Baartman and the Private

Despite this, the South African committee that negotiated her return declined to have the remains tested to verify whether they belonged to Baartman, or even whether the three sets of remains belonged to the same person. For the committee, to do so would amount to a replication of the violation, repeating once again the “great long insult” to which Baartman had been subjected during her life. Instead, on August 9, 2002, Baartman was given a ceremonial burial in Hankey, South Africa, near the place where she was born. This decision of not exposing Baartman’s remains to scrutiny yet again was the South African committee’s assertion and attempt to define a way of knowing differently, whereby it decided to accept without further DNA testing that the remains offered by France belonged to Baartman. This signaled an end to the invasive visibility to which Baartman was subjected during her lifetime and for 159 years after her death.

In “Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure That Has Been Looked at Too Much,” South African gender studies scholar Gabeba Baderoon explains how “dominated peoples have long crafted a way to exist and keep their histories outside of conventional archives.” The politics of knowledge, in other words, is deeply entangled in a politics of the private and in who gets to lay claim to privacy and subjectivity. The assertion of “privacy” in this context is not the same as privatizing – an economic calculation “outside history,” made for the purpose of maximizing profits; rather, in Baderoon’s theory of the private, it draws attention to the “intimate, personal, closed, hidden, coded, secret, veiled, unknown, the apparently meaningless, the invisible, the ordinary, the in-between, the silent … the underside … unofficial … unpredictable, and unreliable in dominant views of history.”67

What is privacy for already exposed people in the age of big data? For oppressed people, I think privacy is not only about protecting some things from view, but also about what is strategically exposed. This might look like Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of slain teenager Emmett Till, choosing to expose the mutilated body of her son because “I think everybody needs to know what happened.” It could also look like the organization Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, exposing the lies of law enforcement officials who claim not to know about the very surveillance techniques that the organization records them using. Organizers participate in community events, public rallies, and protests and proceed to “watch the watchers.” In one video, activists are shown interviewing police officers who act as if they had never heard of “Freedom on the Move” vans – a mobile video surveillance system “intended for use by military, border patrol, and law enforcement agencies”; and, just as they make these denials, the video cuts to the vans driving by the May Day rally.68 Countering these forms of technological exposure, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition created “A People’s Audit,” which includes survey results of community members’ experiences of preemptive policing and harassment.69 If surveillance treats people like a “surface,” then countering this form of violent exposure can entail listening deeply to the everyday encounters of those who are forcibly watched. This points to a different way of making sense and knowledge of the world, a theory of privacy predicated on mutual respect and dignity.