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- Title
A VISIT FROM THE DOOM SQUAD.
- Authors
Dwyer, June
- Abstract
This essay looks at texts that describe two war-ravaged zoos--the Warsaw Zoo that was all but destroyed in 1939 by extensive Nazi bombing, and the Baghdad Zoo that was damaged by American air strikes and then looted during the beginning of the Second Iraq War in 2003. The fate of both zoos demonstrates that as war disrupts cultural and material environments, it often disrupts the traditional visual tropes that are associated with these environments. The Warsaw Zoo in Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife (2007) and the Baghdad Zoo in Lawrence Anthony's Babylon's Ark (2007) both take on biblical resonance and become transformed from secular public spaces into sites overlaid with religious importance. In varying degrees, they assume the biblical identities of both Noah's Ark and Isaiah's messianic vision. Not surprisingly, the kinds of photographs included in the books about these zoos reflect their newly acquired biblical aura. These photos also bring to mind the iconic religious paintings of these biblical subjects by the nineteenth-century American Quaker folk artist, Edward Hicks. In concert with Ackerman's and Anthony's textual accounts, these sets of images complicate our notions of the power of the zoo as both an aesthetic and material environment in an unstable world.
- Subjects
ZOOS in literature; ZOOS in art; HICKS, Edward, 1780-1849; ANTHONY, Lawrence, 1950-2012; ACKERMAN, Diane, 1948-; ZOOKEEPER'S Wife, The (Book); BABYLON'S Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo (Book)
- Publication
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 2013, Issue 24, p58
- ISSN
1756-9575
- Publication type
Essay