Zoo Renewal

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of heightened anxiety about urban decline in the United States, when central cities became objects of widespread fear and white flight fueled the growth of suburban communities that sprouted up around them. This was also a period when American zoos grappled with a growing sense of unease about their programs and exhibits. In this innovative study, the visual and cultural historian Lisa Uddin argues not only that urban renewal and zoo renewal often went hand in hand but also that zoo reform campaigns resonated with the racial and spatial politics of American cities. Deploying cultural theory to analyze an array of images, Uddin aims to show how zoos and their nonhuman inhabitants became agents in “constructing postwar whiteness” (p. 25). Following an introduction that presents the historiographical context and the author's theoretical influences, chapter 1 explores a series of critiques of the sorry state of animal enclosures in midcentury zoos, including Desmond Morris's 1968 Life magazine article, “The Shame of the Naked Cage,” and numerous troubling photographs that Garry Winograd and Peter Batten published soon after. According to Uddin, these critiques collectively mirrored “white middle-class shame over racial injustice in American cities” (p. 29

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Environmental ethics · Historiography · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Shame · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law

• Animal Housing and Human-Animal Relations

  Open Access•Kristian Bjorkdahl, Tone Druglitrø•Animal Housing and Human-Animal…•2016

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