Spectacles, Science and Stereotypes: Primitive Others’ on Display
I am being asked to produce a final paper entitled Spectacles, Science and Stereotypes: Primitive Others’ on Display as an opportunity to demonstrate how much I have learned through the semester. This is not an assignment requiring exploration of new materials but a writing that can utilize the variety of sources drawn upon through the semester. From professor: As you reflect, you should realize you’ve been offered an extended introduction to the West and its Others, exploring through text and the visual and plastic arts, the representations of the Other or the Stranger. We began with tales of unusual men and women in classical sources, and continued reviewing their representation and others with social and political consequences of imagining some people as others.’ You were made familiar with medieval and Renaissance visual and textual treatments of others in Europe and from newly discovered unknown lands in Africa, Asia and the Americas. And we explored early attempts to put Others on display for entertainment or scientific’ or ethnographic knowledge culminating in the creation of human zoos in the United States and Europe in the Gilded Age. We attempted to understand how human zoos related to different historical approaches to the study of the racism, genocide and mass murder and how these presentations of others’ have shaped twentieth-century national identities.
