“… there will be too many words …” What follows is a textual/textural sampling of sorts. I’ve engaged them at a variety of levels (concentrated bursts of information gathering, ongoing study over years, new discoveries in the recent past). I offer them here as points of reference. I’ve wanted to share these influences, but have worried they would cast too big a shadow on the work itself. Nonetheless, these ideas, somewhere in the back of my mind, have textured the landscape I have been navigating.
African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus by Rachel Holmes. (2007)
Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” edited by Deborah Wills. (2010)
Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle by Katherine McKittrick. (2006)
Digital Proxemics: How Technology Shapes the Ways We Move, by John A. McArthur. (2016)
“For Opacity” from Poetics of Relations, by Édouard Glissant
“Homeplace (a site of resistance),” by bell hooks
How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, by Darby English. (2010)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. (2010)
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington. (2006)
“the poet addresses Saartjie Baartman; the so called Venus Hottentot. (on the release of Erykah Badu’s video, “Window Seat”)” by Lynn Procope. (2014)
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” by Emily Dickinson.
The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture by Kevin Quashie. (2012)
Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness by Nicole R. Fleetwood. (2011)
The Venus Hottentot by Elizabeth Alexander. (2004)
Venus: A Play by Suzan-Lori Parks. (1997)
Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture by Janell Hobson. (2005)
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey by Wangechi Mutu, Trevor Schoonmaker, Kristine Stiles, and Greg Tate. (2013)
