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The Politics of Performance in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus: From Spectacle to Performer

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2017, 30(1), pp.5-32
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yungduk Kim 1

1경북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which Parks’s Venus critiques the dehumanizing colonial gaze that commodifies and fetishizes the black female body by representing The Venus Hottentot as a multivalent figure occupying multiple subject positions as spectacle, spectator, and performer. Shifting from an object of male specular desire to a desiring subject, The Venus subverts the male structure of the gaze founded on the male subject/female object binarism. The Venus thus reconstructs her relationship to the spectatorial gaze and in doing so reconstitutes her subjectivity as well. In the play-within-the-play, The Venus watches The Bride-To-Be masquerading “The Venus,” with her subjectivity split into spectator and spectacle. This in turn splits the audience’s gaze as well. In an ironic twist, she announces her own death in the overture and then proceeds to present her story in the following scenes. This suggests that “The Venus” is a theatrical construction, that what the spectator is about to see is a performative re-enactment of the history of Saartjie Baartman. Through this performance, the heroine is re-created. In a series of metatheatrical scenes, the contemporary spectators are implicated in the onstage voyeuristic objectification and racial oppression. In the mise-en-abyme of seeing, the theatergoers’ gaze is conflated with the onstage spectators’ gaze at freak shows and with the scientific gaze in the anatomical theatre. When addressing the spectators, The Venus as performer returns the spectators’ look and invites them to see that racial oppression is still going on and that something should be done about it. In this sense, Parks’s play stages a ritual remembering, not sexual objectification, of Baartman, calling for their ethical engagement.

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