Black Venus: An Absent Presence

Venus, writes Saidiya Hartman, is a "ubiquitous presence […] in the archive of Atlantic slavery," the "emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world" (Hartman 2008: 1). Venus is also an emblem for Black women in Robin Coste Lewis's poem "Voyage of the Sable Venus," which draws from museum labels and descriptions to highlight how the art world obfuscates the Black female identity. These are but two examples where Black women have been called "Venus" since the eighteenth century.

To most classicists, "Venus" denotes the Roman goddess or, as she is represented, the many nude sculptures derived from Praxiteles's canonical Aphrodite of Knidos. For me as a woman of color and as a classicist, this raises several questions, including: how does marble-white Venus--the Roman goddess of beauty and love--become Black Venus--a fetishized and exploited figure? When, exactly, did this transition take place? And, critically, what are the implications we must face in connecting Venus to the enslavement of Black women?

As we continue to strive to create space for Black feminist thought in Classics, nearly thirty years since Shelley Haley raised the issue (Haley 1993), I propose that it is time to confront and understand the ubiquity of Venus in Atlantic Slavery by addressing such questions. I thus intend to integrate scholarship on the Black female body and slavery (Hartman 2007 and 2008; Jackson 2020; Sharpe 2010 and 2016) with studies of classical art (Havelock 1995; Spivey 2013; Vout 2013), to identify and critically analyze instances where Venus is found as a Black woman in poetry, art, and historical records.

This study begins with depictions of Black Venuses in the nineteenth century, with Thomas Stothard's "The Voyage of the Sable Venus" (a reworking of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" in the context of Atlantic Slavery) and Charles Cordier's "African Venus." Before turning to the historical record, where I consider the stories (or lack thereof) of Sarah Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus," and an enslaved girl aboard the Recovery slave ship called "Venus." Enslavement dehumanized and fetishized the Black female body, whilst also erasing the identities of enslaved women from history. I argue that forcibly renaming women "Venus" was a mechanism of these processes. I then turn to attempts to reclaim Venus for Black women in twenty-first century pop culture (Hobson 2018) and in Lewis's poem, mentioned above. In doing so, I demonstrate that Black feminist scholarship can shed critical light on the appropriation of one of antiquity's most famous images and re-empower the Black female body in our field.

It is time we acknowledged that Black Venus represents both emblem and erasure, an absent presence. By bringing Black feminist scholarship into Classics and beyond, we can, in the words of Haley, "re-member, re-claim and re-empower" (Haley 1993: 38) the enslaved African woman, lost simultaneously to the racist and gendered domination of Atlantic Slavery and the aesthetic domination of classical Venus.