Representing"Hottentots" in Early Modern England

[pynchonoid]

...of possible interest to V., GR, and M&D readers:


Linda E. Merians. Envisioning the Worst:
Representations of "Hottentots" in Early Modern
England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001.
289 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $46.50
(cloth), ISBN 0-87413-738-1. 

Reviewed by Neil Parsons, Department of History,
University of Botswana.
Published by H-SAfrica (August, 2003) 

Linda Merians sets out to show that the English
literary image of "Hottentots" as the most beastly of
peoples was constructed in order to show up the
English/British as the best of all peoples in the
world. Merians traces this image from published
accounts of the earliest contacts between English
sailors and Khoekhoe people at the Cape of Good Hope
in 1591, through the adoption of the word "Hottentot"
from the Dutch in 1670, to the early nineteenth
century when Britain colonized the Cape. By then
disparaging remarks about actual Khoekhoe people had
more or less disappeared in published accounts of
"exploration," but the figure of the "Hottentot Venus"
herself appearing in England and France helped
perpetuate the word "Hottentot" as a general synonym
for an ignorant yahoo.  [...] 

...continues:
<http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=38601065338727>


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