The Watched without Organs: A Deleuzean Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

Subject Areas : Journal of Teaching English Language Studies

Sara Faryam Rad ¹ , Hassan Shahabi ² , Shahram Raeisi Sistani ³

1 - Ph.D. student, Department of Humanities, College of English Language and Literature, Kerman Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran.
2 - Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities, College of English Language and Literature, Kerman Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran.
3 - Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran.

Received: 2023-12-17 Accepted : 2023-01-20 Published : 2024-04-21

Keywords: Deleuzean BwO, Love, Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus ,

Abstract :

Suzan-Lori Parks, as a female black playwright, in her postmodern drama, Venus, has portrayed the condition of living of a black South African girl, subjugated under the hegemonic power of dominant colonizers. Saartje Bartmann, later renamed as Venus Hottentot, is seduced and then exploited by the colonizing power, both men and women. In the process of being sent from Africa to Europe, she is being watched, performing ritual dance and then, scrutinized by the colonizers. In this regard, the present study aims to read Venus by borrowing a different perspective from Deleuzean terminology to clarify and open up the less-discussed and investigated aspects of Parks’s drama to conclude that Venus’s slavery narrative, resembling a Deleuzean Watched without Organs, while entails a process of becoming different and against the dominant power, a schizoid person. It can be inferred as a form of Parksean resistance against the dominant metanarratives and creating her own mini-narrative.

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