Чтобы использовать цитирование, отправку по электронной почте, сохранение и экспорт, сначала выберите элементы результатов.
У вас может быть доступ к полной статье.
Попробуйте войти через свое учреждение и проверьте, есть ли у него доступ к полному тексту.
ABSTRACT: This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn't already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.
In this incarnation, she appears in the archive of slavery as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls. But we could have as easily encountered her in a ship's ledger in the tally of debits; or in an overseer's journal-"last night I laid with Dido on the ground"; or as an amorous bed-fellow with a purse so elastic "that it will contain the largest thing any gentleman can present her with" in Harris's List of Covent- Garden Ladies; or as the paramour in the narrative of a mercenary soldier in Surinam; or as a brothel owner in a traveler's account of the prostitutes of Barbados; or as a minor character in a nineteenth-century pornographic novel.1 Variously named Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon's laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master's bedroom-turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.
What else is there to know? Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all.2 Hers is an untimely story told by a failed witness. It would be centuries before she would be allowed to "try her tongue."3
I could say after a famous philosopher that what we know.
