by Pumla Dineo Gqola, 2008
Abstract. ‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann
and African
feminist literary imaginings. The story of Sarah Bartmann
has been one of
the fascinations of academic writing on ‘race’, feminism and
poststructuralism in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century. An
enslaved Khoi woman, she was transported to Europe where she was displayed for the amusement, and later scientific inquisitiveness of
various public and private collectives in London and Paris. Her paradoxical
hypervisibility has meant that although volumes have been written about her,
very little is recoverable from these records about her subjectivity. In this
paper I am less interested in tracing and engaging with some of the debates
engendered by this paradox and difficulty more broadly. Rather, I want to read
and analyse how African feminist literary projects have approached
Bartmann’s absent presence. My paper then tasks itself with exploring the
possibility of writing about Sarah Bartmann in ways unlike those traditions of
knowledge-making that dubbed her ‘the Hottentot Venus’. It analyzes a variety of
texts that position themselves in relation to her as a way of arriving at an
African feminist creative and literary engagement with histories which fix
representations of African women’s bodies, via Bartmann in colonialist
epistemes.
