Heres the debut of another Column Contest winner: Field Notes from Gentrified Places by Vinson Cunningham. Because life is boring, and there wasn’t always such a thing as Netflix, and—let’s face it—good entertainment is way too hard to find, Saartjie Baartman, a young South African slave woman, was brought first to England and later to France, where in the early nineteenth century crowds gathered with the sole intention of looking at her butt. She was called the Hottentot Venus. It was large, Ms. Baartman’s behind, astonishingly big, and for a public held rapt by several spells – phrenology, white supremacy, and, in all seriousness, probably just a crippling amount of boredom—it proved irresistible, if only for a moment.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 14:30:01 +0000
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