to have decided the question without investigation, but Cuvier did not do that. His conclusions were erroneous, but correctible because based on investigation. So it goes.
Real investigation is foreign to people like Crais and Scully. There own unexamined prejudices scream from every page. We are, for example, supposed to shudder whenever Baartman is described as a "colonial" woman. No thanks. I subscribe to a daily newspaper, and Baartman was lucky to have lived before the savagery of African post-colonialism.
Besides, although C&S constantly tell us they are trying to restore Baartman to her real context, apart from the somewhat comical Hottentot Venus job, they do no such thing. As a San (Bushman) person, Baartman stood an excellent chance of being as "colonial" woman even if the Dutch had never found South Africa. The scene-setting that makes up the first part of the book completely ignores the colonization of the San lands by the Bantus. Only once, in passing and near the end of the text, do C&S mention that Khoisan and Bantu had "interacted for centuries." So they had, but Bantu colonialism is not going to be admitted by a professor of women's and African studies, especially not one from historically-white Emory University.
If Baartman had left a personal history, it would have been interesting to have it. She didn't. She was illiterate, and the people around her who did leave records left little.
Thus C&S, with a book contract to fulfill but nothing to put in it, fill up their volume with a combination of naive travelogue (of the school of "So as the blazing African sun sinks into the peaceful Indian Ocean, we bid a fond farewell to the happy people of Camdeboo . . .") and pretentious name-dropping (Baartman was baptized in Manchester Cathedral, but why are we informed that Oliver Cromwell rode his horse through it?). The writing never rises about the level of a high school term paper begun the night before it is due ("the great poet Lord Byron"), and the book sounds for all the world like Andy Griffith describing his introduction to "Hamlet."
But there's worse than bad writing. If the idea was to recover the real Sara Baartman, then there is only one key document, the interview Baartman gave to officers of the Court of King's Bench. The case itself was legally innovative, an application by a stranger (the abolitionist Zachary Macauley) for a writ of habeas corpus to determine whether the Hottentot Venus was a free woman. The court found she was.
As such, the record -- not verbatim -- deserved the minutest examination by writers purporting to be professional historians. Instead, they dismiss it with a glance, probably because Baartman did not tell the court the awful things C&S think she should have.
Elsewhere, they are not so skeptical. Where there is no evidence (which is almost everywhere), they feel free to imagine unrecorded rapes, secret pregnancies and weird conspiracies. This is the Fawn Brodie school of faux history: As long as the documents don't absolutely contradict it, the writer can make up any sort of shocking and sensational crap she wants.
"Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus" will do nothing to absolve women's and ethnic studies academic departments from their well-deserved reputation for producing tedious, tendentious, shallow and sloppy "research."
In the last pages, C&S fling even a pretense of scholarship overboard. Although the book up to this point has often been unintentionally funny -- the semi-literate authors have a habit of using a big word that sounds like the smaller word they really mean, like malinger for linger; and they make the stupidest mistakes, like starting the French Revolution in 1776 -- the last chapters are hilarious.
This might be called the channeling of Sara Baartman, as professional grievance mongers decided that Sara Baartman's bones, brain and pudenda (all preserved by Cuvier) needed to "come home" to South Africa. A national commission solemnly considered the question of what Sara would want, although she had been dead for 170 years. It was a rip-snorting circus of victim's theater, with a cast of con artists, sawdust messiahs, dingbats, corrupt pols, poets (in the conventional sense used of a writer who is incapable of composing a complete sentence), imaginary heirs, fake indigenes, boomers and tub thumpers. How Ward Churchill failed to be involved is a mystery.
The one thing binding this vile crew together, as C&S's narrative makes clear, is that they were all racists. Not that C&S can acknowledge this, since the players were mostly tinted. It turned into a gigantic, international hate fest, although the intended victims (white men) can shrug off the charges. The Vyshinsky of the piece was the deranged racist Thabo Mbeki.
Anyhow, in the end, Sara Baartman came home to a place she never was in life, and everybody else went home vindicated in her own fevered mind. Since then, the site has been vandalized and made the scene of a horrible, perhaps ritualistic child murder.
The French treated her bones with more respect.
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