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Staging/caging 'otherness' in the postcolony:spectres of the human zooChokri Ben Chikha & Karel ArnautPublished online: 11 De c 2013.

To cite this article: Chokri Ben Chikha & Karel Arnaut (2013) Staging/caging 'otherness' in the postcolony:spectres of the human zoo, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 27:6, 661-683, DOI:10.1080/02560046.2013.867589

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ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049pp. 661 – 683

27 (6) 2013 © Critical Arts Projects & Unisa PressDOI:10.1080/02560046.2013.867589

Staging/caging ‘otherness’ in thepostcolony: spectres of the human zoo

Chokri Ben Chikha and Karel Arnaut

AbstractWhen artists engage in postcolonial critiques, reworkings or parodies of what is oftencalled ‘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, expandand refine Foster’s argument, in three subsequent steps. First, the article explores howFoster’s ethnographic challenge for contemporary artists can be substantiated by lookinginto the postcolonial reinvention of the historical ethnographic encounter in anthropology andcultural studies. Second, as a point of comparison, the article examines the format of culturalrepresentation variously known as ‘human zoos’, ‘black villages’ or ‘human showcases’,as exemplary loci of colonial ethnographic work. Third, the article probes the ethnographicaspirations and tensions in a contemporary art project which directly engages with thehuman zoo as historical format of exhibiting alterity. The project in question is ‘Exhibit B’ bythe South African artist, Brett Bailey, which explores the representational mechanisms andethical dimensions of the ‘human zoo’ in the way postcolonial Europe deals with its historicaland contemporary ‘others’. Inequality is identified as the central issue and the ethnographicstance as the ultimate remedy to overcome the pitfalls of the ‘human zoo’. The latter boilsdown to ‘ventriloquism’ which, with the help of Walter Benjamin, Peter Stallybrass and AllonWhite, we call ‘bourgeois’, and consists in using one’s position of domination in order tosilence, direct or even insinuate oneself into the other’s voice.

Keywords: Brett Bailey, colonial anthropology, human zoo, postcolonial ethnography,representational inequality, ventriloquism

Chokri Ben Chikha is performer, director and doctoral researcher at the School of Arts, Ghent UniversityCollege, Belgium. [email protected]. Karel Arnaut is research fellow, Max Planck Institute forthe Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. [email protected]




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It is in fact doubtful whether the bourgeoisie has ever returned from that Voyagede Bougainville where, in imaginary mimicry of a natural and critical native voice,

colonized and on the edge of annihilation, it could at last speak to itself of all that itdesired and denied. (Stallybrass and White 1986: 200)

In the text informing this themed issue, Hal Foster (1995) observes the urgeamong contemporary artists to engage (directly or indirectly) with anthropology.Anthropology is a discipline those artists nd attractive because of, among otherthings, its access to alterity, its conceptual focus on culture(s), its commitment to on-site collaboration ( eldwork), and its re exivity. This ethnographic turn in art, Fosterwarns, holds the risk of instrumentalisation and appropriation of ‘the other’, or, inhis words, ‘it has also obliterated much in the eld of the other, and in its very name.That is the opposite of a critique of ethnographic authority, indeed the opposite ofethnographic method, at least as I understand them’ (Foster 1995: 307). Althoughthis critique is outspoken it is also obscure, because Foster does not explain in anydetail what he understands by ‘ethnographic method’, nor does he provide examplesof artists or works that deserve to be quali ed as pseudo-ethnographic. We will tryto show that it is critical to pursue these issues in order to expand and re ne Foster’sotherwise valuable argument.

This article can thus be seen as complementing Foster’s along two lines:anthropological and artistic. 1 In the following section, we explore the anthropologicaldimension with a narrative that focuses on the paradigm shift from modern(colonial) to contemporary (postcolonial) anthropology. From this shift emerges a

type of ethnographer who strongly resembles ‘the artist as ethnographer’, whomFoster seems to be looking for. In the second section, we revisit the heydays ofcolonial anthropology and examine a format of cultural representation variouslyknown as ‘human zoos’ (Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch et al. 2002), ‘black villages’(Bergougniou, Clignet and David 2001) or ‘human showcases’ (Corbey 1993). 2 Anthropology’s involvement in human zoos ranges from 1) offering elements ofthe conceptual framework (of ‘social and cultural evolutionism’) for its invention inthe course of the 19 th century, over 2) legitimising its existence by recognising it asa site of scienti c research (observations, language sampling), to, more recently, 3)

becoming its analyst and often erce critic. We conclude our analysis in the third andnal section of this article by probing the ethnographic aspirations and tensions in

a contemporary art project which directly engages with the human zoo as historicalformat of exhibiting alterity. The performance project ‘Exhibit B’, by the SouthAfrican artist, Brett Bailey, explores the representational mechanisms and ethicaldimensions of the human zoo in postcolonial Europe.

In comparison to the vast amount of historical, descriptive and analytical workon human zoos, little attention has been given to the postcolonial legacies ofthe historical human zoo, not least in art projects. There are nonetheless several



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

postcolonial critiques, reworkings or parodies of human zoos in contemporary art (seeArnaut 2011b for an overview). In all these cases artists deal with a genre of culturalrepresentation that has been criticised for being pseudo-anthropological, brutallyinstrumentalising and appropriative. Hence, the artists cannot avoid operating ‘asethnographers’ also in Foster’s sense: contending with (different takes on) alterityand insinuating themselves into intricate processes of sel ng and othering, both inthe past and in the present.

In sum, we take the domain of the human zoo to be a patch of common ground between anthropology and art, which we explore in search of the challenges that a‘proper’ ethnographic stance poses to the artist. Therefore, in-between outlining theemergence of the ‘new ethnographer’ in contemporary anthropology (in section one)and exploring the ethnographic aspirations and tensions in an art project engagingwith the human zoos (in section three), the phenomenon of human zoos will be

examined in more depth in the second section of this article.

The anthropological issues: complex identities and culture asinter-subjective practice

Despite its limitations, Foster’s compact article acutely evokes the compleximbrications of art and anthropology in dealing with issues of cultural identity/alterity and location/position. His two points of critique on the pseudo-ethnographicstance of certain artists appear to be fundamental. First, Foster rightly questions the

idea of radical alterity by arguing that in a profoundly globalised world, people’slives and ‘liquid’ cultures are deeply enmeshed across ethnic, national, linguistic,etc. boundaries. Second, Foster addresses the question of reciprocity through sel ngand othering, and warns against the danger of a blind projection of the self into theother, or, indeed, an implosion into self-absorption.

To Foster’s credit, these two general points were central issues in the reinventionof modern anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s, that is, in the aftermath of thediscipline’s protracted involvement with colonialism (James 1973). Two of the mainarchitects of this decolonising endeavour on which our article will focus, are DellHymes and Johannes Fabian – each of whom can be related to the aforementionedissues: Hymes (in combination with Eric Wolf) for addressing the question of new,

postcolonial cultural complexities, and Fabian for putting inter-subjectivity at theheart of anthropology and ethnography as collaborative enterprises of performingand producing culture.

At this point an important proviso is in order. The aforementioned critical issueswere, of course, also addressed and successfully developed elsewhere, that is, outsideanthropology, most notably in cultural studies, and outside Western academia, mostnotably by scholars from the global south (see, e.g., Wright 2004; Tomaselli and




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Mboti 2013; indeed, the journal, Critical Arts , derives from a performance studiestrajectory). In that respect, it is dif cult to overestimate what cultural studies ingeneral, and the work of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer in particular,have done to deconstruct and reorient the way in which generations of social andhuman scientists dealt with identity and diversity (Harris 2009). These authors offeredan alternative framework, that of ‘new ethnicities’, whose vitality is demonstrated notonly by the fact that it has become mainstream, but also because it inspires advancedmodels of diversity in areas such as ‘autochthony’ or nativism (Li 2007) and ‘super-diversity’ (Arnaut 2012). Since the 1980s, and even more convincingly since theearly 1990s, cultural studies has argued that identi cation was the changing outcomeof a ‘relation of subject to discursive formations’ conceived ‘as an articulation’ in thesense worked out by Laclau, whereby ‘all articulations are properly relations of “nonecessary correspondence”, i.e. founded on that contingency which “reactivates thehistorical”’ (in Hall 1996: 14). These statements embed the British cultural studiesendeavour within a broader, global undertaking which one can try to lay out alongdifferent lines at different levels of abstraction.

The rst (most obvious) line consists in the exploration of complex identity-formation processes beyond established racial dichotomies and hierarchies (Gilroy1987: 262; Mercer 1994: 30). Among the seminal texts of this research tradition isthat of Manthia Diawara (1990), which, apart from demonstrating the activation ofdifferent actor and spectator positions in critical ‘black’ cultural production of the1980s, also shows how the latter operates on a meta-semiotic level by ‘decompos(ing)and recompose(ing) the sign systems of established conventions’ (ibid: 43). As such,Diawara indicates the kind of processes which spawned a wealth of literature oncreolisation and hybridity that Homi Bhabha (1996) theorised as the emergence of‘cultures-in-between’ and Zygmunt Bauman (2005) as ‘liquid cultures’. Finally,these issues were addressed at an even higher level of abstraction, namely that ofepistemology, by postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said (1978) and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (1985). Taking their lead from, among others, Michel Foucault’s(1972) archaeology of knowledge project, both in uential intellectuals questionedthe long-term epistemological orders with which (Western) science had mouldedknowledge production in and of the Asian or the African Other, respectively. Likethe two other lines of enquiry – identity-formation processes and meaning-makingstrategies – Said’s (1978) and Mudimbe’s epistemological deconstructions wereconceived as inherently dialogical (involving enmeshed processes of sel ng andothering). A case in point is Mudimbe’s (1985: 150) ‘African gnosis’ concept of an‘impure’ terrain of power-knowledge situated at the intersection of myriad attempts,styles and strategies to produce ‘African’ knowledge and ‘traditional systems ofthought’.



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The above excursus suf ciently demonstrates that the objective of Foster’sconcerns about identity and dialogics was certainly not only addressed solely withinthe narrow con nes of ‘white’ anthropology. However, our choice of Fabian andHymes is warranted by the fact that cultural studies generally has stopped short of

bringing these problematics down to concrete ‘black and brown speaking subjects’and enshrining its knowledge-sharing encounters with the latter into ethnography(Harris 2009: 499). These points are convincingly argued by Roxy Harris (ibid.) and

by Harris and Rampton (2010, see esp. footnote 3) in a recent assessment of ‘black’cultural studies in Britain, and can be extended to other more literacy-oriented

postcolonial critiques of the likes of Bhabha, Said and Mudimbe.Ultimately, this is the principal reason why we chose to focus on Fabian and

Hymes and part company with the invaluable work and insights of so many othersfrom outside ‘white’ academic anthropology. We ultimately needed to connect

Foster’s concerns with concrete intercultural practice, including the ethnographic practice which engages artists and their local subjects. However, before touchingon issues of interculturality, we need to delve into the global imagination of the twoanthropologists and their attempts to reinvent their discipline.

For Hymes, the postcolonial world heralds the end of diversity as we know it.Diversity, he argues, should no longer be located in an ongoing trend of diversi cation

– through dispersion and fragmentation in an ever-expanding world – but in processes of ‘ reintegration within complex units’ (Hymes 1972: 32–33, emphasisin the original). For Eric Wolf (1964: 95), this radically reorients our way of dealing

with human diversity: ‘For the rst time in human history, we have transcended theinherited divisions of the human phenomenon into segments of time and segmentsof space.’ Hence, Wolf (ibid.) predicts that ‘no one stationary perspective willany longer exhaust the possibilities of man’. Finally, he casts the newly emergentanalytical gaze in terms of multiplicity and mobility:

We have left behind, once and for all, the paleotechnic age of the grounded observerwho can draw only one line of sight between the object and himself. We have entered the

physical and the intellectual space age, and we are now in a position to circumnavigateman, to take our readings from any point in both space and time. (ibid.)

For Wolf, this decentring of dominant segmentations and static ‘points of view’requires anthropologists to discard simplicity, predictability and stasis, and confrontthe ‘variability and complexity of human life’ (ibid: 96–97). Moreover, agility andsuppleness thus enable anthropologists to take sides with their interlocutors, andlay the basis for a more democratic and emancipatory science of the human lifeexperience based on mutuality and exchange.

In sum, the ethnographic method emerging here is one that is ready to confrontuidity and multiplicity, both in culture in general and in cultural actors and practices




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in particular. This ties in well with Foster’s questioning of absolute alterity as wellas his focus on the dynamics of sel ng/othering in engaging with local settings andactors. With regard to the latter, Hymes was also instrumental in elaborating thecollaborative basis of ethnography, but it was Fabian who is renowned for theorisingit.

For Fabian (1971: 27–32), the objectivity of anthropology is paradoxically perhapsan ‘inter-subjective’ one which resides in the mutual commitment of ethnographersand their subjects, and is attained ‘by entering a context of communicative interactionthrough the one medium which represents and constitutes such a context: language’.These early ideas of Fabian concerning ethnography as the ‘creative intersubjective

production of knowledge’ (1979: 23) form the basis for his later claims concerningcoevalness (shared time) or contemporaneity, performativity and morality – claimswhich directly answer Foster’s concern about the dynamics of sel ng and otheringand the risks of appropriation.

Based on the few hints (often ex negatio ) which he provides, Foster’s view ofa proper ‘ethnographic method’ basically corresponds with Fabian’s idea thatethnography, like any cultural practice, is a communicative event which engages

people in coevalness, and which produces or expresses culture (performative),rather than documenting or illustrating it (Fabian 1998: 33). Hence, the role of theethnographer is that of a catalyst of cultural expressions or, even stronger, a producerof cultural practices – and, Fabian (1990: 7) adds, ‘in analogy to a theatrical producer’.Finally, Fabian’s emphasis on the creative, productive and inter-subjective basis ofanthropology is an attempt to build a sound context for the reciprocal construction ofknowledge across divisions of (social, economic) inequality or (cultural, religious,etc.) diversity. Moralising these inequalities, according to Fabian, does not really helpethnographers and their subjects to undermine ‘the distancing conceptual apparatuson which ideological conceptions of modernity are based’ (Fabian 2002: 571).

In all, the ethnographer or anthropologist who emerges out of the above attemptsto undermine the ‘distancing conceptual apparatus’ of imperialism/colonialism andWestern modernity, resembles, in more than one way, the creative, performing or

producing artist. As mentioned, this article concludes by examining the recent workof an artist who, by venturing into the terrain of human zoos, takes up, in Foster’sterms, the ethnographic challenge – a challenge of which we have just tried to spellout the basic anthropological terms. Before delving deeper into the works of an‘artist-ethnographer’, we offer a closer inspection of human zoos – that domain ofcultural representation in which anthropology was and is so deeply imbricated as (to

put it in the idiom of cultural production) casting agents, script writers, advisors and,more recently, critics.



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Human zoos: cultural death and social immobility

The following examination of the human zoo format contributes to the growingliterature that documents this extraordinary historical phenomenon (see Blanchard,Boetsch and Snoep 2011) by further scrutinising its mechanisms of representation/repression and sel ng/othering, which one of us (Arnaut 2005, 2009, 2011a and

b) started some time ago. The preceding section discussed various attempts todecolonise anthropology. This section attempts to show how colonial anthropologyinformed or legitimised some of the basic mechanisms of human zoo performancesand representations.

The human zoo originated during the 19 th century, prospering widely in Europe,the United States (US) and beyond, until the 1930s, which saw other mass media(radio, sound cinema) became the locus of transnational popular culture within

which new ‘exotic’ genres ( revue nègre , jazz, etc.) rapidly gained popularity. Thatthe human zoos were a mass medium is indicated by the fact that hundreds ofmillions of Europeans and Americans visited the world fairs at which human zooswere a standard component of entertainment and exhibition. The human zoo enjoyedconsiderable scienti c legitimation, not least because it was often the direct focus ofscienti c research such as language sampling or anthropometric research (Corbey1993; Couttenier 2005). Finally, the extremely popular mass edutainment of thehuman zoo laid the basis for a hegemonic narrative of modernity which understoodthe wonders of technological progress, industrial production and mass consumptionin terms of the rapidly developing nation-state and its imperial or colonial aspirationsand projects (Blanchard, Bancel and Boëtsch et al. 2008; Lemaire, Abbattista andLabanca et al. 2011). Thus, the human zoo was a typical and important instrument inwhat Fabian (2002: 571) calls ‘the distancing conceptual apparatus’ of modernity. Inhuman zoos, the opposition between the modern and the primitive indeed providedthe matrix on which other forms of alterity were mapped: the female, the violent orexuberant, the sexually expressive, the bodily deviant, etc.

As Arnaut (2011a and b) has attempted to show elsewhere, human zoos functionedin a panoptical system of distantiation (between the superior viewer and the subaltern‘viewee’) and of differentiation (among categories of viewees, i.e., the ‘tribal’ ornational ‘troupes’). Therefore contact and interaction between visitors and actors, aswell as the identity and the boundedness of the exhibited tribal or national groups,were heavily dramatised, regimented and policed. The human zoo thus operatedin a process in which ‘staging’ and ‘caging’ are conjugated. The ‘staging’ refers tothe fact that human zoo subjects are supposed to perform their stereotypical selves,stylise their own cultural habits and ‘techniques du corps’. To purify or minimisethe risk of polluting or disturbing this self-performance, some degree of ‘caging’was involved. This caging had material and discursive dimensions, ranging from a




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double barbed-wire fence to naming the enclosure a ‘village’. A concrete examplecan help to demonstrate the broader rami cations of this set-up.

The 1913 Universal Exhibition in the Belgian provincial capital of Ghent was amajor event which ran for six months and comprised a human zoo component, incasu a Senegalese and a Filipino ‘village’. 3 While the Senegalese village was plannedwell in advance and given a space in the eye-catching Park of Attractions, the Filipinovillage, curated by the American Richard Schneidewind, was inserted at the lastminute because of a packed European tour. The almost 60 Filipinos were given somespace in a section of the fair called Old Flanders, which presented reconstructions ofmedieval buildings and public spaces. From the outset, the inclusion of the Filipinovillage was contested, both legally and morally. Legally, the Filipino village wascontested by the French impresario of the Senegalese village, who claimed that theorganising committee, the Ghent Syndicate, had originally granted him the monopoly

of exhibiting ‘people of colour’. The dispute was settled by the relocation of theFilipino village from the main Park of Attractions into the Old Flanders section.This, however, provoked the ire of the latter’s organising committee, the Société deVieille Flandre, who objected on moral and aesthetic grounds:

What has this exploitation of human cattle in common with the reconstructions ofthese remarkable facades of our old Flemish country? Without mentioning that, in ourclimate, instead of undressing these savages who are imported from warmer areas, oneshould rather dress them, if only for humanitarian reasons. ( Le Bien Public 29 May1913, our translation from French) 4

As a consequence of this fallout, the Filipino village was again relocated to another,less prominent space, where it inevitably received less attention and less income thanexpected, and certainly less than the Senegalese village, which was widely acclaimedand immensely popular. Months later, the impresario of the Filipino village used lossof income as an argument in response to his interrogation by the police answeringto of cial complaints against him for nancially neglecting his actors after thefair closed down in November 1913 (Afable 2004; Delanote and Seyssens 2009;Jonckheere 2013).

The above account of some of the events surrounding the arrival, installation anddissolution of the Filipino village in relation to the Senegalese village in the 1913Ghent world fair illustrates how staging/caging functioned in a panoptical apparatusof exoticisation and commoditisation, which essentialises people within the con nesof their presumed cultural identities, ethnic habitats and social status. The immobilityand stasis of the human zoo actors contrast sharply with the mobility of the visitorsas ‘virtual’ world travellers, as well as their agility – or, as Tony Bennet (1997) wouldsay, their ‘restlessness’ – as progressing moderns. As we explain in the remainderof this section, complex anthropological problematics of viability and kinesis are



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closely interwoven with this apparatus. We regroup these under two headings:‘cultural death’ and ‘social immobility’.

Cultural death

In human zoo settings, representation seems to be rather ominously linked toextinction in many different guises. The Filipino village’s juxtaposition within theOld Flanders section is a commentary on how the world fair’s futuristic story of

progress and development was articulated in contradistinction to a glorious historical past of Flanders, and a somewhat discomforting ‘contemporary past’ of the Filipino‘barbarians’. Metaphorically, the latter were earmarked for extinction by modernityand technological progress which circulated through imperialist connections andinternational trade – vectors of global change which were epitomised by the avant-garde technology on display at the world fair.

Cultural death is a process which, in the words of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett(1998: 176), consists of the ‘transvaluation’ of cultural practices and products ‘oncethey are safe for collection, preservation, exhibition, study, and even nostalgia andrevival’. If the dramatisation of cultural death can be witnessed in human zoos, itsinvention (or conceptualisation) took place simultaneously in the emerging humansciences of the second half of the 19 th century. Both folklore and anthropology pitchedthemselves as salvage sciences, studying victims of progress in a disappearingworld. Interestingly, rst-generation anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski,and later analysts such as George Stocking or Michel De Certeau, perceived theresearch subject’s imminent cultural death and urgent preservation as an importantmethodological ingredient of the emerging sciences. Malinowski (1922: xv, see alsoStocking 1992: 187) thought there was tragedy in the fact that modern anthropologysaw ‘the material of its study melt[ing] away with hopeless rapidity’, just whenit found itself fully methodologically equipped to launch research in earnest. DeCerteau, Julia and Revel (1970: 21) analyse the history of folklore research and doubtwhether popular culture can exist beyond the act which abolishes it. On the basis oftheir historical research into 19 th-century folklore studies in France, they argue that

popular culture expressions, mainly literature formerly considered as subversive,

became objects of study after having been repressed and subjugated, i.e., renderedsocially impotent for their producers and original publics. Similar forms of culturalemasculation seem to be at work in processes of social immobility.

Social immobility

Seen in this light, historical human zoos are much like curiosity cabinets: loci of‘collecting and rehearsing strange ways, tongues …’ (Mullaney 1983: 53) whilehuman zoo characters such as Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman or Ota Benga ‘represented




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a “lost” part of the past [...]. They were safe to gaze upon because, for most peoplein the West, they had no contemporary existence’ (Burnham 1993: 191; see alsoHolmes 2007). Human zoo actors and the cultures they embodied were ‘out of time’ –removed from the present of the spectator. As explained above, it was this (structuralor systematic) denial of coevalness or contemporaneity which Fabian (1983, 2002)denounced by foregrounding and theorising the shared time of ethnographic inter-subjectivity. The latter, in turn, can be taken in Hymes’ terms as a driver of translocalinteraction and cultural renewal, creativity and vitality. Obviously, both dynamics

break up or at best disturb the time-space-culture units of the ideal human zoo. As isevident in the following section, this is a major challenge for artists-as-ethnographerswho engage with human zoos. But rst, we need to look at a related, disturbingfactor: the social mobility and, thus, the agency of the human zoo actor.

The story of the Filipino village is typical with respect to the outcome for the

exotic ‘village dwellers’. After the run of the show, many Filipinos ended up beggingfor money in the streets of Ghent, until the impresario was convoked by the police.While he could not submit a labour contract for his Filipino cultural workers, hewas strongly reminded of his commitment to have them out of the city and thecountry as soon as possible (Afable 2004; Jonckheere 2013). Investigations intomore recent (postcolonial) remakes of human zoos in France in 1994 (Bancel 2011)and in Belgium in 2002 (Arnaut 2005) also reveal the absence of proper working

permits and/or labour contracts. On closer inspection, this signals a structural aw:human zoo subjects travel long distances away from their homes – often in the global

south or other peripheral places – but the dramatised relocations merely lead theémigrés into successive situations that are as peripheral or subjugating as the onesthey left behind. Although their movements seldom lead to emancipation, humanzoo actors possessed some degree of mobility and agency, in whatever way thatmay have been repressed or truncated. However, in order to document this sti edagency and mobility, one needs insight into the aspirations and actions of the actorsin colonial human zoos – data which are largely absent. As an alternative, one shouldlook into other contexts ‘at the nexus of performance and subalternity whereby thelatter articulates diversity/alterity with inequality and subjugation’ (Arnaut 2011aand 2011c: 344), but this is beyond the scope of this article. Here it suf ces to make atheoretical opening to the kind of agency and mobility one could expect in situationsof staging/caging. This opening lies in anthropology’s reworked culture concept.

In tune with the critical interrogations of, among others, Hymes and Fabian,the postcolonial culture concept stresses dynamic emergence: culture gains shapeand structure through situated action (Mannheim and Tedlock 1995: 5). The normsorienting cultural activity are multiple, fragmented and polycentric (Glick Schiller2005: 455). However canonical in nature, culture allows some leeway for creativityand the quest for novelty (Barber 1987). Therefore, culture is as much about people’s



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habits as it is about their aspirations and desires (Appadurai 2004). The mainconsequence of this new plural, creative and aspirational concept of culture, Fabian(1998: 33) argues, renders it contested and contesting. In sum, culture should beunderstood ‘as a site of struggle, a place for the negotiation of race, gender, nation,and other identities, and for the play of power’ (Dolby 2006: 33). In terms of mobilityand agency, the ‘moves’ made in these struggles and renegotiations are best seen astactical rather than strategic, resulting from improvisation and navigation rather thancarefully planned action (De Certeau 1984; Vigh 2008). In its different forms, humanzoo agency and mobility, like the cultural agency conceptualised by anthropologists,is a delicate mixture of canon and creativity, con rmation and resistance, hegemonyand freedom (Arnaut 2011a). In the following section we look deeper into how acontemporary artist deals with these matters of agency and mobility while engagingwith human zoo performances.

Brett Bailey as artist-ethnographer

The performance project ‘Exhibit B’ by the South African artist, Brett Bailey,engages with the human zoo as historical, colonial phenomenon and explores itsrelevance for contemporary ways of looking at ‘others’ in positions of (cultural,racial, bodily, etc.) difference and subjugation. This engagement with the human zooformat quali es Bailey to be branded an artist-ethnographer according to the criteria

proposed by Foster: he deals with alterity and processes of sel ng and othering inon-site artistic interventions. Perhaps the clearest (albeit indirect) indicator of the

success of this engagement with the human zoo format is that Bailey’s performance project has been contested more or less along the lines of contestation experienced by historical human zoos. In most general terms, critique arose from the spectators’confusion about the exact nature of the performance or presentation. As was evidentin Ghent in 1913, the Société de Vieille Flandre entirely disregarded the performanceaspect of the Filipino ‘savage’ act and denounced it as a demeaning showcase.Similarly, in Berlin in 2012, the organisation Bühnenwatch, for instance, claimedBailey’s ‘Exhibit B’ did not represent or evoke the historical human zoo, but was‘reproducing it’ by using black actors who were not performers but mere objectsof white inspection. This led Bailey to declare unequivocally that his installationwas ‘not a [historical] human zoo’, but ‘performance theatre’ (Apthorp 2012). Thisgainsaid his earlier statements that the colonial human zoo format was the mainsource of inspiration for his ‘Exhibit’ series. Before disentangling this apparentcontradiction, a closer look at the actual art project is necessary.

‘Exhibit B’ is the second part of a set of three so-called human installationsrealised for the rst time at the Brussels 2012 Kunstenfestivaldesarts, in themonumental, but destitute, Gesù church. Later that same year ‘Exhibit B’ was shownat the Berliner Festspiele in the rather daunting old water towers on Prenzlauer Berg.




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Visitors were admitted individually into these two imposing sites and left to strollaround the ‘human installation’, consisting of a series of separate displays whichhave no apparent narrative connection other than a general story of suffering at thehands of Europe, the West or, perhaps, the global north. The different displays may

best be characterised as isolated tableaux vivants of which the human gures areliving creatures who stare back at the spectators. All these actors are black Africansrecruited locally among diasporic communities respectively in Brussels and Berlin.

The human showcases of both shows can be categorised into ve types orcharacters, of which the rst is the paradigmatic human zoo gure: 1) a half-naked‘Saartjie Baartman’-type of gure rotating on a plateau [Figure 1]. The other typesare: 2) a ‘Samira Adamu’ (Brussels) or ‘Aamir Ageeb’ (Berlin) gure of an illegalimmigrant who died on a forced return ight home, strapped to an aircraft seatand gagged with white packing tape; 3) scenes referring to events in the Belgian

or German colonial history which involve (sexual) violence [Figure 2]; 4) guresin contemporary clothes who are identi ed as refugees or undocumented migrants,and staged as arrestees (sporting enlarged mug shots and record cards) [Figure3]; and 5) a display comprising four singers whose bodies are encased and whose‘heads’ produce polyphonic songs that provide eerie background music for the entireinstallation [Figure 4].

Figure 1: A half-naked ‘Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman’-type of figure rotating on a plateau in thedaunting context of the monumental but destitute Gesù church in Brussels. BrettBailey, ‘Exhibit B’ (2012). © Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Photograph: P. Janssens.



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Figure 2: A ‘Samira Adamu’ figure, illegal immigrant who died on a forced return flight home.Brett Bailey, ‘Exhibit B’ (2012). © Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Photograph: P. Janssens.

Figure 3: Brett Bailey, ‘Exhibit B’ (2012). ©Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Photograph:K. Cobbaert.




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From this overview it becomes clear how Bailey radically departs from the colonialhuman zoo by turning (post)colonial history itself – in the form of some of its iconic/iconised events – into the subject matter of his human zoo installation. In doing so he

brings together very different events and personages. While some of these (such asthe ‘Saartjie Baartman’ gure) can be said to be widely known and to have an almostglobal, iconic status as victims, others, such as the ‘Aamir Ageeb’ type have mainly‘national’ signi cance. This is also the case in the other parts of the ‘Exhibit’ trilogy.‘Exhibit B’ generally focuses on Belgium and France’s colonial past, while ‘ExhibitA’ digs into Germany’s colonial history (mainly related to present-day Namibia), and‘Exhibit C’ looks into the British and Portuguese colonial record.

Figure 4: A display comprising four singers whose bodies are encased and whose blackface'heads' produce polyphonic 'Pygmy' songs. Brett Bailey, 'Exhibit B' (2012). ©

Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Photograph: P. Janssens.

Apart from merging the global and the local, each of the three ‘Exhibits’ collapsesinstances of colonial and postcolonial violence vis-à-vis subjects from the globalsouth and presents them as ‘pieces of evidence’ (exhibits) of Europe’s allegedcriminal record in dealing violently and inhumanely with Africans. Moreover, theinstallation plunges these different cases in an overall atmosphere of ‘shame’, ‘guilt’and ‘mourning’ (Bailey 2012). One of the most conspicuous effects of this spatio-



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temporal ‘merger’ is the confusion over the ‘true’ nature of the performance signalledabove. This confusion leads us – as analysts – into the heart of the ethnographic

problematic which Foster (1995) raised in connection with contemporary art, andwhich we identi ed both in postcolonial anthropology and in historical instancesof human zoos. As we have seen, this problematic is threefold and revolves aroundissues of identity, agency and intersubjectivity, and contemporaneity.

Starting with identities, it is fair to say that the different human types on displayin the respective ‘Exhibits’ have the potential of eliciting different viewer positions.However, this is thwarted because the images end up being construed in a binarygrid that is racial in nature. This racialisation can be found both in Bailey’s ownclari cations (mainly in interviews) and in the critiques of and reactions to hisshows. Explaining the origins of ‘Exhibit A’ and his initial interest in the colonialhuman zoo, Bailey states how, at some point, he realised there was a link with hisearlier work – in theatre shows like ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ (1997) and ‘Big Dada: TheRise and Fall of Idi Amin’ (2001). That link lay in bringing black artists to perform

before white bourgeois audiences (in Europe) – which resembled the basic set-upof the colonial human zoo. According to Bailey (2012), this made him decide totransform the human zoo into the subject of an installation. Together with this directengagement with human zoos, Bailey adopts their idiom and categories. In several ofhis interviews, he uses the racial categories of colonialism and/or apartheid (white,

black, and [occasionally] coloured) which, in turn, appear to have been taken over by visitors and critics in both Brussels and Berlin (Exberliner 2012; Müller 2012).

Looking further into how Bailey deals with the site-speci city of his ‘Exhibit’shows, one realises that he very actively and diligently ‘localises’ the installations,for instance, by connecting with local dramatic events (named deceased asylumseekers), by choosing appropriate locations – in the case of Brussels the Gésu churchwhich, at some time in the past was occupied by undocumented migrants – or by

buying into local discourses of violence (such as that surrounding Leopold II inBelgium and of Nazism in Germany). This ‘on-site adaptation’ is not, however,

pursued with regard to the local categories of debating alterity, be it in connectionwith ex-colonised subjects, migrants or allochthones. In Belgium, for instance, thedistinction between Francophone and Dutchophone is an important national grid onwhich other categories of otherness and different cultural attitudes towards ‘others’are articulated (Arnaut and Ceuppens 2009). Instead of people engaging with theselocal categories, they are submerged in the racial dyad of black and white (Africalia2012).

Thus, using Foster’s as well as Hymes’ and Wolf’s critique of radical alterityunder conditions of postcolonial globalisation as a yardstick for dealing with identityand diversity, Bailey’s human installation can be seen to remain quite close to the




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historical human zoo format. As we will see presently, that is also the case in the wayhe handles agency and mobility.

Several press reports con rm what we ourselves experienced when visiting‘Exhibit B’: that the eye contact between actors and visitors is a critical ingredientof the human installation. When asked what difference there is between an ordinary

peep show and ‘Exhibit B’, Bailey argued that it is quite different, if not entirelyopposite: ‘First of all […] the actors look back – directly into the eyes of the visitors.I tell the performers always: you are the public and you consider the white spectatoras performer’ (Bailey 2012).

Much like turning colonial history into the subject matter of the postcolonial humanzoo, the inversion of the direction of the gaze appears to be a radical transformation,

but again one that is not easily perceived as such. What makes one distinguish between (a) a (reproductive) display of a half-naked black woman subject to a gazeof a contemporary spectator who is de ned as ‘white’ and ‘ex-colonial’ and his/hergaze as exploitative, and (b) a (critical) display of an icon of colonial exploitation of(half-)naked black women by white colonisers and their exploitative gaze? The samequestion can be asked about the act of ‘looking back’: How easily can the staringeyes of an actor be interpreted as reversing the gaze? Critics of Bühnenwatch argue:

We cannot see any reversion here: The fact that the exhibited Black people are ‘looking back’ into the audience – as Bailey highlights in an interview – is nothing new, buthas always been part of resistance strategies, which also consisted of much more than

that. There is no change in the archetypical constellations white observer – Blackobserved and white organizer – Black exposed. After all, it is not whites, but BlackAfricans that are standing motionless for over 45 minutes – some of them almost naked.(Bühnenwatch 2012)

Clearly, these critics identify the actors’ gazes not as a strategic turning of the tables, but as an instance of resistance, or what we above called subaltern or tactical agency.Interestingly enough, the broader picture they paint of the distribution of agencyand mobility along the racial divide slots in well with the critique of Foster andFabian. First of all, the focus on the gaze hardly obscures the absence of any other

communication, such as language, which, for Fabian, is the basis for building coevalinter-subjectivity. Apart from the absolute silencing of the actors, Bühnenwatchobserves that the latter are immobilised in contrast to the white, ambulant spectator.

Here again we see the price there is to pay for a dyadic categorisation: differencesand inequalities (different types of characters, different forms of subaltern agency)seem to constantly lose their nuances in favour of more radical operations: reversals,meta-representations which one either accepts or not. This also appears to be an issuewhen it comes to the (third and nal) problematic of contemporaneity.




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dehumanisation and the bad ones are the perpetrators. We conjecture that the‘Exhibit’ project would bene t from considering Fabian’s objections to ‘moralising’the ethnographic encounter and suggestions for discarding an ethical approach infavour of an epistemological one which focuses on questions and conditions ofmutual understanding.

Postscript: the bourgeois ventriloquist

In all these ways the artist, critic, or historian projects his or her practice onto the eld ofthe other, where it is read not only as authentically indigenous

but as innovatively political!(Foster 1995: 307)

In the epigraph of this article, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) vociferouslycondemn the manner in which the ‘bourgeoisie’ instrumentalises alterity for itsown purposes. Although the term ‘bourgeoisie’ has lost most of its currency incontemporary critical human and social sciences, it happens to constitute a hiddenlink between the main actors in this article, including Bailey and Foster. As quotedabove, Bailey explained his initial interest in human zoos by detecting similaritieswith his own artistic practice of bringing black performers over to entertain ‘a white,

bourgeois public’. For Foster, the artists’ commitment to side with ‘the other’ isderived from Walter Benjamin (1970), who, in his seminal piece ‘The author as

producer’, explored the limits of the artists-as-bourgeois to side with the proletariat.

In each of the three cases, the central issue is one of appropriating ‘the other’s voice’:the bourgeois using his/her position of domination to silence, direct or even insinuatehim/herself into the other’s voice, while carefully masking this ventriloquist set-up.In the latter scenario, the two ethnographic aws identi ed by Foster are combined:while from the outside one seems to observe a situation of radical alterity, on closerinspection the self is deeply projected onto the other.

Whether the bourgeois embodies the mainstream of society who is excited aboutexotic extravaganza (Stallybrass and White), the white European (ex-)coloniser whoexerts his/her power over silenced black bodies (Bailey), or the privileged owner of( nancial, cultural) capital who super cially sympathises with subalterns (Foster/Benjamin), s/he is engaging with the other in a power play in which the other’s voice

– in the sense of talk, physical expressions or performance – reproduces, indeed,reinforces, the other’s subalternity. In the middle part of this article we identi ed thisas the exemplary human zoo predicament of staging (the other’s expressions, voice or

performance) and caging (the other’s con nement in his/her position of subalternity).The way out of this, we agree with Foster, is the kind of ethnographic engagement,of which we attempted to explore, in this article, the anthropological and the artisticcontours. The anthropological exploration produced a rather exhaustive analytical



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instrument with which we scrutinised Bailey’s ‘Exhibit B’. While we revealed thelatter’s potential and detected some of its conspicuous failures, we realised that ittakes courage and perspicacity on the part of any artist-ethnographer to ventureinto the postcolony without committing the fundamental errors of (bourgeois)ventriloquism and (human zoo) staging and caging.

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors of this themed issue as well as the anonymous reviewers for theirinvaluable comments and suggestions. We owe a large debt of gratitude to our colleaguesat the Ghent School of Arts (KASK) and the Max Planck Institute for the Study ofReligious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen) for discussing with us the key issues ofthis article. Moreover, we thank the actors/participants of De Waarheidscommissie

(www.dewaarheidscommissie.be/) and all the members of Action Zoo Humain (www.actionzoohumain.be/) for their inspiration, creativity and commitment in thinking andacting through the intricacies of the ‘human zoo’.

Notes

1 This double aim refers to the division of labour between the anthropologist KarelArnaut and the artist Chokri Ben Chikha, but it also expresses a rm commitment ofreciprocal interest. Chokri Ben Chikha is in the nal stages of his PhD in arts (by de nitiona hybrid undertaking at the intersection of artistic and scholarly practice), entitled: ‘What is

the critical value of using stereotypes as theatre/performance symbols’, to be submitted inOctober 2013 at the School of Arts, Ghent University College, Belgium. Karel Arnaut has asustained interest in cultural representations, popular culture and media (Arnaut 2004).

2 In the text we mainly use the term ‘human zoo’. For reasons of readability, theapostrophes are henceforth dropped.

3 The choice of the human zoo as (historical) format of performance in general andof the Ghent world fair of 1913 in particular, is doubly motivated. First of all, Chokri BenChikha,together with his brother Zouzou, has made the exotic villages of the 1913 GhentUniversal Exhibition into the subject matter of a large performance project entitled ‘The TruthCommission: Expo Zoo Humain’ [De Waarheidscommissie: Expo Zoo Humain]. The latteris the most recent in a series of four performances which engage with the human zoo format(project title: Action Zoo Humain), i.e., L’Afrique c’est chic (2010), De Ceremonie (2010),and De Finale: een stand-up tragedie (2010) (see Ben Chikha 2013). Second, Arnaut (2009,2011b) and erstwhile collaborators (Arnaut and Seyssens 2007; Delanote and Seyssens 2009)have been working on ‘human zoos’ in general and the Ghent 1913 ‘ethnographic showcases’in particular.

4 This newspaper excerpt was kindly provided by Evelien Jonckheere, who also refersto it in her forthcoming chapter (Jonckheere 2013).




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