Black Body as Remains/ Black Body Remains: Black Femaleness as Spectacle in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

Reflecting Suzan-Lori Parks’s vocational ethics as a “playwright- resurrectionist,” Venus, a play about a Khoisan woman named Saartjie Baartman who turned into the Venus Hottentot, a circus freak in early nineteenth-century Europe, contributes to at once restitution and re-exposure of this diasporic black female. Paralleling the ways in which the NAACP anti-lynching campaign and the Without Sanctuary exhibit employed racist spectacles as a site for critical contests and political awareness, Parks re-presents the spectacle of the Venus Hottentot to engage the audience in challenging the cultural logic of the spectacle without risking its affective power. As the Venus’s body within the play becomes a discursive site in which the spectators confront, reaffirm, and consume their prejudices, fantasies, and false myths about blackness, the black body, and black female sexuality, Venus thwarts, disrupts, and refracts the white gaze on the black female body by constantly calling up the Venus’s body only to foreground its absent presence. Finally envisioning the redemption of the Venus as a feeling subject rather than the object of voyeuristic curiosity, Venus/Venus invites the audience for affective communion with her. Echoing archival and embodied historical practices, such ambivalent uses of racial spectacles inform the difficulties and complexities the body poses as a medium and agent of history: the body serves as the remains of white colonialist history, yet black history remains through the body.