2 The brief narrative on the website of Bailey's company, Third World Bunfight, explains the evolution and shifting focus from German to French and Belgian colonialism. Aside from Vienna, Exhibit A was shown at the Theaterformen Festival in Braunschweig (2010) and at the Kiasma Centre in Helsinki, Finland (2011). From 2012 onwards, the show was titled Exhibit B, and continued to feature installations about the German, Austrian and Dutch past, but expanded its lens to include the colonial past of the Belgian Congo and the (French) Republic of Congo. See www.thirdworldbunfight.co.za/productions/exhibit-b.html, last accessed 26 April 2015. In Edinburgh, Bailey added one installation to Exhibit B about a Kenyan man castrated during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s; see www.theguardina.com/stage/2014/aug/12/exhibit-b-edinburgh-festival-2014-review, last accessed 4 November 2014.

3 Exhibit A and B have travelled to a number of important festivals in Europe and beyond, including the Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), the foreign affairs festival (Berlin, Germany, 2012), the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (South Africa, 2012), the Holland Festival (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2013), the Avignon Festival (France, 2013), the Edinburgh International Festival (Scotland, 2014), and the Territoria Festival (Moscow, Russia, 2014). Aside from the Kiasma Centre in Helsinki, only a few theatres were able to book the show independent of a festival, including the Barbican in London and the Theatre Gerard Philippe in Paris, both in 2014.

4 To give some examples: In her review of the 2013 Avignon Festival, Fabienne Darge called it ‘magnificent’, a ‘grand ceremony between revelation and invocation’ (‘Théatre de l’Afrique de la Colonisation celle de la Mondialisation’, Le Monde, 16 July 2013, p. 12). The press in Vienna was less effusive, but one reviewer called it ‘necessary’ and another ‘impressive’ (respectively Ploebst, Helmut, ‘Exotische Ausstellungsstücke in High Heels’, Der Standard, 19 May 2010, p. 34Google Scholar; Petsch, Barbara, ‘Der Mensch als Beute und Präparat’, Die Presse.com, 20 May 2010 (web))Google Scholar. The press coverage in Berlin (2012) and Edinburgh (2014) tried to convey both sides of the controversy, and included praise along with criticism. The subtitle of the review in the Telegraph conveys this stance: ‘Laura Barnett Finds Exhibit B, the South African Director Brett Bailey's Painful Meditation on Race and Colonial History, Both Powerful and Problematic’ (Laura Barnett, ‘Edinburgh Festival 2014: Exhibit B, Playfair Library Hall, Review: “Confrontational”’, Telegraph, 11 August 2014 (web)). While the review in the Guardian was fairly damning (see note 2), the most positive review called it ‘disturbing but powerful’; ‘still, reflective, non-histrionic’; and ‘haunting’ (Lyndsey Winship, ‘Edinburgh Festival: Exhibit B, Playfair Library Hall – review’, London Evening Standard, 18 August 2014 (web)).

5 Bailey exacerbated the conflict, first by misleadingly linking the installation to a ‘human zoo’ in the promotional materials and on his website (which has meanwhile been revised), and second by decrying protests as a form of bullying and censorship in a public statement posted on his website – www.thirdworldbunfight.co.za/productions/exhibit-a-b-and-c.html, last accessed January 2015. Meanwhile, the website has been radically remade and now provides a rich trove of materials documenting different sides of the debate: http://thirdworldbunfight.co.za/exhibit-b, last accessed May 2015.

6 In her press release upon the cancellation of the show, Sara Myers, who had called for its boycott, framed the controversy in this way: ‘the Black community refuses to have racism defined for them by wealthy, white liberals’. ‘Press Release: Withdraw the Racist Exhibition “Exhibit B – The Human Zoo” from Showing at the Barbican from 23rd–27th September’, change.org, 24 September 2014 (web). The constellation of racialized minorities charging elite cultural institutions with racism, and the reverse charge of censorship, also recall the scandal surrounding the publication of satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten in 2005, as well as the discussions surrounding the use of blackface in the Berlin theatres in 2011 and 2012. See note 23 below.

7 Krueger, Anton, Experiments in Freedom: Explorations of Identity in New South African Drama (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 153–70Google Scholar.

8 Matshikiza quoted in ibid., p. 153.

9 Lisa Skwirblies has argued that Bailey has chosen sites entwined with imperial history for Exhibit A and B although the production refrains from making this history explicit, and instead leaves ‘it to the investigative skills of the spectator’ to make a connection between ‘place and content of the performance’ (Lisa Skwirblies, ‘“Come and Be Ashamed!” On Exhibit B and the Ambivalent Alignments of Shame’, unpublished paper presented at the University of Warwick, 25 November 2014). These associations pertain to some sites where Exhibit B was shown more than others: the former Water Reservoir in the Berlin neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, where Exhibit B was shown in 2012, for instance, was used as a makeshift concentration camp, an army kitchen and an air-raid bunker during the Second World War. The vaults underneath Waterloo station, where the London show was to be installed, was once used as a morgue, but I could not find any references to British imperial history.

10 A word on terminology: ‘Afro-German’ is the term by which members of this minority began to refer to themselves in the mid-1980s, when the biracial children of white German mothers and African-American GIs and African students (in West and East Germany, respectively) came of age and began to research the history of black people in Germany, forge a political movement, and tell their own stories through poetry, biography, literature, cinema and theatre. The term ‘black German’ is also becoming more common. The recent adoption of the term ‘people of colour’ in more activist circles aims to forge stronger coalitions between communities with distinct histories. While the largest ethnic minority in Germany consists of the descendants of Turkish–German labour migrants, who long struggled for citizenship rights (and now against anti-Muslim sentiments), the small minority of Afro-Germans are German citizens, but had to contend with racist exclusion based on skin colour. Oguntoye, Katharina, Opitz, May, and Schultz's, Dagmar edited anthology Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992Google Scholar, originally published in German in 1986) is considered the first document constituting a collective Afro-German subject.

11 By calling the persons labelled ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘deportee’ in the exhibit ‘non-citizens’, I follow current nomenclature in the social sciences and activism. The term ‘non-citizen’ aims to simplify a confusing array of labels that are often ideologically loaded (e.g. illegal alien, foreigner), and marks what many regard as the most salient division of Europe's denizens, namely that between those with and without citizenship rights, despite the fact that they are all governed by European states. The distinction also helps to keep in view the different legal (and social) status of minority communities compared to refugees, and complicates the Berlin and London protesters’ effort to speak simply for black people.

12 Tony Bennett proposed ‘exhibitionary complex’ as the proper analytical object of the discipline of museum studies. This term brilliantly highlights the alliance of the museum with other ‘complexes’, which discipline the modern citizen, including the military–industrial complex and the prison complex, in more overtly coercive ways. In addition, the phrase positions the museum in proximity to other sites of pleasurable surveillance and discipline, such as the fairground or the department store, and thereby challenges the institution's high-cultural distance from low-/mass-cultural venues and practices. Bennett, Tony, The Birth of the Museum (London, New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

13 For detailed discussion of that controversy, and Buehnenwatch's role in it, see Sieg, Katrin, ‘Race, Guilt and Innocence: Facing Blackface in Contemporary German Theater’, German Studies Review, 38, 1 (2015), pp. 117–34, n. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 In contrast to the London protests, which were organized by a blogger who became a public spokesperson, Buehnenwatch does not have a single head. Among those who have participated in public discussions are Afro-Germans such as the performance artists Simone Dede Ayivi and Sharon Otoo, a black British writer and editor now based in Berlin.

15 Ames, Eric, Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

16 Zimmerman, Andrew, Anthropology and Anti-humanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Dreesbach, Anne, Gezähmte Wilde: Die Zurschaustellung ‘exotischer’ Menschen in Deutschland 1870–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005)Google Scholar.

18 See especially ibid.; Ciarlo, David, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

19 Blachard, Pascal, Bancel, Nicolas, Deroo, Eric and Lemaire, Sandrine, eds., Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

20 Blanchard, Pascal, Boetsch, Gilles and Snoep, Nanette Jacomijn, eds., Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, trans. Dusinberre, Lilian Thuram (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011)Google Scholar.

21 Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boetsch and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, Human Zoos, p. 20.

22 The work of Brändle, Joeden-Forgey and Zimmerman, for instance, is more interested in the agency of the performers, who often pursued their own agendas in signing contracts with impresarios. Brändle, Rea, Nayo Bruce: Geschichte einer afrikanischen Familie in Europa (Zurich: Chronos, 2007)Google Scholar; Joeden-Forgey, Elizabeth, ‘Race Power in Postcolonial Germany: The German Africa Show and the National Socialist State, 1935–40’, in Ames, Eric, Klotz, Marcia, and Wildenthal, Lora, eds., Germany's Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), pp. 167–88Google Scholar. Kruger, Loren is one of the few scholars who has examined displays of Africans in Germany that do not conform to the primitivist paradigm. ‘“White Cities,” “Diamond Zulus,” and the “African Contribution to Human Advancement”: African Modernities and the World's Fairs’, TDR: The Drama Review, 51, 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 19–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Finally, Jane Goodall has produced a transnational comparative study of popular performances, including ethnological shows, that attends to a much greater degree than Blanchard et al. to the destabilizing effects of performing racial difference in Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (New York: Routledge, 2002).

23 Buehnenwatch, ‘Unsere Position zum Projekt “Exhibit B” von Brett Bailey bei den Berliner Festspielen 2012’, at http://buehnenwatch.com/unsere-position-zum-projekt-exhibit-b-von-brett-bailey-bei-den-berliner-festspielen-2012, last accessed May 2015.

24 Koepsell quoted in Shirley Apthorpe, ‘Black “Human Zoo” Fury Greets Berlin Art Show’, at www.bloomberg.com/news/2012–10–03/black-human-zoo-fury-greets-berlin-art-show.html, last accessed May 2015.

25 Skwirblies, , ‘Come and be Ashamed!’, draws on Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar for her critique of Bailey. She argues that the eliciting of shame is the show's main objective, and draws on Bailey's own statements of intent, Anton Krueger's interview with Bailey, and her own experience of the show to support her argument. While I agree with her critique of shame, I maintain that there are other modes of engaging with the performance installation. Krueger, Anton, ‘Come in and Be Ashamed! An Interview with Brett Bailey’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 9, 1 (February 2013), pp. 1–13Google Scholar.

26 John O’Mahony, ‘Edinburgh's Most Controversial Show: Exhibit B, a Human Zoo’, Guardian, 11 August 2014 (web).

27 The Deutsches Theater had originally planned to produce Bruce Norris's play Clybourne Park, which includes two African-American characters. The Deutsches Theater wanted to cast white actors in blackface in these parts. When Norris found out, he withdrew his permission, and the theatre instead produced the play Unschuld (Innocence) by German playwright Deah Loher. It also included two black roles, and these were performed in blackface by white actors. For a detailed discussion of the blackface discussion and its aftermath, see Sieg, ‘Race, Guilt and Innocence’.

28 In Berlin, only one person on the cast list (not counting the four Namibian choristers travelling with the show) was a professional actor; the remaining twelve cast members were not. (The proportion was different in London, where more cast members were professional actors.) J. S. Rafaeli, ‘Performers in London's “Racist” Human Zoo Exhibit Are Angry It's Been Shut Down’ at www.vice.com/read/exhibit-b-human-zoo-barbican-178, last accessed 26 September 2014. In a public statement, the performers of the London production identify themselves as ‘actors and performers’, and as ‘artists who, after thoughtful and careful deliberation, decide what projects we want to work on’. See http://cdn.mg.co.za/content/documents/2014/09/30/londonperformersinexhibitbspeakout.pdf, last accessed May 2015.

29 Jamele Watkins, ‘Theater as the Rehearsal to Revolution: “Real Life: Deutschland”’, paper presented at Black German Studies seminar, German Studies Association, Kansas City, September 2014. Damani Partridge, ‘After Diaspora, “Beyond Belonging”: Assessing the Future of Citizenship from a Noncitizen Stage’, paper presented at Intersections: Cross-cultural Theater in Germany and the US, University of Pennsylvania, 21 March 2014.

30 Arnaut, Karel and Chika, Chokri Ben, ‘Staging/Caging “Otherness” in the Postcolony: Spectres of the Human Zoo’, Critical Arts: South–North Cultural and Media Studies, 27, 6 (December 2013), pp. 661–83Google Scholar.

31 See, for instance, the writing of poet Ayim, May, Blues in Black and White: A Collection of Essays, Poetry and Conversations (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Eley, Geoff, ‘The Trouble with Race: Migrancy, Difference, and the Remaking of Europe’, in Chin, Rita, Fehrenbach, Heide, Eley, Geoff and Grossmann, Atina, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), pp. 137–81Google Scholar; el-Tayeb, Fatima, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fehrenbach, Heide, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

32 Popoola, Olumide, Also by Mail (Münster: Edition Assemblage, 2013)Google Scholar. Elizabeth Blonzen's play Schwarz tragen (Wearing Black) was produced at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin, in 2013.

33 Nso explained his reasons for going on hunger strike in a press release posted on the website of Karawane, a non-governmental organization (NGO) for refugee rights.

34 Nso, quoted in Apthorpe, ‘Black “Human Zoo”’.

35 Koepsell, quoted in ibid.

36 Pichler, Karoline, Angelo Soliman, der hochfürstliche Mohr: Ein exotisches Kapitel Alt-Wien, in Bauer, Wilhelm A. and Firla, Monika, eds. (Berlin: Edition Ost, 1993; first published Vienna: Gerlach und Wiedling, 1922)Google Scholar.

37 Omofuma's story was featured in the installation showing a deportee in an aeroplane seat when Exhibit A opened in Vienna. Similar to the ‘found-object’ installations, the biography recounted in the deportee installation has been adapted in each city where Exhibit A and B were shown.

38 Belinda Kazeem on the Research Group in Kazeem, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, Peggy Piesche, ‘Museum. Space. History: New Sites of Political Tectonics’, at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0708/kazeemetal/en, last accessed May 2015. The Research Group intervened in the tendentious perspective framing Soliman at the time of the Mozart anniversary year. Until then, biographical scholarship on Soliman was dominated by Monika Firla, who edited the reprint of Pichler's biography, and curated two exhibitions on Soliman at the Rollettmuseum near Vienna and the Freemason Museum in southern Germany. Firla wrote the accompanying catalogues; the short portrait of Soliman accessible at Germany's Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BPB, Federal Centre for Political Education), which serves as an online source on a wide range of topics; and an online essay in which she presents her controversial thesis that Soliman had voluntarily donated his own skin for scientific use. Monika Firla, 'Verkörpert uns Soliman oder hat er seine Haut selbst gespendet?’, at www.tanzhotel.at/Deutsch/Angelo_Soliman/Firla.htm, last accessed May 2015. Her only support for this thesis is his wholesale acceptance of Enlightenment precepts of scientific rationality. Although she contends that Soliman's ‘donation’ does not diminish the outrage of his display as a stereotypical savage, her thesis imputes Soliman's consent based on his false consciousness. Moreover, Firla was irked by the public focus on Soliman's desecration after death, and wished to emphasize his achievements as a model migrant instead, by showcasing his friendships with prominent white Viennese on the BPB site. Since the mid-2000s, a notable shift in the scholarly approach to Soliman has become evident in the monograph by Walter Sauer, and in the 2011-12 exhibition on Soliman at the Vienna Museum. Philipp Blom and Wolfgang Kos, eds., Angelo Soliman: Ein Afrikaner in Wien (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2011); Sauer, Walter, ed., Von Soliman zu Omofuma: Afrikanische Diaspora in Oesterreich 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2007)Google Scholar. Italics in original.

39 Mozart and Soliman were members of the same Freemason lodge.

40 Belinda Kazeem, Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche, ‘Museum. Space. History’.

41 The two installations about the Herero and Nama genocide perpetrated by German colonial troops are also linked to the descendants’ demands to have human remains returned from German museums to the state of Namibia. See Larissa Förster, ‘These Skulls Are Not Enough: The Repatriation of Namibian Human Remains from Berlin to Windhoek in 2011’ (2013), at www.darkmatter101.org/site/2013/11/18/these-skulls-are-not-enough-the-repatriation-of-namibian-human-remains-from-berlin-to-windhoek-in-2011, last accessed April 2014. In addition, Exhibit B refers to Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from the Cape colony, whose body parts were also displayed in the French Musée de l’homme after her death, but eventually repatriated after a long legal battle, and interred in the South African Republic.

42 In her study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), performance scholar Catherine Cole stresses that the TRC was judged much more positively abroad than in South Africa, where many criticized that failure of the justice system to follow through by either prosecuting perpetrators or compensating the victims. Cole also argues that artistic works about crimes perpetrated during apartheid were often much more forthright and radical in their demands for justice than the hearings. Cole, Catherine, Performing South Africa's Truth Commissions: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

43 Aside from Lisa Skwirblies (see note 9), Brett Bailey and Anton Krueger characterized European audiences as feeling shame, in Krueger, Anton, ‘Gazing at Exhibit A: Interview with Brett Bailey’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 9, 1 (February 2013), p. 3Google Scholar. Nathanael M. Vlachos interprets Bailey's work on Exhibit B in South Africa as the artist's effort to work through his own shame, but argues that ‘the use of the work as a technology of self for acts of self-excavation, however, would not accompany Bailey as he took the work to Berlin’. Nathanael M. Vlachos, ‘Brett Bailey's Traveling Human Zoo: Fragmentations of Whiteness Across Borders’, at https://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/vlachoswhitepaper.pdf, last accessed 29 April 2015.

44 Azoulay, Ariella, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008)Google Scholar.

45 ‘Exhibit B: Is the ‘Human Zoo’ Racist? The Performers Respond’, at www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/sep/05/exhibit-b-is-the-human-zoo-racist-the-performers-respond, last accessed May 2015.

46 Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘Reality Check: From Culture and Difference to Possession and Dispossession’, paper presented at Envisioning 21st Century Museums, Milan, Italy, 22 January 2015.

47 Speaking shortly after the deadly assault on the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 9 January 2015, Dimitrakaki referenced as well the attack on The Jewish Museum of Belgium in May 2014, which resulted in four deaths.