JOTWELL's legal history section has posted some
new material:
Angela Fernandez (University of Toronto) writes about her appreciation for
Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press, 2012). Here's an excerpt from the beginning of Fernandez's short essay:
Irus Braverman’s recent book Zooland
is a wonderful read on a topic that is of both historical and current
interest—zoos. How should we view zoos given the frank admission by all,
including zoo advocates, that zoo animals are captives, forced to forgo
what would otherwise be a superior existence in order to serve the
pedagogical and conservationist agenda that zoos have cultivated as
justifications for their existence? . . .
Legal historians will be interested in the shift Braverman describes
from zoos as sites of entertainment, a variation on the old menagerie
style collection of animals, preferably exotic, that would then perform
various colonialist and empire-building functions, to the (arguably)
more laudable conservationist rationale and its accompanying practices
often targeted at educating adults and children about species and
habitat decline and destruction. . . .
Read on
here.
