"SHOWING HER ASS OFF IN HER IRON CAGE": DIS (-RE-) MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS'S VENUS Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

“SHOWING HER ASS OFF IN HER IRON CAGE”: DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING
THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS
Raphaëlle Tchamitchian
Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »
2022/2 N° 171 | pages 80 à 91

ISSN 0397-7870
ISBN 9782410025705
DOI 10.3917/rfea.171.0080
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“Showing Her Ass Off in Her Iron

Cage”: Dis(-re-)membering
the Black Female Body in Suzan-
Lori Parks’s Venus
RAPHAËLLE TCHAMITCHIAN
Keywords Dans Venus (1995), une interprétation fictive et

hyper-théâtrale de l’histoire de « La Vénus hottentote »,
Suzan-Lori Parks; the Suzan-Lori Parks place délibérément et de manière provo-
Hottentot Venus; cante le corps féminin noir nu au centre de la scène. Sans
colonial exhibition; éviter les questions de complicité et d’agentivité, la pièce
blackness; black met en scène la construction coloniale du corps féminin
womanhood noir, ainsi que la position du public dans ce processus. En
fin de compte, en choisissant de mettre en avant une repré-
sentation noire de la nakedness plutôt que l’idéal occiden-
tal associé à la nudity, Parks investit le corps de La Vénus
de rébellion et d’irrévérence.
Although African-American drama has often staged the “dis(-re-)mem-

berment” (Parks, V 95) of the black body in order to throw light on what
it means to be a black body under white scrutiny, nudity per se is rather
rare in this tradition. It lies at the heart however of one of Suzan-Lori
Parks’s major plays, Venus. This highly theatrical drama presents the
“imperialist tragedy” (Keizer 200) of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi
woman who was famously displayed in Britain and France from 1810
until her death in 1815 as “The Hottentot Venus.” 1 Her body—especially
what scientific racism has called her “steatopygia” (hypertrophy of the
h i p s a n d bu t t o c k s ) a n d “ m a c ro ny m p h i a ” ( p ro t r u d i n g s ex u a l
organs)—fascinated Western audiences. During her time in France, Baart-
man also became an object of study for naturalist Georges Cuvier, whose
1. Sometimes called “Khoisan” or “Bushmen,” the Khoikhoi were called “Hottentots”
by the Afrikaners. They live in what is now South Africa, which at the time of Baartman’s
birth (at the end of the 18th century) was under Dutch rule.
80 No 171
DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS
observations contributed to making her a symbol of racial and sexual

difference in the West (Gilman 231). After her death, Cuvier dissected
her and put her sexual organs and other anatomical elements in jars
which, along with a plaster cast of her body, joined the shelves of Paris’s
Musée d’Histoire Naturelle. 2 “Sadly,” comments Mae G. Henderson,
“her fate as ethnographic spectacle, along with her subsequent display as
museum specimen, signifies the European colonial fetishization of the
black female body in life as well as in death” (163).
The few images of Saartjie Baartman that have reached us show her
partially or completely naked. Similarly, Parks’s play uncovers “The
Venus” both literally (her naked body is the very first thing we see) and
figuratively: much like the playwright herself, a master of ceremonies
called The Negro Resurrectionist digs up her body from its grave (“Dig-
gidy-diggidy-diggidy-diggidy” 12) to expose it in all its horror. During
the Overture, while she spins round slowly for everyone to see, he introdu-
ces her in a circus-like fashion: “Venus, Black Goddess, was shameles, she
sinned or else / completely unknowing of r godfearin ways she stood /
totally naked in her iron cage” (18). Although it is clear from the begin-
ning that the whole play revolves around The Venus’s nudity, the word
“nude” never appears in the text. Instead, The Venus is said to be
“naked.” This choice of words is of major importance. According to Ken-
neth Clark’s classic study The Nude:
to be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the
embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the
other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague
image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but
of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.
(1)
By choosing to call her “naked,” Parks first implies that The Venus is
vulnerable. Indeed, “exposure iz what killed her” (11) says The Negro
Resurrectionist.
Whether for entertainment or scientific purposes, The Venus’s
uncovering continuously results in an economic exploitation and/or an
emotional hold. Venus tells the story of a woman who was stripped of
her clothes as well as of her dignity and humanity. The play, with scenes
2. Saartjie Baartman’s organs and cast remained in public view at the Musée d’Histoire
Naturelle and later at the Musée de l’Homme until 1976. In 1994, with the end of apart-
heid, descendants of the Griqua people, belonging to the Khoisan group, appealed to
Nelson Mandela to demand the restitution of her remains. After long negotiations, in
April 2002 they were officially returned by France to South Africa, and Saartjie Baartman
was finally properly buried.
Revue Française d’Études Américaines 81

numbered from 31 to 1, looks like a countdown towards the ultimate

unveiling that is her dissection. Taking great liberties with the historical
record, it is organized in two symmetrical parts separated by an intermis-
sion. The first part is a place of public exhibition: “The Girl” leaves South
Africa to be displayed by The Mother-Showman throughout England,
where she becomes “The Venus Hottentot,” a freak show character. 3 The
second part features nakedness in relation to intimacy and scientific
racism: after being bought from The Mother-Showman by The Baron
Docteur, a fictional avatar of Georges Cuvier, she follows him to Paris
and soon becomes her lover. While covering her with gifts and promises,
The Baron Docteur studies her for his own advancement. Seduced, she
sees her hopes dashed: after two abortions, she is abandoned and dies in
prison.
In his definition, Kenneth Clark suggests that “nakedness” is a state,
whereas “nudity” is the result of a work of art. While the nude alludes to
an ideal body, the naked refers to the body itself, in all its materiality and
crudeness. In the case of The Hottentot Venus, the body, according to
Western standards, is not only “re-formed,” it is de-formed. Described as
a “STEPSISTER-MONKEY TO THE GREAT / LOVE / GODDESS”
(45), she becomes in the Western mythology an anti-ideal as well as anti-
goddess, her stage name a cruel oxymoron. While the nudity of Venus is
associated with beauty, ideal and civilization (all qualities that are paired
with whiteness), The Hottentot Venus’s nakedness is synonymous with
monstrosity, primitivity and animality (that is to say: blackness). Thus,
behind the distinction between nudity and nakedness lies an implicit dif-
ference between whiteness and blackness. By using the word “nakedness”
instead of “nudity,” Parks both addresses that difference and chooses
blackness.
Since “the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of the
black, especially the black female” (Gilman 225), Parks uses The Venus
as a conceptual figure to reflect on the perception of the black female
body, and more generally black womanhood, in contemporary America. 4
As Mehdi Ghasemi reminded us (260), by putting her naked body center
stage Parks unveils the “matrix of domination” intersecting issues of race,
3. Whereas the historical Venus was called “the Hottentot Venus,” Parks inverted the
two terms to give “the Venus Hottentot.” Depending on the context, I use both formula-
tions.
4. Parks’s appropriation and reframing of Baartman’s story in the American racial
context has been critiqued for its tendency to “generalise Africa” and “denature” the
‘Hottentot Venus’, which then “function as concepts” for the playwright (Keizer 208). See
also Gordon-Chipembere.
82 No 171
gender and class (Collins 2005), to which she is subjected. And, as in

other works by contemporary African-American women artists such as
Renée Cox, Kara Walker or Carla Williams (Willis 2010), “the story of
Saartjie Baartman takes on the value of a mediating object, allowing us
to burst the abscess of this neo-colonial gaze that continues to trap black
artists” (Chalaye, SRC 500, translation mine).
Staging The Venus’s Nakedness

Considering the very first thing we see is The Venus’s nakedness, the
play is at risk of putting contemporary audiences back into the voyeuris-
tic position of nineteenth-century spectators, thus reproducing Baart-
man’s oppression instead of countering it. Because of this, and because
at several points in the play The Venus is clearly complicit in her own
fate, Parks’s work caused controversy at the time of its first production
(in 1995 by Richard Foreman at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Thea-
ter). The discussion was such that “criticism of the play and criticism
of the reviews became completely imbricated” (Warner 190). Whereas
established critics were pleased with a show that avoided a “condemning
historical perspective” (Brantley 1996), the most virulent criticism came
from Jean Young, who accused Parks of “re-objectifying” and “re-com-
modifying” Saartjie Baartman (1997). 5
Some criticism exonerates Parks by considering it a mistake to read
the play as a historical narrative (Miller 127). The linear plot I summa-
rized earlier is indeed embedded in a Brechtian circular structure designed
to remind us at all times of the artificiality of the show (by “us” I mean
both readers and spectators). Introducing each scene and delivering his-
torical “footnotes” extracted from various sources (some historical, some
fake), The Negro Resurrectionist connects the play’s dual dramaturgical
temporality: the past of the narrative and the present of the spectacle.
These two intertwined levels of structure are an exact transposition of the
task that the playwright assigned herself: while the linear plot re-members
Saartjie Baartman, the overall fragmentary spectacle dis-members her. In
the gap between the two lies the silence of the real Baartman, who is
desperately unattainable (Elam & Rayner 273). Parks’s play is but a “rep-
etition and revision” on History (“Rep & Rev” as she calls it, AP 8): it
does not seek to represent History so much as to interrogate historiogra-
phy. Thus, The Venus is “less a character than […] a discursive formation”
5. For full accounts of the reviews, see Warner 190; Young 2010, 123-126; Garrett 76-
87.

(Thompson 175) or a “metatheatrical echo” (Wetmore 89), who exists

only to serve a theatrical purpose (Geis 77).
However, when it comes to the tangible presence of a naked black
female body on stage, that line of argument tends to fall short. Since
1995, stage directors have adopted several strategies to represent The
Venus. Accounts of Richard Foreman’s production report that it
“depicted the body of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ in a wholly naturalistic fash-
ion” (Keizer 208). The actress who played The Venus, Adina Porter, wore
“prosthetic buttocks” (Warner 191) covered by “a skin-coloured leotard”
(Keizer 208), and little else. In the few available pictures of the show, she
appears wearing a cloth covering her breasts, a tight apron, a headdress
and many jewels—all adorned with “African” motifs. According to Harry
Elam and Alice Rayner, “the butt clearly did not belong to the actress,
but it nonetheless gave the effect of total exposure” (271). This clear
attempt to reproduce the costume that the real Saartjie Baartman per-
formed in (“tight silk body stocking,” Warner 184) “conflicts with the
emphasis, in the written text of the play, on the ‘Hottentot Venus’ as a
construction” (Keizer 208). Moreover, it elicited a “struggle” between
“the artificiality of this Venus” and “the reality of the actress,” demon-
strating the inescapability of her exploitation and our inevitable complic-
ity as an audience (Elam & Rayner 271).
To avoid that pitfall, Lear deBessonet’s 2017 production at the Sig-
nature Theatre in New York added a silent prologue where Zainab Jah,
the actress who played The Venus, appeared on stage wearing a light
nightgown. 6 In full view, she put on a skin-colored Venus-shaped jump-
suit that was waiting for her. Enhancing her buttocks and breasts, it made
her look naked. Then, throughout the play, she wore several dresses and
a proper Hottentot Venus costume (an apron, jewels and feathers, and a
cape) over the jumpsuit, which remained visible at all times. With this
theatrical trick, Lear deBessonet followed Parks’s lead and foregrounded
the “Venus Hottentot” as a construction. Furthermore, the jumpsuit
materialized nakedness as a costume. Far from revealing her inner self,
nakedness appeared as the garment of the “Venus Hottentot” persona.
Nevertheless, Lear deBessonet’s production failed to maintain this dis-
tance over the course of the play. Because it highlighted each character’s
complexities and elicited sympathy for them, it eventually “obscure[d] the
implications of one’s own participation in the spectacle” (Elam & Rayner
273) and invisibilized the fact that the systemic reasons why The Venus
finds herself in this position might still exist. The jumpsuit’s exaggerated
6. All accounts of this staging are based on the show I attended on June 3, 2017 at
3pm.
84 No 171
features became a mere part of a generally grotesque play about a psycho-

logically motivated character instead of a theatrical construction. In the
end, the illusion took over.
In an attempt to strike a balance between condemnation and exoner-
ation, Jennifer Larson argues that, in Venus, “what appears to be complic-
ity may be simultaneously read as subversive agency” (Chapter 3, n. p.).
Similarly, Harry Elam and Alice Rayner conclude that “Venus the play,
Saartjie Baartman, the Venus Hottentot, the actor in body suit who reem-
bodies the Venus—all evidence a problematic ambivalence. They are at
once subject and object, present and absent, symbol and matter. […]
Parks’s representation of Venus actively embraces contradiction and com-
plexity” (280). To these arguments I would add that Venus’s irreducible
ambivalence is evidence of a marronnage strategy, in the sense that Sylvie
Chalaye gives to the word (CM 2018). Drawing on Édouard Glissant,
Chalaye’s concept of marronnage references black antebellum strategies
to find freedom in the midst of oppression, either through fugitivity or
through trickster and Signifyin(g) practices (in the sense of Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., 1988). Appropriating ancient African-American cultural strate-
gies, Parks’s drama often overlap “what is” and “what aint,” as per the
later formulation in Topdog.Underdog (77). In a provocative gesture,
Parks turns The Venus’s nakedness into a site of both objectification and
subjectification, exposure and empowerment, oppression and agency.
The Colonial Construct of Black Female Nakedness

Throughout the play, we come to understand the extent to which
the “Venus Hottentot” character, and by extension The Venus herself, has
to be nothing more than a naked body. Any ability she might have is
hidden in favor of an exclusive visual show: “Yr a negro native with a
most remarkable spanker. / Thats what they pay for. / Their eyes are hot
for yr tot-tot. / Theres the poetry” (60). Off stage, she talks in a perfectly
normal English with The Mother-Showman, but on stage, she is said to
speak “uh whole language of kicks” (55), that is to say a body language
(Pecorari 166). Objectified into a sheer naked body, she is denied any
intellectual life. Her interiority has been erased in favor of biological
reports of her dissection spread throughout the text, exactly as her body
was spread in jars. “Her buttocks had nearly / nearly the usual origin and
insertion / but the muscular fibres were surprisingly thin and flabby,” says
The Baron Docteur (149). By the end of the play, both her exterior figure
and her insides have been made into a commodity, since they allow The
Mother-Showman to make money and The Baron Docteur to advance
his career.

Her very real dismemberment is echoed by the continuous fragmen-

tation of her body by the colonial gaze. As bell hooks has commented,
the Hottentot Venus “is there to entertain guests with the naked image
of Otherness. They are not to look at her as a whole human being. They
are to notice only certain parts”—which, hooks indicates, recalls the
“black female slaves who stood on auction blocks” (62). In line with a
long tradition of reducing the black female body to their behind (Hender-
son 160), sexual parts are particularly singled out. “Ass,” “bucket,”
“bum,” “spanker”… the accumulation of the buttocks lexicon is such that
The Venus appears to be nothing but “bottoms and bottoms and bot-
toms” (16). “Derogated in the dominant and hegemonic western culture
as a sign of the sexually perverse and grotesque” (Henderson 160), The
Venus’s hypersexualized behind arouses both disgust and desire. “The
central nineteenth-century icon for sexual difference between the Euro-
pean and the black,” the protruding buttocks of the Hottentot Venus are
seen as a proof of her “deviant sexuality” (Gilman 228, 231). “She comes
from The Wilds and she carries them behind her,” comments one of the
characters (136). Said to “like when people peek and poke” (17) and
regularly raped (33, 66), she is “perpetually scripted in terms of [her]
sexual availability” (Brooks 168). Through a series of puns, Parks high-
lights the confluence of black nakedness with sexuality and inferiority
that is inherent to the colonial gaze: “WHAT A BLACKSIDE!” exclaims
The Mother-Showman to attract onlookers (52); and, in reference to the
race hierarchy established by nineteenth-century scientific racism: “she
bottoms out at the bottom of the ladder” (45).
This constant objectification contaminates The Venus’s rare
moments of intimacy. During a love scene with The Baron Docteur, she
significantly asks to “keep it dark,” as to hide her nakedness from her
lover (and the audience), prevent reifying gazes and make space to exist
as a desiring subject. But when she wants to show The Baron Docteur
something we can only guess (“Voilà. Open yr eyes.”), he replies bluntly:
“Too dark to see” (105). This brief moment implies that, while he is
fascinated by The Venus, he is either unable or refuses to see her on her
own terms. This resistance to letting her exist as a subject culminates
when he “turns his back to her” (109) and starts masturbating. When she
tries to see what he is doing, he exclaims “Dont look! Dont look at me”
(110). Certainly, as Harvey Young observes, The Baron Docteur is con-
cerned with being exposed, but his expression “anchors itself in an aware-
ness of the artificiality of Baartman’s status as object and the ease with
which she could become a subject. […] She is object. He is subject. He
looks. She is the looked-at. He is the self and she is always the other. The
possibility of her look threatens the stability of this binary” (41).
86 No 171
This leads us to deepen our understanding of nakedness in the play.

Whereas The Venus’s naked body concentrates all the attention, this same
body’s feeling remains desperately absent. Anything that could give her
presence depth and texture (the touch of her skin, her warmth, etc.) is
eluded. In bed, she keeps asking to be touched and The Baron Docteur
only distractedly complies while talking about himself. The mere fact that
he would “turn his back to her” to masturbate is the sign that her actual
naked presence is held back in favor of a fantasized one. The Venus’s
naked body is but a surface for projections, and as such has to be kept
at some distance. During the “Venus Hottentot” exhibition, her silhouette
is highlighted: “Stand up now, Girl. / Let em see you in yr alltogether.
[…] Stand still. In profile. There thats nice. / Ladies and Gents: / The
Hottentots best angle” (56). Moreover, it is progressively revealed that
The Venus is for most of the play actually not “all undressed” (14). Her
sexual parts are covered (“She gained fortune and fame by not wearing
a scrap. / Hiding only the privates that lipped in her lap,” 15), and much
later we learn that “She was always / Standing on a stage 2 feet high,
clothed in a light dress, / A dress thuh color of her own skin.” Thus, she
only “looked, well, naked” (76, emphasis added).
In Venus, everything is set to remind the audience that the play is
less about the title character than “about looking-at her” (Young, 2007
41). Through various theatrical devices, our own onlooker position is
embedded in the play and sent back at us. A shape-shifting Chorus
embodies the different facets of the gaze focused on The Venus: norma-
tive (The Chorus of The 8 Human Wonders), voyeur (The Chorus of
The Spectators), judiciary (The Chorus of The Court) and scientific (The
Chorus of The 8 Anatomists). As a double of the audience, this epic
Chorus stages, estranges and diffracts our own gaze. A play-within-the-
play, where the actors who play The Chorus are double-casted, has a
similar effect. Entitled “For The Love of The Venus,” it is adapted from
the 1814 vaudeville La Vénus hottentote, ou Haine aux françaises. Over
the course of six scenes, a Young Man abandons his fiancée for a Hotten-
tot whom he has never seen. Desperate at first, The Bride-To-Be manages
to win back his favor by “disguising” herself as “The Hottentot Venus”
(134). The stage directions do not specify the nature of her disguise, but
the detail is telling: in order to masquerade as a Hottentot, The Bride-
To-Be needs not to remove but to add layers. Rendered completely silent,
she is in fact replaced by The Young Man’s own fantasy. This grotesque
play-within-the-play, which ridicules Western phantasmagoria, is pre-
sented as a show whose only spectator is (for most of the time) The Baron
Docteur—who, one may surmise, would identify with the young man. In
addition, the game of mirrors is redoubled by the fact that The Venus

observes him from a distance. This scopic triangulation suggests that

while The Venus falls in love with a man, The Baron Docteur falls in love
with an image.
“Our Posteriors, Our Posterity”

Quoting Ann duCille, Daphne Brooks has argued that
black women’s bodies continue to bear the gross insult and burden of spectacu-
lar (representational) exploitation in transatlantic culture. Systemically overde-
termined and mythically configured, the iconography of the black female body
remains the central urtext of alienation in transatlantic culture. Hegemonic her-
meneutics consistently render black women’s bodies as “infinitely deconstructa-
ble ‘othered’ matter.” Yet, […] such women might put their own figures to work
for their own esthetic and political uses.
(7-8)
Similarly, although the “dis(-re-)membering” process is complex and

ambivalent, a political resistance is embedded in Venus. Firstly, the simple
staging of Saartjie Baartman’s story, including its gaps and holes, makes
possible the excavation of the corpses of Western History, sheds a light on
the colonized, and gives a (paradoxical) voice to those who were silenced.
“Sometimes telling the story is the only thing that makes it all right,”
Parks states in the program for the 1996 production (Chaudhuri 56).
From this viewpoint, as an affirmation of one’s existence, exposing the
black female body as Parks does, in a deliberately vulgar exhibition of
flesh, is in itself an act of resistance. Furthermore, as Parks has signified
in one of her signature puns (“our posteriors, our posterity,” REE 17),
the black female body is a site of the configuration of History. “The butt
is the past, the posterior: posterity. She’s a woman with a past, with a
big past—History” (Parks, qtd in Chaudhuri 55):
The shifting symbolic and linguistic play on posterior/posterity is a typical way
for Parks to connect language to questions of history and make a term carry
multiple implications that are both literal and figurative. […] For the Venus
Hottentot, the derriere was indeed the cause and the sign of her history, and a
case in which the part became the whole, while Saartje Baartman disappeared.
(Elam & Rayner 270-271).
Making her (w)hole again, “Parks almost reproduces Saartjie Baartman’s

exhibition—almost, but not quite. By embedding the display of The Venus
into her own show, she does not suppress the exhibition, but reproduces
it with a shift” (Tchamitchian 110). In the last scene, The Venus repeats
and revises the introduction by The Negro Resurrectionist quoted at the
beginning of this paper: “Venus, Black Goddess, was shameless, she
88 No 171
sinned, or else / completely unknowing thuh Godfearin ways she stood /

Showing her ass off in her iron cage” (162). By replacing “totally naked
in her iron cage” with the provocative self-affirming pun “showing her
ass off in her iron cage,” she actively chooses nakedness over nudity. Here,
The Venus signifies with respect to the theatrical situation, mocking the
Western gaze and regaining control of her body and narrative. Disrupting
a Western way of looking at the black female body, she turns shame into
pride and rebellion. As the play outgrows the theatrical form itself, The
Venus’s naked body outshapes Western representations.
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"SHOWING HER ASS OFF IN HER IRON CAGE": DIS (-RE-) MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS'S VENUS Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

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“SHOWING HER ASS OFF IN HER IRON CAGE”: DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING

THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »

2022/2 N° 171 | pages 80 à 91

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“Showing Her Ass Off in Her Iron

Keywords Dans Venus (1995), une interprétation fictive et

Although African-American drama has often staged the “dis(-re-)mem-

DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

observations contributed to making her a symbol of racial and sexual

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 81

numbered from 31 to 1, looks like a countdown towards the ultimate

DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

gender and class (Collins 2005), to which she is subjected. And, as in

Staging The Venus’s Nakedness

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 83

(Thompson 175) or a “metatheatrical echo” (Wetmore 89), who exists

DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

features became a mere part of a generally grotesque play about a psycho-

The Colonial Construct of Black Female Nakedness

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 85

Her very real dismemberment is echoed by the continuous fragmen-

DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

This leads us to deepen our understanding of nakedness in the play.

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 87

observes him from a distance. This scopic triangulation suggests that

“Our Posteriors, Our Posterity”

Similarly, although the “dis(-re-)membering” process is complex and

Making her (w)hole again, “Parks almost reproduces Saartjie Baartman’s

DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

sinned, or else / completely unknowing thuh Godfearin ways she stood /

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 89

GILMAN, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of

DIS(-RE-)MEMBERING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY IN SUZAN-LORI PARKS’S VENUS

WETMORE, Kevin J., Jr. “Re-enacting: Metatheatre in Thuh Plays of Suzan-Lori

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 91

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