For almost five centuries (1490-1960) women, men and children from Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas and in some cases from Europe were displayed in the West.
Real people were exhibited as “savages” in Europe, the United States and Japan. The shows were impressive “spectacles”, theatricalizations, with performers, stage sets, impresarios and riveting storylines.
The exhibition industry attracted over one billion four hundred million spectators and staged somewhere in the range of thirty and thirty-five thousand performers from the four corners of the world.
“Human zoos” aimed to establish a boundary and hierarchy between the “civilized” and the “savage”.
These displays often emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, and implied the superiority of "Western society", through tropes that purported marginalized groups as "savage"
They began as a part of circuses and "freak shows" which displayed exotic humans in a manner akin to a caricature which exaggerated their differences.
In 1904, over 1,100 Filipinos were displayed at the St. Louis World's Fair in association with the 1904 Summer Olympics.
In 1925, a display at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester, England, was entitled "Cannibals" and featured black Africans in supposedly native dress.
We have come this far, yet the concept of the racist gaze underlying the human zoos still exists today.