"Venus Worked in Bronze": African American women writers and classical beauty myths
Embargo Date
2027-07-21
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
“‘Venus Worked in Bronze’: African American Women Writers and Classical Beauty Myths” explores how African American women writers use the classical tradition from Ancient Greece and Rome in their work. It specifically centers and interrogates iterations of the Black Venus as she appears in African American women's writing. It asks what it means to be beautiful in America and offers multiple answering perspectives to Saidiya Hartman’s question from “Venus in Two Acts” (2007), “can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor?” It argues that white supremacist ideas of classical beauty dominate in American life and culture and that beauty is constantly wielded as a racialized and gendered weapon against women of color, specifically Black women. It uses the concept of transformative classicism to analyze the power, potential, and limitations of reclaiming a classical beauty aesthetic through the figure of Venus. Transformative classicism holds that Black women writers invoke classical myths of transformation and metamorphosis to interrogate racialized and gendered histories of objectification, particularly by reimagining myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It particularly examines how the beauty, fashion, and cosmetics industries figure in the long afterlife of slavery. As slavery attempted to transform Black women into consumable commodity objects, to literally objectify them, the texts examine these objectifications in American contexts from 1773 to the present day, including work from Phillis Wheatley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, and Robin Coste Lewis to demonstrate that classical beauty myths are often wielded as tools of white supremacy and so must be resisted and reclaimed.
Description
2024