Looking at the Other/Seeing the Self: Embodied Performance and Encounter in Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B and Nineteenth-Century Ethnographic Displays

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Nadia Valman and Dr Rachael Gilmour for reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of this essay. I am also grateful for the advice given by the anonymous readers for this journal and the editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Brett Bailey, quoted in Staff Reporter, “Brett Bailey: The Intention of Exhibit B was never hatred,” Mail & Guardian, September 27, 2014, online.

² “Open letter to Nicholas Kenyon from Dr Kehinde Andrews and Others,” online.

³ There is a substantial body of literature covering Baartman’s time in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus.” See, for example, Blanchard and Boëtsch, “The Hottentot Venus: Birth of a ‘Freak’ (1815)”; Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman, The ‘Hottentot Venus’”; Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?”; and Strother “Display of the Body Hottentot.”

⁴ Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 85.

⁵ Ibid., 107.

⁶ Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 93.

⁷ Ibid., 33.

⁸ Kruger, “Gazing at Exhibit A,” online.

⁹ Bailey, Third World Bunfight and Edinburgh International Festival, 4.

¹⁰ Kruger, “Gazing at Exhibit A.”

¹¹ Yvette Greslé, “Twenty Pound Spectacle: Brett Bailey (Exhibit B),” 3:AM Magazine, 27 August 2014, online.

¹² Kruger, “Celebrating the Spirit of Tragedy,” 238.

¹³ Courttia Newland, “A Hidden Code: The Subtle Language of Racism,” Change.org, 12 September 2014, online.

¹⁴ Peter Boenisch, “From Brett Bailey,” online.

¹⁵ JS Rafaeli, “Performers in London’s ‘Racist’ Human Zoo Exhibit Are Angry It’s Been Shut Down,” Vice, 26 September 2014, online.

¹⁶ Goffman, Presentation of Self, 3.

¹⁷ Baderoon, “Intimacy and History,” 89.

¹⁸ Kruger, “Gazing at Exhibit A.”

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Stella Odunlami quoted in “Is Art Installation Exhibit B Racist?,” The Observer, 27 September 2014, online.

²¹ Anonymous, “Bosjesmans,” Illustrated London News, June 12, 1847.

²² Qureshi, “Meeting the Zulus.”

²³ Qureshi, “Meeting the Zulus,” 184.

²⁴ Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, and the Hottentot Venus, 91; Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman,” 238–9.

²⁵ Bhana Young, “‘Rude’ Performances: Theorizing Agency,” 55.

²⁶ Although Crais and Sculley read this as evidence of a limited control Baartman was able to exercise over her performance, questions have been raised about how far Baartman was able to express her own preferences, and how far Caesars and his partner Alexander Dunlop were coercing her. See, for example, Abrahams, “Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain.”

²⁷ Holmes, African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, and the Hottentot Venus.

²⁸ Mrs Matthews, Memoirs of Charles Matthews, 137–9.

²⁹ In fact, the justification for Cuvier and de Blainville’s anatomical interest in Baartman’s body both before and after her death stemmed from an ongoing debate among ethnologists in the early nineteenth century as to whether the “Hottontot” constituted the most degraded form of humanity or the most evolved form of primate. See Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 76–108.

³⁰ See also Bhana Young, 58.

³¹ Anonymous, “The Bosjiemans at Exeter Hall,” The Morning Chronicle, May 19, 1847.

³² For more on Romantic sympathy, particularly with regard to spectatorship, see Page, Imperfect Sympathy, 4; Chandler, “Moving Accidents: The Emergence of Sentimental Probability”; Rai, Rule of Sympathy.

³³ Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 9.

³⁴ Rai, Rule of Sympathy, 164.

³⁵ Erving Goffman suggests that, in the case of African Americans, they may feel obliged to affect a manner that affirms white ideas about their inferiority, illustrating how race is often a determining factor when a person chooses which role to adopt in a face-to-face interaction. See Presentation of Self, 25.

³⁶ For more on this, including the contractual and management arrangements, see Qureshi, Peoples on Parade, 101–25.

³⁷ Although, despite the drawing up of a contract stipulating the length of her “service” and also her payment in the wake of the Macaulay court case, we cannot read Baartman’s consent as a transparent expression of her agency. See Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, and the Hottentot Venus, 83–101.

³⁸ Anonymous, Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, May 2, 1850.

³⁹ Tyler, Mental and Moral Attributes of the Bush Men, 7.

⁴⁰ Tyler, 7.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Qureshi, Peoples on Parade, 163.

⁴³ Ibid.,144.

⁴⁴ Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 82.