Rewilding the Zoo: Animal Captivity and the Future of Extinction

media release: Focus on the Humanities. Room L140.

How do zoos, historically developed in the nineteenth century as public gardens where “wild” animals were put on display, frame our understanding of multispecies encounters in an age of catastrophic biodiversity loss? Modern zoos have become important conservation centers that serve as staging grounds for the management of endangered species in the wild, yet, situated in the large urban parks on which they were first established (Regent’s Park in London, the Jardin des plantes in Paris, the Parque de El Retiro in Madrid, Central Park in New York City, the Tiergarten in Berlin, etc.), these phantasmatic commons retain the imperial imprimatur of their origins by staging the encounter between humans and “wild” or “exotic” animals as both a carceral and a museal experience. With reference to the literary and cultural history of the axolotl, a critically endangered neotenic salamander endemic to the wetlands surrounding present-day Mexico City that was first put on display at the Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation in Paris in the 1860s, Ortiz-Robles argues in this Focus on the Humanities talk that the zoo, along with other nineteenth-century public animal institutions, came to normalize, indeed to “naturalize,” the ambivalent attitude toward the prospect of mass extinction that characterizes our present-day politics.

Mario Ortiz-Robles is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English and a Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities. Ortiz-Robles’ work is situated at the intersection of literature and theory, with an emphasis on the question of the “literary” and its historicity. Ortiz-Robles is currently working on a book-length project on the narrative treatment of the figure of the animal in fiction after Darwin as a way of tracking the status of the natural in late Victorian culture. Also in the pipeline is a comparative project that seeks to re-examine the notion of literary agency in a global context by foregrounding the role played by what Pierre Bourdieu called literature’s “consecrating agencies” (reviewers, publishers, academics, translators, etc.) in the legitimization of “world literature.”