This article takes Zurich’s Masoala Halle as an example to show how the spatial redistribution of whiteness, as Sara Ahmed calls it, is tied to a specific use of science and the scientific through two interconnected arguments. First, the difference between the scientific human and the ‘native informant’ is taken up. As Gayatri Spivak’s account of the native informant indicates, the displaying of whiteness relies on the racialised Other who stands in for the premodern ways of life as well as the basic and primitive aspects of human existence. Second, the current return of representations of the native Other to zoo exhibitions, as exemplified by the Zurich Zoo, needs to be seen within the trajectory of the human zoos of the late nineteenth century that were crucial for the popular establishment of a racialised gaze, which drew heavily on the emerging scientific approach to the world and vice versa.
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