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The story of the human body review11/26/2022 ![]() For Holmes, Baartman’s journey as an object of European curiosity and African exploitation began on the veld of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. ![]() It is difficult not to be propelled through “African Queen.” The story of Saartjie Baartman - the Hottentot Venus’s real name - is inherently fascinating, and littered with a diverse cast of highly unlikable characters, ranging from Baartman’s lowly black South African master, Hendrik Cesars, to the foremost European scientist of the day, Georges Léopold Chrétien Cuvier. Today, in the hands of Rachel Holmes, a former English professor at the University of London, it is “a symbol of the alienation and degradations of colonization, lost children, exile, the expropriation of female labor and the sexual and economic exploitation of black women by men, white and black.” Her body was the object of prurient gaze, scientific fascination and disturbed bewilderment. When she arrived in London in 1810, this young woman from South Africa became an overnight sensation in London’s theater of human oddities. The Hottentot Venus, with buttocks of enormous size and with genitalia fabled to be equally disproportionate, was part of this human menagerie. Properly top-hatted and shawled, men and women of Britain’s upper crust gawked at, prodded and squeezed these so-called human freaks, amusing themselves with the deformities that were paraded before them. ![]() But late Georgian Piccadilly - London’s most fashionable district since the Restoration - was as much a place for shows featuring “the Living Skeleton” and the 19-inch “Sicilian Fairy” as it was for members of Parliament, playwrights and self-styled gentlemen. ![]() James’s Square today, past the old-boys’ clubs like Boodle’s and White’s, and the grim palace that Prince Charles once called home, it’s hard to imagine that in the last years of King George III’s reign carnivals of human curiosities existed side by side with these bastions of English aristocracy. ![]()
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