Saartjie Baartman, Nelisiwe Xaba, and me: the politics of looking at South African bodies

Abstract

Dance Artist/Choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba’s They Look at Me and That Is All They Think (2006) ‘refers to the story of Sara[tjie] Baartman […] the “Hottentot Venus”’ (2006. 9th Jomba! Contemporary dance experience 2006 programme, p. 7) who was taken from her homeland South Africa, and exhibited in Europe in the nineteenth century. After Baartman died in 1815, her remains were displayed in a museum in Paris until 1982. Xaba parallels the story of Baartman to her own experience of performing in Europe as a black South African woman. This article considers how They Look at Me and That Is All They Think exposes the politics surrounding the act of looking at a particular racial and gendered body in both the historical and contemporary context, and how the concept and articulation of the ‘superior’ European subject was dependent on the classification of Baartman, and other black Africans, as exotic others. In my practice-based research project How I Chased a Rainbow And Bruised My Knee (2007), which was a choreographic response to Xaba’s work, I theatricalize my identity as a white South African woman to make visible whiteness, its associated privilege, and how it is dependent on the representation of a particular type of blackness.