COVID-19 at the Zoo: Racial Capitalism, Immunity, and the Zoo

Abstract

Zoos are a feature of modern life and contemporary culture. They are one of the few places where humans interact with animals especially in post-industrial economies. And yet the zoo is rarely attended to in critical social theory and cultural studies. This paper argues that the zoo is deeply enmeshed within racial capitalism and modes of biopolitical regulation beyond the species line. Specifically, this paper situates the immunization of zoo animals from COVID-19 within a longer history and broader conceptualization of the zoo as a biopolitical site of control over animals enmeshed within racial capitalism, anthropocentrism, and the biopolitics of immunity and confinement. The article traces the history of the contemporary zoo alongside the formation of a discourse of immunity from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries and the history of racial capitalism. The article then concludes with a call to rethink human-animal relationships through an abolitionist lens: a framework dedicated to abolishing property.