Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
Ota Benga, a young African man, was featured as an exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging him 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 and the international controversy it inspired. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota's tragic existence, from the Congo to St. Louis to New York and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.
Spectacle simultaneously explores New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, a racially fraught era that led to a rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn for African Americans.
Praise for Spectacle
2016 NAACP Image Award Winner
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Root, and the Huffington Post Black Voices
"Here is a gripping and painstaking narrative that breaks new ground. Now, after a century, Benga has finally been heard." —New York Times Book Review
"Deeply researched and thoughtful. . . . Writing with precision and moral clarity, Newkirk indicts a civilization whose 'cruelty was cloaked in civility,' leaving us to examine its remnants." —Boston Globe
"This is an explosive, heartbreaking book. It unfolds with the grace of an E. L. Doctorow novel and spins forward with the urgency of a wild tabloid story." —James McBride, National Book Award–winning author of The Good Lord Bird
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Pamela Newkirk. (2015). Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Pamela Newkirk. 2015. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Pamela Newkirk, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. HarperCollins, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Pamela Newkirk. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. HarperCollins, 2015.
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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.
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- "A riveting account of one of the more startling episodes in the . . . history of race in America" (Wall Street Journal).
Ota Benga, a young African man, was featured as an exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging him 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 and the international controversy it inspired. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota's tragic existence, from the Congo to St. Louis to New York and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.
Spectacle simultaneously explores New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, a racially fraught era that led to a rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn for African Americans.
Praise for Spectacle
2016 NAACP Image Award Winner
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Root, and the Huffington Post Black Voices
"Here is a gripping and painstaking narrative that breaks new ground. Now, after a century, Benga has finally been heard." —New York Times Book Review
"Deeply researched and thoughtful. . . . Writing with precision and moral clarity, Newkirk indicts a civilization whose 'cruelty was cloaked in civility,' leaving us to examine its remnants." —Boston Globe
"This is an explosive, heartbreaking book. It unfolds with the grace of an E. L. Doctorow novel and spins forward with the urgency of a wild tabloid story." —James McBride, National Book Award–winning author of The Good Lord Bird - reviews
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"Here is a gripping and painstaking narrative that breaks new ground. Now, after a century, Benga has finally been heard." — New York Times Book Review
"Newkirks account of this shocking and shameful story is forceful." — The New Yorker
"Haunting and heartbreaking." — Ebony
"What became of Benga is best left discovered by readers of this revelatory book. Suffice to say that the shock of it will haunt you. Newkirk's dispassionate, powerfully understated writing lets her sorrowful account speak for itself." — San Francisco Chronicle
"[Ota Benga's] story has been told before, but the journalist Pamela Newkirk fleshes it out with chilling human dimension and rich anthropological perspective in her engrossing new book, Spectacle. — New York Times, Metro Section "Bookshelf" Review
"With her meticulously researched account, Newkirk rights the record, offering a profoundly unsettling look at the racism deeply rooted in even the city's (and the nation's) progressive institutions at the start of the 20th century." — NYU Stories (Online)
"Newkirk's investigation is a nuanced account of Benga's relationship with Verner and Hornaday, a subtle look into what it meant for a colonized African to be free and how the pursuit of scientific knowledge played a role in racial subjection." — Jezebel
"In this enthralling social history, Newkirk reveals the truth about Ota Benga, the people who exploited him and the heroes who fought vainly to save him." — More magazine
"This is an explosive, heartbreaking book. It unfolds with the grace of an E.L. Doctorow novel, and spins forward with the urgency of a wild tabloid story." — James McBride, bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird
"A riveting account of one of the most startling episodes in the sorry history of race in America. Ms. Newkirk is a crisp storyteller as well as an experienced journalist whose investigative skills bring alive both her cast of characters and the age in which they lived." — Wall Street Journal
"Compelling. . . . Spectacle is an exhaustively researched work of social history that links Benga's story with examinations of turn-of-the-century racial discrimination and discord, scientific polygenism, middle-class African American life in New York, and yellow journalism." — Washington Post
"Deeply researched and thoughtful. . . . Writing with precision and moral clarity, Newkirk indicts a civilization whose 'cruelty was cloaked in civility,' leaving us to examine its remnants." — Boston Globe
"Painstakingly researched and heartbreaking. . . . Newkirk does an exemplary job of respecting the damaged dignity of her subject." — In These Times
"Pamela Newkirk has taken a careful, highly readable look at an episode that lays bare so much about our not-so-distant past. It's all here: the dreams of glory in African exploration, appalling racism, and the moving, tragic odyssey of a forgotten man who was the victim of both." — Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
"A shocking tale of a young African taken from his home for the purposes of Western science throws into relief the turn-of-the-century's ill-conceived intentions and prejudice. . . . An inspired and moving work of intrepid scholarship." — Kirkus...
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April 6, 2015
Newkirk (Within the Veil) centers this meticulously detailed monograph on the life of Ota Benga, a young Congolese man who at the beginning of the 20th century suffered the indignity of being caged with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House. Although Benga himself left no written record of his experiences, Newkirk pieces together his story from the texts, photographs, and other records produced by the “lettered elite” whose members were complicit in his capture and display. While other African men and women, including the “Hottentot Venus” Sarah Baartman, had been exhibited to European audiences, Benga’s experience was unusual because it took place not in a “human zoo” but in one devoted to animals, thus depicting this African man not simply as exotic, but as a failure of human evolution. Newkirk places Benga’s story in the context of an ever more segregated and aggressively racist United States, a Europe intent on exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources, and a scientific culture that venerated objective inquiry but refused to question established ideas about race. The book might have benefited from a more effective structure, as it wanders through various times and locations. Nonetheless, readers will be moved, especially when reading about the tragic turns Benga’s life took in the years after he was released.
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April 15, 2015
In 1906, the New York Zoological Gardens unveiled an exhibit that became an international sensation: its Monkey House, inside which was caged a young Congolese man named Ota Benga. Ota was promoted as a "pygmy" and brought to the United States for the sole purpose of serving as an anthropological display. In New York, Ota was presented as half zookeeper, half exhibit, but it's clear that he was generally regarded as more of the latter than the former--particularly by his promoters, many of whom were renowned eugenicists. When African American leaders protested, everyone from well-respected scientists to the New York Times downplayed the outcry. The Times ran an editorial arguing that it was "absurd to make moan over the imagined [...] degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies are very low in the human scale." What made Ota so "entertaining" for millions of onlookers? This is a question whose answers spoke directly to the dialog of early 20th- century race relations, and award-winning journalist Newkirk presents them with clarity. VERDICT Newkirk gives us more than the tragic story of one Congolese man. She offers a look into the history of American eugenics and the concepts of racial anthropology that have served as the foundation for racial intolerance for generations. Benga's story is one part of a bigger problem--a problem that continues to exist--and Newkirk doesn't allow us to forget him. Nor should she.--Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Ota Benga, a young African man, was featured as an exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging him 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 and the international controversy it inspired. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota's tragic existence, from the Congo to St. Louis to New York and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.
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