Returning Remains: Saartjie Baartman, or the "Hottentot Venus" as Transnational Postcolonial Icon

Abstract

Contemporary African fiction and film have become increasingly concerned with the (re)construction of a “pantheon” of postcolonial icons. Against the background of a colonial past which keeps on haunting both France and African countries alike, the case of Saartjie Baartman (or the “Hottentot Venus”) in the context of France's debates on memory and histories at the end of the 1990s offers a charged site of transnational diasporic memory and appropriation. Through a focus on Bessora's novel 53 cm, this article will highlight the ways in which the fictive and real “return” of the colonial remains of the “Hottentot Venus” serve to articulate a critique of the postcolonial present but also to memorialise a gendered, African, and transnational icon whose trajectory is ultimately reclaimed as a prototypical migratory experience across continents and linguistic traditions.

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