Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage

Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage , by Paul Blanchard; Gilles Boëtsch; Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, Ne paperback copy in wraps, still in publisher’s shrink wrap, perfect condition as issued,  oversized 4to, 4lbs, insurance is  required, will not ship overseas. 382 pps, mostly color illustrations.  Scarce! Actes Sud Editions, 2011

“Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, curated by former French international footballer turned anti-racism campaigner Lilian Thuram, traces the history of a practice which started when Christopher Columbus displayed six “Indians” at the Spanish royal court in 1492 and went on to become a mass entertainment phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Millions of spectators turned out to see “savages” in zoos, circuses, mock villages and freak shows from London to St Louis, Barcelona to Tokyo. These “human specimens”, and “living museums” served both colonialist propaganda and scientific theories of so-called racial hierarchies.”
—The Guardian.

Human Zoos offers a fascinating, sobering and macabre tour of mans exploitation of man–that is, Western mans exploitation of non-Western men and women–as recorded throughout the early history of photography, from the 1860s to the 1930s and the invention of humane exhibiting of nonwhite persons. Freak shows, the circuses of Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum and European colonial exhibitions provided the occasions for most of these images, several of which were incorporated into posters, postcards and other ephemera, designed with an improbable jauntiness. Human Zoos traces the evolution of such paradigmatic conceptions as specimen, savage and native for the designation of peoples as various as Native Americans, Asians and Africans from all corners of the continent. As horrific and compelling as it is brilliantly researched and compiled, this volume unflinchingly surveys the very recent history of the Wests arrogant abuse of those deemed to fall outside its brutal terms of civilization.

$ 975.00