Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga [Inscribed and Signed]

[Ota Benga] Pamela Newkirk

ISBN 10: 006220100X / ISBN 13: 9780062201003

Published by Amistad / HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 2015

About this Item

New York: Amistad / HarperCollinsPublishers, [2015]. First Edition with full number line. Octavo (23.5cm); publisher's boards in unclipped photo-illustrated dust jacket; xvi,297pp.; four leaves of photographic plates printed on rectos and versos. Dust jacket a bit worn and rather soiled, corners bumped; Very Good and sound overall. Inscribed and signed by the author on title page. Biography of Ota Benga, a young Mbuti (Congolese) man who was captured and put on display at the St. Louis World Fair and the Bronx Zoo at the turn of the 20th century.

Seller Inventory # 45117

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga [Inscribed and Signed]
• Publisher: Amistad / HarperCollinsPublishers, New York
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006220100X
• ISBN 13: 9780062201003
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good -
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Africa / African Writers
  • Biography / Memoir
  • Signed
  • Circus / Carnival
  • Black Studies / Black Arts and Artists

About this title

Synopsis

2016 NAACP Image Award Winner

Winner of the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction

An award-winning journalist reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit—a shocking story of racial prejudice, science, and tragedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid.

In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Congolese “pygmy”—a person of petite stature—arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe.

Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life. It also reveals why, decades later, the man most responsible for his exploitation would be hailed as his friend and savior, while those who truly fought for Ota have been banished to the shadows of history. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota’s tragic life, from Africa to St. Louis to New York, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.

Illuminating this unimaginable event, Spectacle charts the evolution of science and race relations in New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, exploring this racially fraught era for Africa-Americans and the rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn they endured, forty years after the end of the Civil War. Shocking and compelling Spectacle is a masterful work of social history that raises difficult questions about racial prejudice and discrimination that continue to haunt us today.

About the Author

Pamela Newkirk is an award-winning journalist and a professor of journalism at New York University. She is the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, which won the National Press Club Award for media criticism, and the editor of Letters from Black America. She lives in New York City.