Staging/caging 'otherness' in the postcolony: spectres of the human zoo

Abstract

When artists engage in postcolonial critiques, reworkings or parodies of what is often called 'human zoos', their performances claim access to the real, the culturally authentic, and the psychically primal – three expectations which Hal Foster (1995) qualifies as quasi-anthropological or pseudo-ethnographic. This article is an attempt to substantiate, expand and refine Foster's argument, in three subsequent steps. First, the article explores how Foster's ethnographic challenge for contemporary artists can be substantiated by looking into the postcolonial reinvention of the historical ethnographic encounter in anthropology and cultural studies. Second, as a point of comparison, the article examines the format of cultural representation variously known as 'human zoos', 'black villages' or 'human showcases', as exemplary loci of colonial ethnographic work. Third, the article probes the ethnographic aspirations and tensions in a contemporary art project which directly engages with the human zoo as historical format of exhibiting alterity. The project in question is 'Exhibit B' by the South African artist, Brett Bailey, which explores the representational mechanisms and ethical dimensions of the 'human zoo' in the way postcolonial Europe deals with its historical and contemporary 'others'. Inequality is identified as the central issue and the ethnographic stance as the ultimate remedy to overcome the pitfalls of the 'human zoo'. The latter boils down to 'ventriloquism' which, with the help of Walter Benjamin, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, we call 'bourgeois', and consists in using one's position of domination in order to silence, direct or even insinuate oneself into the other's voice.