The Human Zoos of Modernity (Part 1 of 3)

Image Description: Thumbnail depicts a stereoscope of the St Louis World Fair’s Festival Hall and Great Fountain. The image is repeated twice. A crowd of onlookers watches.

    I was on the phone with my friend Erica, a Black woman like me. She was describing an encounter she had with a man on the street recently.

“He looked at me like I was an animal in the zoo,’ she said, ruminating. “A person who thinks like that…what would he do to me?”

     This immediately struck a chord with me, because I was already working on this blog post, about the human zoos of modernity and how we live out the legacy of these zoos in various aspects of capitalist life. To me the concept of the zoo invokes the exploitation that we experience or participate in every day.  

     I was not aware of the reality of the human zoos until I read The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand, where she points out that “the first bones emerged in the human zoos” in the 15th century, by none other than Columbus.

     When Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the Taíno people, he devised a terrible plan to fund the Conquest by enslaving Native Americans. He referred to them as his granjeria, or granary, as described by scholar Jack Forbes in an interview with Listervelt Middleton on For The People, a South Carolina Educational Television program: “it was the granary that was going to pay for the conquest, that is, Native American bodies. Columbus himself sent at least 3,000 and possibly as many as 6,000 or more Native American slaves to Europe.”

     In the process of this exploitation, he invented the modern human zoos:

     “Columbus reached Lisbon in early March 1493. Many people came to see the captive Americans and it is very likely that some…were taken nine leagues into the interior to see the king of Portugal…Shortly thereafter some of the Americans were taken to Seville, perhaps seven to ten being still alive and together. Some were left in that area, while about six or seven were taken overland across Spain to Barcelona where they were displayed before the monarchs in mid-April.” (from Jack Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, pg. 24)

    These spectacles or “shows” for the benefit of the Crown were a proof of concept for the burgeoning imperialism of the day. And they were repeated at the human zoos of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, another proof of concept for another growing imperialism.

     The United States, hot on the heels of defeating Spain and taking its colonial possessions (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines), was celebrating the 100-year-old Louisiana Purchase and looking to expand. The Philippine civil governor at the time, William Taft, wanted to showcase the new colony.

     Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, and in 1904 added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that “in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

     The Monroe Doctrine, which claimed the United States’ hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, was inspired by the Doctrine of Discovery, which provided the spiritual justification for Euro-Christian colonialism. This Doctrine was incorporated into U.S. law in Johnson v. M’Intosh, where Chief Justice John Marshall stated that “[c]onquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny” and that “title by conquest is acquired and maintained by force.”

     So this was the scene, at the turn of the 20th century.