ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the connection that beauty has to black female bodies and examines how constructions of female beauty and sexuality reflect racial hierarchies of white supremacy and black subjugation. For an interpretation of Sara Baartman's body—preserved, as it were, in a jar, or molded from a cast, or hanging from a rack—requires that people "read" this "hard" evidence through an accepted ideology of racial and sexual difference. In other words, Baartman's history is one of "migration" and "transnational" crossings, between South Africa, England, and France, and, in contemporary discourse, between Africa, Europe, and North America. Somehow, the creation of a black feminist aesthetic must challenge dominant culture's discourse of the black body grotesque and articulate a black liberation discourse on the black body beautiful. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
