Where Are the Zoos Today? (Part 3 of 3)

Image description: thumbnail depicts a picture of Carmen Miranda’s face. She is facing the camera and has a flower and fruit headdress.

“So here we are, almost year 2000, almost 180 years later, and yet almost identical, oppressive, hierarchical systems continue to exist ruled substantially by the same people that were running them when the Spaniards were here. Now, how is that maintained?” asks Jack Forbes.

   In verso 10.1 of Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand describes watching the beginning of the Iraq War: “I was sitting in my living room in a city of about five million people observing a city of about five million people being bombed.”

    With choices to make: watch re-runs of Law & Order, Seinfeld, a basketball game, or watch the war.

“In other words, nothing stopped for the war,” she remarks. “There is in our lives a televisual remove that one is afforded as a consumer of everything, a spectator of everything. The great spectator of the world. Nothing happens here, at least nothing that is not entertaining.”

     In 2011, an article in the Guardian commenting on Paris exhibition “Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage,” looking at it as an “international phenomenon.” The article points out that while human zoos became less popular with the advent of movies in the 1930s, they continued into the late 1950s, with the last captives being Congo villagers exhibited in Belgium in 1958.

    I think it is important to note that the “decline” of the human zoos may have less to do with their actual popularity, and more the fact that they changed formats, and become more sophisticated at the dawn of cinema. It is easy to gesture to “Birth of a Nation” here, but instead I will look at two examples in media: Carmen Miranda and the “controversy” over the casting of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone.

    Carmen Miranda knew the zoo better than most. As Caetano Veloso wrote for the New York Times, “Carmen conquered ‘white’ America as no other South American had done or ever would. She was the only representative of South America who was universally readable, and it is exactly because of this quality that self-parody became her inescapable prison.”

    As a representative for South America as a whole (her band’s passage to the United States was paid for by the president of Brazil at the time), she faced severe criticism and scrutiny. In her home of Brazil, her look was considered “too black” by some, while others believed she had been Americanized and commercialized. Later in career, she was mandated by contract to wear the fruit-laden headpieces she became known for. She was a complicated symbol of both pride and shame for Brazilians.

    This is not to disparage Carmen Miranda’s artistry in any way, but merely to point out how somebody can simultaneously be a participant, watcher, and captive in the zoo. As Dionne Brand puts it in The Blue Clerk, “"I am a watcher of the zoo, the author says. As well as a performer, this snide and dangerous clerk interjects."

    A more contemporary example of this phenomenon as it more directly relates to colorism is the casting of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone. This egregious casting of a light-skinned Black women put into blackface is only one example of modern minstrelsy that perpetuates the modern zoo. Here, Saldana is literally being rewarded to capture the image of Nina Simone, not in guns and goods, but instead in millions of dollars and intangibles (fame, prestige, etc.), dishonoring a dark-skinned advocate for social justice in the process.

    More instances of capture: the Saweetie McDonald’s meal, biopics about Black nationalists produced by multi-billion dollar corporations, and CIA agents played as sympathetic heroes in other movies produced by multi-billion dollar corporations in the context of African liberation.

    What is interesting to note about these exploitations is how they take on a tele-visual and spectacular dimension, perhaps in a Situationist sense, but here I quote Brand again: “the spectacle, of course, was for the grand spectator, we, libidinous for disasters elsewhere, hate and pity is what we find sexy.”

    The fact that the same people who want us subjugated or dead often also find us sexy is something with which all marginalized genders can resonate. And it is a problem, and it deserves analysis within the historical context of the human zoos.