Why are there African huts at the zoo? The racialized spectacle of conservation

ABSTRACT

With 700 million annual global visitors, zoos transmit widely consumed stories about human relationships with nature and animals. In recent decades, zoos have framed their mission around wildlife conservation. Yet just as zoos pivoted to conservation, they simultaneously re-introduced ‘native village’ exhibits: African huts, thatched roofs, and Thai tuktuks. This article examines the Denver Zoo in Colorado, arguing that the zoo produces a racialized spectacle of conservation. Drawing on quantitative and photographic documentation of the zoo’s signage and architecture, I describe how the African and Asian exhibits at the zoo are the only sections representing human culture, and feature elaborate architectures, artwork, and descriptions of stereotypically rural and primitive people. These representations ‘naturalize race’ by portraying these cultures as closer to nature. Zoo exhibits simultaneously reproduce Malthusian narratives of environmental decline, blaming African and Asian populations for harming wildlife through overpopulation, deforestation, and illegal poaching. White Western conservationists are portrayed as educating local tribes in proper beliefs and scientific management. Meanwhile, exhibits erase how colonial exploitation, capitalism, and conservation itself have destabilized human-ecological relationships across the globe. This article contributes to broader literatures on the spectacle of neoliberal global conservation, demonstrating the racialization of this spectacle.

KEYWORDS:

• neoliberal conservation
• race
• neoliberal natures
• racialization
• human zoos
• Denver Zoo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. CLR Design’s ‘People’ webpage (accessed July 2022) features (what appear to be) 19 White people out of 20 people. All but 2 of the Principals, Senior Associates, Senior Principals, Senior Architects, or Leads referenced on the site refer to 12 White men, all trained in landscape architecture. Not a single woman nor Black person is mentioned on the ‘History’ page of the website which highlights the historical achievements of the firm. CLR Design has helped design so many U.S. zoos (master plans and exhibits) that it impossible to list here.

2. I thank my graduate student Juliet Seibel for this observation.

3. Only 317 are analyzed in my tables. The discrepancy comes from a subset of signs for bathroom signage, directions, or other signs that I could not classify as referring to either a region or specific animals.

4. These exhibits were designed in partnership with CLR Design.

5. To be clear, I’m not analyzing the zoo’s actual conservation programs – a separate topic. My concern here is with the way they are portrayed.

6. The same basic issues regarding Africa re-appear. It will feature a new ‘Africa: A Wild Savanna’ Exhibit, implying that Africa is a wild savanna.

7. As noted, more nuanced discussions (like the use of cell phones and their effect on coltan mines in the Congo) are often in smaller fonts and pack less of a punch than the visual spectacles of architecture, art, and photographs.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Sociology Department at Colorado State University. I want to extend a special thanks to Juliet Seibel for her literature review work, to Leisl Carr Childers and Mike Childers for their enthusiasm and historical thinking, to Lucas Avelar for his suggestions on world fair literatures, and to my daughter Jade for her patience with mom as I dilly dallied in exhibits. Folks in the Geography Department at the University of Denver and two incredibly insightful reviewers helped sharpen my thinking, as did emergent conversations with Gretchen Walters, Samantha Sithole, and Olivier Hymas.

Notes on contributors

Jessie K. Luna

Jessie Luna is an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University, specializing in environment, food and agriculture, development, and the sociology of race. She holds a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder and a Masters degree in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. She also served as an agriculture Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali, West Africa. Broadly, her research examines how inequalities of neoliberal capitalism are produced and justified. Her recent research investigates agricultural modernization in Burkina Faso through the lens of racial capitalism.