11/21/2022 0 Comments Venus in two acts![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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