Venus Hottentot: performance ethnography, the audience and resisting racism

ABSTRACT

Sara Baartman (Venus Hottentot) was an African teenager lured to Europe to perform for audiences in 1810; her genitals and brain were posthumously dissected, pickled and museumized. In 2016, ‘Venus Hottentot: A Short Play’ was staged at The University of MA, Amherst, and the audience participated in free writing at the end of the performance. The paradigm for the play and audience research is performance ethnography, which emphasises using research and writing as a political act to destabilise colonial power. I analyze the audience’s writing and make recommendations for resisting racism against Black bodies in theatre practice and activist scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Venus
• Baartman
• performance
• ethnography
• audience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayshia Mackie-Stephenson

Ayshia Mackie-Stephenson is an intimacy director, activist, scholar, and award-winning writer from Brooklyn, NY. With an MFA from the California Institute of Arts and a PhD in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Ayshia uses performance to investigate race and sexuality.