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Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on February 20, 2009
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2009 45(2):200-212; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqp005
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: Global Francophone Africa [View the issue table of contents]

Returning Remains: Saartjie Baartman, or the "Hottentot Venus" as Transnational Postcolonial Icon

Lydie Moudileno

Department of Romance Languages
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104–6305
USA

moudilen{at}sas.upenn.edu

  Abstract

Contemporary African fiction and film have become increasingly concerned with the (re)construction of a "pantheon" of postcolonial icons. Against the background of a colonial past which keeps on haunting both France and African countries alike, the case of Saartjie Baartman (or the "Hottentot Venus") in the context of France's debates on memory and histories at the end of the 1990s offers a charged site of transnational diasporic memory and appropriation. Through a focus on Bessora's novel 53 cm, this article will highlight the ways in which the fictive and real "return" of the colonial remains of the "Hottentot Venus" serve to articulate a critique of the postcolonial present but also to memorialise a gendered, African, and transnational icon whose trajectory is ultimately reclaimed as a prototypical migratory experience across continents and linguistic traditions.

Key Words: Baartman, Saartjie • Hottentot Venus • postcolonial francophone fiction • Bessora • colonial memory


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