Uddin, Lisa (Author)
***** This study investigates the renewal of American zoos in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing for two decades thereafter, zoo makers in the United States grew ever more ashamed of the physical condition of their animals displays and worked to give them a new material form. Bars came down and expansive, multi-species enclosures simulating natural territories and encouraging natural behaviors began to take their place, albeit it with the unevenness and historical repetition of many so-called design revolutions. Simultaneously, zoo makers grew concerned about the international supply and reproductive prospects of captive wildlife and began to breed their charges with renewed dedication, expertise, and publicity. This dissertation focuses on how this two-part revitalization, spatial and biological, constituted the birth of a "new zoo" in the United States and how it also constituted a re-birth of white public culture. Drawing from other critical zoo history, animal studies, studies on the social construction of whiteness, and public sphere theory, I interpret the new zoo's multi-mediated display of animals as a process of public culture formation that a range of mid-twentieth- century Americans recognized and responded to as racially white. More specifically, I employ discourse analysis on archival sources to show how the new zoo makers constructed white racial identities for a multiplicity of spectators, enlisting zoo animals as powerful surrogates for racial difference and sameness while also grappling with their semantic instability. A first chapter explores zoo-making in the nineteenth century as a racialized investment in the civilizing potential of public animal exhibition in American cities, which would influence the renewal of zoos a hundred years later. The following chapters concern the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park in Washington D.C. and the two campuses of the Zoological Society of San Diego in the 1960s and 1970s, examining regionally specific discourses of slum clearance, white tiger breeding, open space, and white rhino endangerment. The conclusion situates the 2007 public controversy surrounding the "Maasai Journey" program at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo as an historically mature example of the new zoo and its racial politics. *****
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/01 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3343622.
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