Author: Robin Coste Lewis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101911204
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
Voyage of the Sable Venus
Author: Robin Coste Lewis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101911204
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101911204
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
Hottentot Venus and Other Poems
The Venus Hottentot
Author: Elizabeth Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76
Book Description
These poems range from personal memory to cultural history to human personae: John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela, and "The Venus Hottentot," a nineteenth-century African woman made into a carnival sideshow exhibit. -- p.[4] of cover.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76
Book Description
These poems range from personal memory to cultural history to human personae: John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela, and "The Venus Hottentot," a nineteenth-century African woman made into a carnival sideshow exhibit. -- p.[4] of cover.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
Author: Morgan Parker
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1941040543
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 One of Oprah Magazine's "Ten Best Books of 2017" "This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. . . . These exquisite poems defy categorization." —The New Yorker The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1941040543
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 One of Oprah Magazine's "Ten Best Books of 2017" "This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. . . . These exquisite poems defy categorization." —The New Yorker The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus
Author: Clifton Crais
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691238359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Displayed on European stages from 1810 to 1815 as the Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman was one of the most famous women of her day, and also one of the least known. As the Hottentot Venus, she was seen by Westerners as alluring and primitive, a reflection of their fears and suppressed desires. But who was Sara Baartman? Who was the woman who became the Hottentot Venus? Based on research and interviews that span three continents, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus tells the entwined histories of an elusive life and a famous icon. In doing so, the book raises questions about the possibilities and limits of biography for understanding those who live between and among different cultures. In reconstructing Baartman's life, the book traverses the South African frontier and its genocidal violence, cosmopolitan Cape Town, the ending of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, London and Parisian high society, and the rise of racial science. The authors discuss the ramifications of discovering that when Baartman went to London, she was older than originally assumed, and they explore the enduring impact of the Hottentot Venus on ideas about women, race, and sexuality. The book concludes with the politics involved in returning Baartman's remains to her home country, and connects Baartman's story to her descendants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus offers the authoritative account of one woman's life and reinstates her to the full complexity of her history.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691238359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Displayed on European stages from 1810 to 1815 as the Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman was one of the most famous women of her day, and also one of the least known. As the Hottentot Venus, she was seen by Westerners as alluring and primitive, a reflection of their fears and suppressed desires. But who was Sara Baartman? Who was the woman who became the Hottentot Venus? Based on research and interviews that span three continents, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus tells the entwined histories of an elusive life and a famous icon. In doing so, the book raises questions about the possibilities and limits of biography for understanding those who live between and among different cultures. In reconstructing Baartman's life, the book traverses the South African frontier and its genocidal violence, cosmopolitan Cape Town, the ending of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, London and Parisian high society, and the rise of racial science. The authors discuss the ramifications of discovering that when Baartman went to London, she was older than originally assumed, and they explore the enduring impact of the Hottentot Venus on ideas about women, race, and sexuality. The book concludes with the politics involved in returning Baartman's remains to her home country, and connects Baartman's story to her descendants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus offers the authoritative account of one woman's life and reinstates her to the full complexity of her history.
Vénus Noire
Author: Robin Mitchell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
Black Venus 2010
Author: Deborah Willis
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439902062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
Analyzing contemporaneous and contemporary works that re-imagine the "Hottentot Venus."
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439902062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
Analyzing contemporaneous and contemporary works that re-imagine the "Hottentot Venus."
I’Ve Come to Take You Home
Author: Diana Ferrus
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456891731
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 107
Book Description
Diana Ferrus was born in Worcester in 1953 and completed her high school career in 1972. She completed a postgraduate degree in Womens and Gender studies at the University of the Western Cape where she works as an administrator in the Dept of Industrial Psychology. Diana is a writer, poet, performance poet and story-teller. Her work in both Afrikaans and English has been published in various collections and some serve as prescribed texts for high school learners. Her publishing house, Diana Ferrus Publishers has published various publications including her first Afrikaans collection of poetry, Ons Komvandaan. Diana co-edited and published a collection of stories about fathers and daughters, Slaan vir my n masker, Vader in 2006. The mission of her publishing company is to publish writers from previously disadvantaged communities. Her company in association with the University of the Western Cape has published life stories of three former activists and unionists namely, Liz Nana Abrahams, Zollie Malindi and Archie Sibeko. These publications contain rich material about South Africas past and some are prescribed texts at the University of the Western Cape. She is a founder member of the Afrikaanse Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets (all women poets) and Women in Xchains (grassroots women writers). Diana has attended numerous literary festivals locally and abroad. In 2006 she performed her poetry at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees with the Mamela band. They received a Kanna-award for the best contemporary music. At this very festival Diana received a Kanna-award for her contribution to Afrikaans. However Diana Ferrus is internationally known and acclaimed for the poem that she wrote for the indigenous South African woman Sarah Bartmann who was taken away from her country under false pretences and paraded as a sexual freak in Europe. Dianas work has had and still has a bearing and influence on matters of race, gender, class and reconciliation. She is popular amongst South Africans of all race groups. She believes in her countrys future and works tirelessly for her peoples emancipation from racial, sexual and class exploitation as well as reconciliation.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456891731
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 107
Book Description
Diana Ferrus was born in Worcester in 1953 and completed her high school career in 1972. She completed a postgraduate degree in Womens and Gender studies at the University of the Western Cape where she works as an administrator in the Dept of Industrial Psychology. Diana is a writer, poet, performance poet and story-teller. Her work in both Afrikaans and English has been published in various collections and some serve as prescribed texts for high school learners. Her publishing house, Diana Ferrus Publishers has published various publications including her first Afrikaans collection of poetry, Ons Komvandaan. Diana co-edited and published a collection of stories about fathers and daughters, Slaan vir my n masker, Vader in 2006. The mission of her publishing company is to publish writers from previously disadvantaged communities. Her company in association with the University of the Western Cape has published life stories of three former activists and unionists namely, Liz Nana Abrahams, Zollie Malindi and Archie Sibeko. These publications contain rich material about South Africas past and some are prescribed texts at the University of the Western Cape. She is a founder member of the Afrikaanse Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets (all women poets) and Women in Xchains (grassroots women writers). Diana has attended numerous literary festivals locally and abroad. In 2006 she performed her poetry at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees with the Mamela band. They received a Kanna-award for the best contemporary music. At this very festival Diana received a Kanna-award for her contribution to Afrikaans. However Diana Ferrus is internationally known and acclaimed for the poem that she wrote for the indigenous South African woman Sarah Bartmann who was taken away from her country under false pretences and paraded as a sexual freak in Europe. Dianas work has had and still has a bearing and influence on matters of race, gender, class and reconciliation. She is popular amongst South Africans of all race groups. She believes in her countrys future and works tirelessly for her peoples emancipation from racial, sexual and class exploitation as well as reconciliation.
Library of Small Catastrophes
Author: Alison C. Rollins
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321998
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91
Book Description
Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins’ ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. “Memory is about the future, not the past,” she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins’ poetry seeks to challenge the status quo, engaging in a diverse, boundary-defying dialogue with an ever-present reminder of the ways race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture collide.
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321998
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91
Book Description
Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins’ ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’ fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. “Memory is about the future, not the past,” she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins’ poetry seeks to challenge the status quo, engaging in a diverse, boundary-defying dialogue with an ever-present reminder of the ways race, sexuality, spirituality, violence, and American culture collide.
The Hottentot Venus
Author: Rachel Holmes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408881519
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
The acclaimed biography of Sarah Baartman, once a slave and later a showgirl 'A significant and timely book ... Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story' Frances Wilson, Literary Review 'Impeccable ... In telling her extraordinary story, Holmes's fascinating book illuminates the forces which dominated her age, and resound in our own' Sunday Telegraph In 1810 the slave turned showgirl Sarah Baartman, London's most famous curiosity, became its legal cause célèbre. Famed for her exquisite physique – in particular her shapely bottom – she was stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed. This talented, tragic young South African woman became a symbol of exploitation, colonialism – and defiance. In this scintillating and vividly written book Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Baartman's extraordinary life for the first time.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408881519
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
The acclaimed biography of Sarah Baartman, once a slave and later a showgirl 'A significant and timely book ... Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story' Frances Wilson, Literary Review 'Impeccable ... In telling her extraordinary story, Holmes's fascinating book illuminates the forces which dominated her age, and resound in our own' Sunday Telegraph In 1810 the slave turned showgirl Sarah Baartman, London's most famous curiosity, became its legal cause célèbre. Famed for her exquisite physique – in particular her shapely bottom – she was stared at, stripped, pinched, painted, worshipped and ridiculed. This talented, tragic young South African woman became a symbol of exploitation, colonialism – and defiance. In this scintillating and vividly written book Rachel Holmes traces the full arc of Baartman's extraordinary life for the first time.