ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Colonial, Capitalist, and Communist Creatures: International Networks and Animal Acquisition in Korea’s Modern Zoos

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 3

English Abstract

“Colonial, Capitalist, and Communist Creatures: International Networks and Animal Acquisition in Korea’s Modern Zoos” Joseph Seeley, University of Virginia, and Aaron Skabelund, Brigham Young University Historians describe nineteenth and twentieth-century zoos as imperial institutions that promoted an orderly vision of exotic colonized landscapes in metropolitan capitals like London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo. But zoos were also built in colonized peripheries as well as in the metropole, a fact which has attracted far less scholarly attention. Building on our previous efforts (Seeley and Skabelund,2020) to disrupt this colonialist bias in the literature, this presentation examines the histories of zoos in Korea and the international networks that sustained their collections through empire and its aftermath. We compare the colonial zoo built by Japanese imperialists in Seoul in 1908 (Korea’s first) with zoos created in post-colonial South and North Korea after the peninsula’s Cold War division. In colonial Seoul, exotic zoo animals were sourced from European animal dealers as well as other zoos in imperial Japan’s growing network of zoological gardens. Following the collapse of the Japanese Empire and imperial networks, the post-colonial Seoul Zoo came to rely on a Cold War network of animal exchange subordinated to the United States. Meanwhile, a new zoo built in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang obtained animals through highly symbolic “fraternal” exchanges with socialist allies such as the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. While supposedly equal, these transactions also underscored the lingering peripheralization of Korea in a new Cold War order. The story of Korea’s twentieth-century zoos—colonialist, capitalist, or communist—illuminates the unequal human and interspecies hierarchies at the heart of global zoo history.

Authors

• Joseph Seeley, University of Virginia

• Aaron Skabelund, Brigham Young University