This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.”

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine.  She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015), both of which won book awards from the American Political Science Association.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Claire Jean Kim: Murder and Mattering in Harambe's House

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Claire Jean Kim: Murder and Mattering in Harambe's House

IHC UCSB