‘Defending the race’: the Italian reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism

Abstract

Abstract Abstract In 1938 the regime's popular periodical La Difesa della Razza published the portrait of Saartjie Baartman (a Khoisan woman known to the western world as 'The Hottentot Venus') to discourage miscegenation in the empire of Italian East Africa. But by 1938, Italian public and scientific interest in the Hottentot Venus had long faded away. In addition, readily available photographs of Italo-Eritreans could have been used to show the 'outcome' of miscegenation. Why then did the regime's organ publish a portrait of 'The Hottentot Venus'? This article addresses this question, and explores how Baartman's story could serve the regime's aim of forging a new 'racial consciousness' among Italians. By focusing on the transformation of scientific discourses from the 1850s to the late 1930s, and on their silences, the article illuminates the process through which some of the regime's anthropologists constructed a new, 'made in Italy' story for the Hottentot Venus. Deliberately leaving out all the main issues long debated during the previous century, they turned this figure into an empty icon to support Fascist colonial obsession with the purity and prestige of the Italian race. Keywords: AnthropologyFascismMiscegenationRaceSegregation