- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (19 Mar 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747577765
- ISBN-13: 978-0747577768
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.4 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 786,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
'I am convinced that The Hottentot Venus is going to cause a real literary stir, rescuing its eponymous heroine from almost two centuries of misunderstanding. This is a sharply focused, elegantly written, gripping story, meticulous in its research and scholarship. Rachel Holmes wears her considerable authority lightly and delightfully. There is fine imaginative writing here, as well as strong, pointed argument and ideas.' Professor Lisa Jardine
Product Description
Saartjie Baartman was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks, the striking African beauty had made the headlines and become the talk of the social season of 1810, hailed as 'The Hottentot Venus' for her exquisite physique (not least her shapely and irresistible bottom) and suggestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lightning rod for late-Georgian and Napoleonic attitudes toward sex and race, fashion and body image, exploitation and colonialism, prurience and science. But celebrity brought unexpected consequences. Abolitionists initiated a High Court lawsuit to win Saartjie's freedom that electrified the English public. In Paris, a team of scientists subjected her to a humiliating ordeal as they probed the mystery of her sexual allure. Stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed, Saartjie came to symbolise the erotic obsession at the heart of colonialism. But behind the costumes, caricatures and the glare of publicity, this young Khoisan woman was a real person beginning to understand the true nature of her fate. Nearly two centuries after her death, Saartjie made headlines once again as Nelson Mandela launched an international campaign to have her remains returned to the land of her birth. In this scintillating, vividly written and meticulously researched book, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and its dominions, Rachel Holmes for the first time traces the full arc of Saartjie's extraordinary life and death - a story that still resonates today.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sublime,
By
This review is from: The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman (Born 1789 - Buried 2002) (Hardcover)
A beautifully written text, this book is a prize for any bookshelf. Rachel Holmes has succeeded once again in blending impeccable research with delightful prose; and when combined, invites the reader into a different place, a different time, a different viewpoint...at first, we are at one with the indigenous population of South Africa, following a story of domestic drudgery and bad luck - suddenly we are ripped from our comfort zone and introduced to a freak-obsessed showcase London - profit wins over protection and a lifetime of servitude makes itself abundantly clear to our subject, Saartjie Baartman. She reacts to her new surroundings accordingly and that is what makes her story all the more poignant.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Goodbye Hottentot, hello South African icon,
By
This review is from: The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789 - Buried 2002 (Paperback)
Two sets of human attributes are most fascinating to us. The first are
those which we believe we share with others and so enhance our common humanity. The second, and more dangerous, and those which we believe show up our differences, and help us to define ourselves, both as groups and as individuals. Those differences sometimes give grist to primitive and irrational racism. Sartjie Baartman was a young Koisan (the current non-racist word used for people formerly known as Hottentots and bushmen) woman born in the 1790s into the serving classes in Cape Town in the important and remote trading teritory of Dutch/British South Africa. She was very pretty and had a most enormous and, for Europe, unusual steatopygic bottom. She was brought to London and exhibited as a kind of freak show. She went on to Paris, and died there around 1815. In London, anti-slavery campaigners had agitated for her human rights; in Paris she was seen as of scientific interest, and eventually dehumanised. Following her early death, she became a specimen on the shelves of a Paris museum. Following South Africa's renaissance under Mr Mandela, he requestedthat her remains be returned to her native country, which they duly were, and there she has achieved a mother-of-the-nation status. Rachel Holmes' book starts with the historical background of Sartjie's origins in Cape Town and follows her journeys to London and Paris and her final return home to modern South Africa. The book is highly readable and authoritative, not sparing in criticism of the absurdities of the European scientists of the era nor of the details of Saartje's short and tragic life. Read it and weep.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent!,
This review is from: The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman (Born 1789 - Buried 2002) (Hardcover)
This is a really fabulous book, a gripping read, and a great study on many levels, whether the history of South Africa, London in the eighteenth century or just man's humanity/inhumanity to man (and I include woman in that generalisation), perhaps borne out of fascination and curiosity. Highly recommended.
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