"Black women" as a rhetorical tool of persuasion

How theories can support, obstruct, and determine understanding and developing of various cultural subjects? The paper approaches this question by analyzing the biographies of two women, who are called black: Saartije Baartman and Waris Dirie. In the perspective proposed by this paper, biography is not conceived of as the sequence of successive objective facts but as the cultural construct defined by many factors (social, political, etc). This construct is changeable and may occur in many variants, however a specific horizon of cultural imagination, established in the particular time and place, stimulates creating certain types of biographical narratives. Biographies of Saartije Baartman and Waris Dirie have been told in many ways, for various reasons and for different purposes; they have been involved in ideological, political, scientific, and also popular culture discourses. The juxtaposition of these cases may disclose more meanings than single analysis of isolated biography. The paper discusses how biographies become effective as persuasive tools for negotiating and contesting different opinions and convictions. It also presents a reverse of this interaction: a situation where certain theoretical orders (e.g. postcolonial theory, feminism) can ideologize and influence the biographies, providing both a language and a rhetorical frame for expressing experiences and emotions. In this way, theoretical orders can colonize biographies.