Abstract
This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.
Highlights
The performative representation in museological display of dinosaurs, those extinct denizens of the Mesozoic era, has been informed since their articulated remains first shared exhibition spaces with human spectators in the nineteenth century by theatrical and aesthetic choices situated in discourses of Darwinism and eugenics, settler colonialism, and frontier mythology concomitantly emerging with the science of dinosaur fossils
Sioux stories of the “thunder beings” that populated the land during the “first sunrise of time”
The space from which these dinosaurs hailed was not that of the hushed vaulted temple-like galleries of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where their remains were displayed, but of some alien wilderness, as difficult to imagine as the dinosaurs themselves, with only bits of fossilized plant remains to give indication of the flora
Summary
The performative representation in museological display of dinosaurs, those extinct denizens of the Mesozoic era, has been informed since their articulated remains first shared exhibition spaces with human spectators in the nineteenth century by theatrical and aesthetic choices situated in discourses of Darwinism and eugenics, settler colonialism, and frontier mythology concomitantly emerging with the science of dinosaur fossils. Biblical role of master.”[8] To infuse prehistoric animals like dinosaurs with contemporary human concerns involves the affective projection of ideologically charged feelings and emotions upon the non-human other, but a projection across multiple temporalities Such practices of meaning making allow for museum visitors to cognitively apprehend the specimens on display across what would otherwise be an immense gulf separating spectator and object.
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