Hottentot Venus Redux: Nelisiwe Xaba’s Critical Moves of Resistance

In her transdisciplinary work, The Venus (2009), Nelisiwe Xaba reimagines Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, as a cosmopolitical black feminist African figure. Her work disrupts the meanings attached to the colonial spectacle of hypervisible black flesh, as well as the logics that keep these meanings intact in the postcolonial world now.