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"Chase-Riboud, Barbara."
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I always knew : a memoir
\"American artist, poet, and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939), has had an unusually varied and highly successful career across genres and media. As a poet, her work was edited by Toni Morrison and she is a recipient of the Carl Sandburg Prize. As a fiction writer, she was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and her first historical novel, Sally Hemings (1979) was a bestseller. But Chase-Riboud trained as a visual artist, primarily as a sculptor, and her large installations made of fabric and bronze are powerful, with references to the human figure, her travels in North Africa and China, and the American Civil Rights Movement. She and Bettye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art, and her work is in many major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou. This book, framed as a memoir, is composed of over forty years' worth of letters Chase-Riboud wrote to her beloved mother, and which she found in her mother's house around the time of her death. The letters begin in 1957, while the artist was a student in Paris, and continue through 1991. As Chase-Riboud writes in the introduction, \"This is not autobiography, nor biography, nor memoir nor fiction but a strange hybrid mixture of disparate and even contradictory narratives out of which portraits of the two of us emerge, separate yet united and indivisible.\"\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Modernist Antagonisms and Material Reciprocities: Chase-Riboud’s Albino
This paper considers the material exchange initiated in the early sculptural practice of Barbara Chase-Riboud when she began to incorporate fiber into her bronze sculptures by looking closely at her 1972 work, The Albino. I suggest that Chase-Riboud staked a claim for sculpture as a symbolic site at which material knowledge might be transferred across time and space. The work’s negotiations open western sculptural practice to a hybridized form located within transhistorical associations that rework the alleged specificities of both craft and bronze into sites for the exchange of ideas and practices.
Journal Article
Chase Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) and the Neo-Victorian: The Problematization of South-Africa and the Vulnerability and Resistance of the Black Other
This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud's neoVictorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a result of these will be a substantial argument throughout the text represented in the historical and fictional character of the Venus Hottentot. She was seen as the icon of sexual deviancy and became a victim of the white colonizer as the embodiment of black racialized sexuality for Europeans. However, despite her vulnerability, in the narrative she gains agency in resistance in Butlerean terms. In the Hottentot Venus, Barbara ChaseRiboud tries to bring to light the experience and the memory of slavery as they constitute a key element in the reconstruction of the past and in the construction of a better future. Similarly, the process of recovery and identity construction in a postcolonial era determined by the traces of colonial trauma is an important element in the fictionalization of Sarah Baartman's life as an icon of the idealization and problematization of South-Africa. These issues bring to the fore questions of race and feminism, the idealization of the colonies and colonized people in contrast with white imperial subjects, and the consideration of the contemporary neo-slave narrative as a neo-Victorian genre.
Journal Article
On Hearing of a Death in Prison: For George Jackson Blois, August 21, 1971
A poem is presented.
Journal Article
Whose Trauma? Discursive Practices in Saartjie Baartman’s Literary Afterlives
After a brief contextualization of the figure of Sartjie Baartman – the Khoisan woman displayed in London and Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the “Hottentot Venus” – this contribution addresses the issue of contemporary discursive practices making use of Baartman’s icon. Starting from Thabo Mbeki’s speech at the ‘funeral’ of Saartjie Baartman as an introduction, the article focuses on the analysis of two very different novels, Zoë Wicomb’s \"David’s Story\" (2000) and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s \"Hottentot Venus. A Novel\" (2003). Their very dissimilarity can tell us much on the discursive practices concerning Baartman’s figure; yet, the two works permit comparison because they share the same wish to shed light on the relationship between past and present by means of an overall structural complexity. Both novels make use of the postmodern features of a multi-voiced and multi-layered narration, and avoid granting authority to a single version of history. Moreover, both \"David’s Story\" and \"Hottentot Venus\" engage in a narrative relating to individual and collective trauma; that is why the article briefly introduces the ongoing discussion focused on the application of Western trauma theories to the South African historical and political situation. The literary investigation provided here takes into consideration the aesthetic aspect of both books; I contend that Chase-Riboud’s narrative is unsatisfactory as a novel, and that its literary weakness diminishes the strength of its socio-political stances.
Journal Article