Temple University Press

Chapter Title: The Imperial Gaze: Venus Hottentot, Human Display, and World’s Fairs
Chapter Author(s): MICHELE WALLACE

Book Title: Black Venus 2010

Book Subtitle: They Called Her "Hottentot"
Book Author(s): Carla Williams
Book Editor(s): DEBORAH WILLIS
Published by: Temple University Press. (2010)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt8mv.19

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MICHELE WALLACE

14 The Imperial Gaze

Venus Hottentot, Human Display,
and World’s Fairs

Few pastimes are more amusing than looking at other people. A study of visitor
behavior in public parks shows that people spend more time looking at each
other than at the beauties of nature. If the people observed differ in some strik-
ing fashion from the observer, interest is further stimulated. For centuries, entre-
preneurs and showmen have been charging admission to see human oddities.
—Burton Benedict, “Rituals of Representation”

In his important article, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnic-
ity,” Stuart Hall makes some significant points regarding the usefulness of Antonio
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to any discussion of popular culture. Gramsci defined
cultural hegemony, as opposed to the coercive forces of outright domination, as “a very
particular, historically specific, and temporary ‘moment’ in the life of a society. It is rare
for this degree of unity to be achieved. . . . Such periods of ‘settlement’ are unlikely to
persist forever. There is nothing automatic about them. They have to be actively con-
structed and positively maintained.”1
From his prison cell in Italy in the thirties, Gramsci noted the difficulty of translat-
ing a revolutionary strategy that produced success in pre-industrial Russia to the more
complicated and variegated conditions of post–World War I Europe. Pre-revolutionary
Russia, with its long-delayed modernization, its swollen state apparatus and bureau-
cracy, its relatively undeveloped civil society and low level of capitalist development,
was a much more conducive environment for sparking a government-toppling insur-
rection than was the industrialized West, with its mass democratic forms and its complex
civil societies. In the West, the hegemony of the state is consolidated on a more con-
sensual basis through political democracy.
As Hall writes, in such cases “the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there
stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks, more or less numerous from one
state to another. . . .” In other words, in a non-coercive society, cultural hegemony by
the dominant group is not so much an imposition of the values of the ruling class on
distinctly different and oppositional values, but rather a fragile and symbiotic process of
consensus building. Ironically, these more fragile conditions make the state more resil-
ient and cultural hegemony much more difficult to subvert. In this situation, hegemony
becomes “multi-dimensional”—sustained on multiple fronts simultaneously. “Mastery
is not simply imposed or dominative in character, and results from winning a great deal
of popular consent. Thus it has substantial moral and political authority.”2

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150 Michele Wallace

In the context of tracking a genealogy of a race/gender visual at the turn of the cen-
tury, we need to understand hegemony as a subtle and flexible construction, composed
of multiple dialogical currents. Those currents might be viewed concretely as specific
pragmatic positions, such as pro- and anti-women’s suffrage, anti- and pro-imperialism,
pro-nativism and anti-immigration, anti-segregation and lynching versus pro-white
supremacy. Or, these currents may be viewed more abstractly, in Foucauldian terms of
modern modalities of power/knowledge.
Turn of the (twentieth) century racialism is better understood in the terms of its
own time than in our context—though such an understanding is, of course, nearly
impossible to achieve. One way to go about our efforts to achieve this understanding
of turn of the century racialism’s particular hegemony is through a closer examination
of its popular forms.
One of the most significant of these popular forms, now all but lost, was human
display. Instances of human display ranged from world’s fairs and expositions, which
were the rage all over the world around the turn of the century, to circuses and freak
shows, to ethnographic expositions and life groups in natural history museums, to the
staged events of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and other such ventures in performance
and entertainment.
Human display is a crucial feature of the particular discursive regime of black visual
culture herein described. Its race/gender visual circulated internationally, in significant
part through the circuitry of world’s fairs. The world’s fair appears to have been the
primary mediator of Western modernity’s confrontation with the non-Western world at
the turn of the century. To consider world’s fairs solely within an American context is
to distort the ultimately international and global aspirations of the form. A parallel and
overlapping occurrence to Orientalism, such mechanisms of racial hierarchy were an
intrinsically international discursive regime, a discourse between Western nations.
Throughout the modern world, when blacks were the focus of human display, there
tended to be a special emphasis on what Foucault called “the gaze” as an institutional
micro-strategy and on the body as an ideological effect. This “gaze” is crucial to com-
prehending the peculiar legacy of the race/gender visual as it was formed within the
abstract space of the world’s fair and as it influenced all manner of racial representations
in early cinema. (See Figure 1.)
In one of the earliest known instances of black female display, Saartjie Baartman, a
woman of the so-called Hottentots of South Africa, was placed on tour in Britain and
France. Her exhibitors admitted a paying audience to view her unusually shaped and
large buttocks. In his study of stereotypes of sexuality and race, Sander Gilman reports
that Baartman’s buttocks were viewed as an indication of the size of her clitoris and her
presumably heightened sexual appetite.
French biologist George Léopold Cuvier’s dissection of the Venus Hottentot signifies
at the level of a specular objectification peculiar to the modern gaze in its apprehension
of black or non-white bodies. Modernity’s zoos, parks, museums, fair grounds, bazaars,
department stores, and shop windows are all designed to display the commodity fetish
to its best advantage and to promote its promiscuous and carefree exchange. And yet
in this economy of display, the black body always seems to disrupt at a special or inten-
sified level beyond its mere numerical presence or the amount of physical space it
occupies in the system.

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The Imperial Gaze 151

The Venus Hottentot presents us with a comparatively rare historical object in the
form of a black female individual, whom we can identify and study (albeit not ade-
quately) throughout her life, which was used as a human display. Yet there were many
others, less well known but like her, who followed her condition. Some fared better,
some worse. In that history, most of its record written through the medium of photog-
raphy (and therefore subsequent to the date of the innovation of photography), Saartjie
Baartman occupies a special position in this genealogy of a race/gender visual, as an
arbitrary starting point, which precedes photography. The documentation of Baartman’s
life is through drawings, watercolors, writings, and the preservation of her private
organs. Baartman offers us the comparatively rare opportunity to follow the specular
examination of one category of objects from the obsolescence of one visual regime to
the dawn of another, that of photography. The scopic regime of the peculiarly modern
gaze can be identified as formed and ready for employment, through the figure of the
Hottentot Venus, even as photography was in its early preparatory stages as daguerreo-
type, and cinema was yet hardly a notion.
From the Hottentot’s private parts, to the skulls of her San and Khoikhoi kinsmen
housed in the British Museum, to the African and “primitive” sculptures that populate
the galleries of Western museums and transformed the vision of Western avant-gardes,
the presence of competing visions of the black body invariably alters the anticipated
balance of display; it always tilts the scale to reveal more than it intends about the
inherently corrupt intentions of the structure of the gaze.
It is no accident such theorization would suggest that it was a piece of a black
body—Sam Hose’s knuckles, brutally removed from his hands during his lynching and
displayed in a butcher shop window in downtown Atlanta—that revealed to W.E.B.
Du Bois the necessity for more aggressive political activism on the part of the “Talented
Tenth.”3 And therein lies the trouble with Booker T. Washington’s image of blacks and
whites in the South as the fingers of a single hand. As Grace Elizabeth Hale reminds
us, “black fingers” also “served whites . . . as fetishized objects of entertainment.”

While the gruesome southern practice of lynching actually made black fingers
into coveted commodities, lovingly preserved and displayed in jars, northerners
practiced a less deadly form of appropriation in which racial images performed
as minstrel entertainment and advertisements for the new consumer products.4

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that such people, whether entertainers, product-

hawkers, or subjects in ethnographic exhibits, might exercise free will on any level, that
their participation in such a system of display was in any sense consensual. What man-
ner of freedom could this be? It was much like the kind of provisional freedom visited
upon colonized subjects the world over at that time, including the former slaves in
much of the Americas. Whereas there was no guarantee that the plight of your descen-
dants would follow your own in perpetuity, as in the case of a slave, on the other hand,
someone else’s will still entirely dominated your life.
We know very little about the terms of Saartjie Baartman’s agreement with the
entrepreneurs who exhibited her. But we know that in regard to more recent ethno-
graphic displays, such as the ones featured in world’s fairs all over the world in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was at least the semblance of a voluntary

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152 Michele Wallace

arrangement. Such exhibitees were not enslaved or dragged unwillingly to fairgrounds

or forcibly bound. A more accurate way to describe their relative position to their keep-
ers is to say that they were coerced. They were not fully apprised of their rights in the
situation. They were often promised a great deal more money and comfort than they
received. Only a few of these persons were outright entrepreneurs, willingly engaged
in the marketing of their own bodies for exhibition.

The international exhibitions that shaped the cultural geography of the modern
world were arenas for making ideas about progress visible. For the designers of
international fairs, progress was a universal force that active human intervention
could direct toward national benefit.5

The fad for world’s fairs in decades preceding and following the turn of the century
was a peculiar symptom of the changing concerns of the dominant classes and of their
preoccupation with having a positive impact on the predilections of the masses. The
fascination of the various powers—Britain, France, Belgium and the United States—with
the latest technological innovations, the development of foreign markets, the explora-
tion of exotic lands, and their celebration of imperial triumph were paraded for all
to examine.
Whatever was new, hot, modern, or futuristic was welcome. The fairs lasted for
months and spread over miles, comprising large numbers of newly built and lavishly
designed buildings, fountains, and fantastic structures, such as the Eiffel Tower, which
was built for Paris’s Exposition Universelle Internationale in 1889, or the Ferris Wheel,
built for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
The fairs were a major influence on the cultural life of their host countries, as they
were endlessly memorialized in “songs, books, buildings, public statuary, city parks,
urban designs, and photographs” via a variety of commercial media: the illustrated press,
lithographs and posters, stereograph sets, and, in later years, newsreels and film, as well
as other memorabilia.6
Generally, world’s fairs are treated by a select group of scholars, usually art and
photography historians. They are examined in terms of their exhibitions of art, artifacts,
photography, or architecture, and how such innovations were influential in subsequent
developments in these fields. Or the fairs are looked at as symptomatic of the imperialist
ambitions of the period. Within this latter context, human display has been substantially
treated, although commentators are inclined to see the horror of human display, and
the racism and imperialism it implied, as a frightening, inexplicable, and anachronistic
disjuncture from current issues and concerns. Linking the appetite for human display
with equally inexplicable, and presumably distant, practices of early twentieth century
imperialism and racism, however, does not provide an adequate explanation for these
gargantuan events, much less for the place of human display within them.
Broader consideration of these fairs helps us to understand that minute visual
differentiation—via anthropometric measurement, the speculum, photography, and
scientific or medical illustration—was the empirical foundation of most thought about
race and sexuality (as distinct from gender) during this period.7 Potentially, the fairs
provide a key to all other visual practices, not only because most other visual practices

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The Imperial Gaze 153

were actually included in the package of the fair, but also because the fairs themselves
were a central feature of a range of visual cultures of the time.
As the first form of industrially produced mass culture designed to promulgate the
importance of imperial mission and white supremacy among the masses, the fairs and
their deployment of human display served most conspicuously an entertainment func-
tion. At the same time, they provided a kind of pedagogical reassurance that would
emerge as typical of mass entertainments regarding the safety and security of future
progress. Their distractions sought to “dispel anxiety about industrial depression and
social unrest.”8
The presentation of technological and national progress was intertwined with nar-
ratives of racial hierarchy. So-called “natives” were imported, paid some nominal fee,
dressed in what were imagined to be their “native” costumes, and displayed in what
were thought to be characteristic dwellings, where they engaged in typical ceremonies
or activities such as cooking and eating. The result was viewed optimistically as a happy
marriage of education and entertainment.
A priority at the fairs, as well, was the pursuit of international markets in an increas-
ingly high-pressure and global economy, in which these human displays functioned to
verify the savagery and primitiveness of subject colonial populations and to reinforce
the superiority of dominant civilizations and nationalistic master-narratives. The effect
on the audience must have been a curious combination of loathing and an insatiable
desire to know intimately, to experience, even to touch. Re-inscribed by the fairs were
all the dominant iconographies of race. Whites were always shown as more beautiful,
intelligent, and straighter-standing than blacks or peoples of other “inferior” races, usu-
ally though not always demarcated by darker skin.
World’s fairs were a laboratory of a race/gender visual regime in which human display
and ethnographic exhibitions were prime features, and “invented traditions are always
symbolically and emotionally charged.”9 To fully comprehend the effects of the Western
gaze, it is necessary to accept and understand this emotional aspect of it. The enter-
tainment values of the gaze in this race/gender visual regime neutralized the capacity
of the audience to perceive the military and economic violence the visual regime made
possible.

Epigraph: Burton Benedict, “Rituals of Representation: Ethnic Stereotypes and Colonized Peoples at
World’s Fairs,” in Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E. Gwinn, eds., Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the
Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 29.
1. Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in David Morley and
Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996),
424.
2. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance,” 427; and Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
3. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt,
1993), 226.
4. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New
York: Vintage, 1998), 150.
5. Robert Rydell, The Book of the Fairs: Materials about World’s Fairs, 1834–1916, in the Smithsonian
Institution Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1992), 9.

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154 Michele Wallace

6. Rydell, The Books of the Fairs, 10; Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Fran-
cisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley, CA: Lowie Museum of Anthropology/
Scolar Press, 1983), 15–18.
7. Herein I am referring to both race and sexuality in terms of their visually perceivable character-
istics on the surface of the body, and gender in terms of its socially and culturally constructed additions
to the body. Of course, both sexuality and race can and often are socially and culturally constructed,
but this would be irrelevant to anthropometric measurement where both race and sexuality are con-
sidered “natural” and continuous with their visual markers.
8. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and the World’s
Fairs, 1851–1939 (London: Manchester University Press, 1988), 45.
9. Aram A. Yengoyan, “Culture, Ideology and World’s Fairs,” in Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E.
Gwinn, eds., Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University Press,
1994), 66.

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