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Cultural Identity Questions

The video The Life and Times of Sara Baartman – The Hottentot Venus demonstrates the emic views of the creators of the video toward their subject as well as the emic viewpoint of the British and French audiences who came to see Sara. The makers of the video do not view Sara as a freak, a woman from the Khoi Khoi village of South Africa who was taken to London and used as a symbol of racial inferiority and black female sexuality. The exhibitors of Sara see her in this manner but the makers of this documentary shows us the emic viewpoint of the French and British audiences who came to see Sara. While many of them, too, viewed her as a freak, a black hottentot, and a primitive sexual presence, others rebelled against her exploitation. Abolitionists of the era were outraged and wages an extracted court battle to have Sara freed from her exhibitors, even though their case was unsuccessful. Sara remained little more than a scientific object to her exhibitors, one they needed in order to reinforce their own self-interests and theories on black female sexuality. Sara’s sexual organs and brains were displayed in a Paris museum and her remains to this day have not been returned to her people. As Sara says in the video “My name is Sara, very unhappy Sara.”

Sally Price discusses the concept of universality or universalism when it comes to primitive, animal, traits and qualities shared by all human beings, ones that can be appreciated in works of art despite disparate spans of time, space, and cultures. However, in discussing the concept she actually shows the inability of human beings who preconceive previous generations as primitive to be able to genuinely appreciate “primitive” art. Price (32) believes this is the case because of an ethnocentric (i.e., Western) ideology and mentality that brings a preconception to primitive art, imagining primitive artists m

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Cultural Identity Questions. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:49, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1685279.html