Black Feminist Museographical Poetics in “Voyage of the Sable Venus”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article builds on existing scholarship on literary encounters with the museum in its treatment of Robin Coste Lewis’s poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015), as exemplifying the contemporary state of museal engagement in literary production. The poem delivers an account of the history of the Black female form in Western art—a presence Lewis argues, has gone overlooked, both intentionally and unintentionally, by Western museums. Sourced from an inestimable number of museum labels interpreting objects rendered in the Black female form, the poem not only brings the ubiquity of this form into view but presents a method of literary production that this article theorizes as “Black feminist museographical poetics.” In its heightened focus on museography, otherwise referred to as museum text, Lewis’s work adopts a poetics shaped by historical knowledge of the museum’s role in generating perceptions of Black femininity premised on erasure, dehumanization, and subjugation. Lewis’s poem reveals biases toward Black femininity encoded in the museography, through which museum visitors interpret cultural artifacts. This article argues that through her unconventional arrangement of museum labels, Lewis appeals to the nature of museal texts as inherently poetic sources of information, marked by accounts of racial and sexual difference.