![]() ![]() Although she died in 1815, “her body was on display in Paris up until the 1980s, then again in the ’90s. “Baartman’s story is still with us in a lot of ways,” Radke said. “So when white people were looking at Sarah Baartman, they were projecting all of this stuff they’d already inculcated in the culture.” “(Baartman’s) show perpetuated ideas around African savagery and primitive Black womanhood, ” Hobson explains in in the book. Hobson links the fetishization of Baartman’s figure to the seeding of colonialism and the continuation of slavery into White society. ![]() Radke spoke with Janell Hobson, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the State University of New York at Albany who has written extensively on Baartman. ![]() ![]() Radke’s account of Baartman’s life, and of how her body became “a fantasy of African hypersexuality,” underlies much of the book’s narrative, as she traces the stereotypes created by European “racial scientists” of that era and, later, the skewed and prejudiced legacy of big-butted women as more highly sexual - especially Black women - directly back to the exploited Baartman. ![]()
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