• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.253-270
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how Suzan-Lori Parks reveals colonized oppression and violence in a black woman's body in Venus. The body of Hottentot Venus is an 'object' of white male spectators' gazes and a dissection from a medical study. The report on her pathologic anatomy gives the audience the illusion that the body of a black woman is inferior to those of others. Not only 'subjective' aesthetics, but also 'objective' medicine makes us confuse 'fact' with 'truth' about black women. By publicly exhibiting her erotic body, Venus is represented as a singular emblem for nineteenth-century colonial discourse on race and sexuality. Her body stands for the powerful signifier of raped Africa. A distinctive feature of black Venus is her raciality. The ownership of her body is only transferred from Mother-Showman to Doctor Baron. She had no right to her ownership. Her body is an object of hatred and curiosity and at the same time a site which is represented by conflicting desires. Parks' eventual goal in Venus is to investigate 'hindsight' of Venus Hottentot, 'the past' and 'the posterior'. As the meaning of original chocolate can be regained, the insulted and damaged body of Venus should also be recovered and resurrected.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.129-147
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• 2008

Since the beginning of her dramatic career, Suzan-Lori Parks has considered digging up and restoring African-American history buried under the dominant white Anglo-Saxon history as her mission as a playwright. In Red Letter Plays, she attempts what Deborah Geis called "canon-critique" by taking canonical work by Nathaniel Hawthorne and casting an African-American character as the main character and describing her oppression as an African-American female. This paper argues that Suzan-Lori Parks accuses the oppressive social system by restoring and representing the history of sexual, economic, and racial exploitation that African-American females had to suffer through the dominant image of body and blood. Parks had to rewrite the history of black female characters on their bodies and in the blood because their bodies have been the ultimate object of revulsion and attraction in the perspective of white male. While abhorring and despising Hester La Negrita's abject body, male characters in In the Blood nonetheless not only exploit her sexually and economically but also impregnate her. Hester resorts to her only means of revolting against this oppressive system; she kills her most beloved son and writes "A" on the floor with his blood. Likewise, Hester Smith in Fucking A, who wears "A" on her bosom like Hester Prynne, which in this case means "abortionist," "saves" her son from the hunters by slitting his throat. Abundant graphic and sensational images written on black female body and in the blood are Parks's dramatic strategy to rewrite the forgotten and hidden history of black women's history.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.301-322
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• 2008

Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self was published in the Colored American Magazine during 1902-03. As a literary experimentalist and a political protester, Hopkins uses her fiction as a medium to overcome and ameliorate the violently racialized surroundings of the turn-of-the-century America. Having been faced with racist rhetorics and theories growing on biological differences between races, Hopkins must have felt an overwhelming urgency to challenge the heritage of slavery in American history. In order to speak out her political agenda in such a milieu, she needed a new setting as well as new narrative materials for the new era. She had to move the setting from America to Africa, the ancient utopian Ethiopia; her interest in the ancient African civilization reflects both a popular African-American vision of Africa and the movement of "black nationalism" of the time. She also needed materials from nineteenthcentury sciences, the newly evolving theories of psychology and mysticism (spiritualism/mesmerism), to explore the meaning of "the hidden self" which unfolds the complex nature of Hopkin's position on race, "blood," and African-American racial subjectivity. Hopkins in the novel explores not the color line but the bloodline. Tracing the horrific legacy of incest in the history of slavery, she attempts to redefine the true racial identity of African-Americans in America and to reconstruct their past, both family and race history. At the very center of her major tropes in the novel-such as "of one blood," "the hidden self," and incest-exists female body. Black female body, though it represents the violent site of sexual body (rape and incest) in slavery, ultimately becomes a vehicle to convey and preserve the truth of racial memory/past/history for African-Americans. As a conveyor of the past, black women not just connect the past and the present but also reawaken AfricanAmericans with the legacy of the African 'pure' bloodline. Hopkins's vision here necessitates the reevaluation of black women's role in family and history, heralding the 20th-century black feminine writing. With the major tropes, Hopkins clearly suggests that the blood of (African-)Americans is unrecognizably intermixed. Although the novel ends with ambivalence and without resolution on what Africa signifies, those tropes certainly offer her a vehicle for criticizing as well as for challenging the racial reality of America.