Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices - Paperback

by Jorunn Svensen Gjerden (Volume Editor), Kari Jegerstedt (Volume Editor), Zeljka Svrljuga (Volume Editor)

Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices critically examines a longstanding colonial fascination with the black female body as an object of sexual desire, envy, and anxiety. Since the 2002 repatriation of the remains of Sara Baartman to post-apartheid South Africa, the interest in the figure of Black Venus has skyrocketed, making her a key symbol for the restoration of the racialized female body in feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial terms.

Edited by Jorunn Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Zeljka Svrljuga, this volume considers Black Venus as a product of art established and potentially refigured through aesthetic practices, following her travels through different periods, geographies and art forms from Baudelaire to Kara Walker, and from the Caribbean to Scandinavia.

Contributors: Kjersti Aarstein, Carmen Birkle, Jorunn Svensen Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, Ulla Angkj r J rgensen, Ljubica Matek, Margery Vibe Skagen, Camilla Erichsen Skalle, Zeljka Svrljuga.

Author Biography

Jorunn S. Gjerden is an independent researcher of French literature who recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship thematizing Sara Baartman. Her publications include articles and a monograph on ethics and aesthetics, modernist literature, performativity, and postcoloniality.

Kari Jegerstedt is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Bergen. She has published several articles and edited volumes on gender and feminist theory, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis and Scandinavian, British and South-African Literature.

Zeljka Svrljuga is Professor of American Literature at the University of Bergen. She has published a number of articles and a monograph on the aesthetics of suffering and essays on African American and Caribbean literature.