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 Angkjaer Jorgensen, Ljubica Matek, Margery Vibe Skagen, Camilla Erichsen Skalle, Zeljka Svrljuga.

This book sheds new light on gender-based inequalities in a globalized world. Interdisciplinary in scope, it reveals new avenues of research on gendered citizenship, analysing the possibilities and pitfalls of being represented and of representing someone. Drawing on contexts both historical and contemporary, it queries what it means to have access to representation, which power structures regulate and produce representation, and who counts as a citizen. Situating its arguments in the global struggle for hegemony, it answers such thought-provoking questions as whether one can represent someone or be represented without recourse to citizenship and, conversely, whether it is possible to be a citizen if one does not have access to representation. This engaging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, media studies, political science, literature, gender studies and cultural studies. div>

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 Angkjaer Jorgensen, Ljubica Matek, Margery Vibe Skagen, Camilla Erichsen Skalle, Zeljka Svrljuga.