History Matters: Digging a hole in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus

Abstract

Chun, Yon-hee. “History Matters: Digging a Hole in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 33.1(2007): 43-64.The winner of Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, one of the controversial plays in terms of theme and dramatic technique. Parks has tenaciously clung to the project of unearthing a hidden history concerning Blacks. In Venus, Parks calls, resurrects African woman Saartijie Baartman who has been on the public display in London and Paris under the name of ‘The Venus Hottentot’ and rewrites her distorted history. Parks bestows upon Baartman a new version of life and challenges the reader with the proposition that the sense of subaltern subjectivity is recoverable. The aim of Parks’ specific dramatic invention is to help the audience to tell the disparity between white goddess ‘The Venus’ and the Black slave ‘The Venus Hottentot’. Among her multiple dramatic elements, a strategy of alienation that foregrounds the gaze of the colonizer/audience is the most formidable contrivance. This unconventional narration interrupts the romantic relationship and awakens power politics. Parks’ reversal of white male ideology is pursued in the play within the play. Through the strategic historicism, Parks encourages audiences to consider the repression of black female body and multifaceted expression of seduction and victimization. She widens her concern on Black history to the universal level, portraying the human condition transcending spatial and time limits. (SungShin Women’s University)