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Abstract: This paper addresses issues of race, species, and kind through an incident that took place 25 May 2020, when a birder and a dog owner crossed path in the Ramble of New York's Central Park. The birder, a gay Black man, was searching for scarlet tanagers and other songbirds. The dog owner, a white woman, was walking Henry, her blond cocker. The birder asked the dog owner to leash her spaniel, a bird dog, as required by park rules. The dog owner called 911, reporting that an 'African-American man was putting her in danger'. There is a pre-history to their encounter. Our dubious guide is John James Audubon, whose Ornithological Biography presents haunting scenes of life out of doors, the ramble, or the hunt, and how humans and animals prey upon each other. But the decisive voice is that of Frederic Law Olmsted, who not only designed Central Park (with Calvert Vaux), but also provided the moral and ethical code for its police force. Once it is shown how all the actors (human and animal) and the setting are in fact 'related,' it is the presence of the police in the park that must be explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2018, a statue commemorating J Marion Sims was removed from Central Park, New York, and relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he is buried. In 1849, Sims developed a repeatable surgical solution for obstetric fistula, a debilitating condition caused by prolonged, obstructed labour, which damages the vaginal wall, resulting in permanent leakage via the vagina from either the bowel or bladder and sometimes both. Initially, Sims appears worthy of widespread adulation. There are several commemorative statues of him, he has been afforded the title of the 'father of modern gynaecology', and for 37 years, the American Urogynecological Society held an annual eponymous lecture, among other honours. Obstetric fistula rendered women social pariahs, unable to engage fully in either domestic or public life. Sims was able to create a reliably repeatable surgical solution but did so through ongoing experimentation on enslaved women. One of these women, Anarcha, was operated on at least 30 times without the use of anaesthesia over a four-year period, despite the availability of anaesthesia for the majority of the experimentation period. Over 170 years later, Sims' story retains its relevance because it represents a clear point at which race, gender and class intersect with medicine. This paper will use Sims' own account to drive the narrative, then examine matters of agency, ethics and consent that come from it, to show that his work, and subsequent renown, were only possible because of the inherent violence of chattel slavery and other systemic forms of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In tracing the controversy-ridden social history of the West Indian Labor Day Carnival in Central Brooklyn, the phrase 'Zoo York' emerged as a powerful descriptor of city life as a staged and enclosed spectacle, an ethos that is enunciated by Carnival. The term 'Zoo York' was coined by the hip-hop generation of the 1970s. Zoo York is said to have been inspired by the physical, literal zoo in Central Park, but might have been influenced by the major construction projects that enclosed the inner city of New York City decades prior. In this analysis, Carnival is shown to be a method and praxis for examining the racial and gender aspects of the city. This method places the West Indian Carnival within a larger narrative of enclosure that has been critical in the policing of Black cultural aesthetics in the United States and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filmed in New York City's Central Park, the 1968 experimental documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One involved three film crews who were each tasked with capturing different aspects of the film production process simultaneously. One crew filmed the actors conventionally while a second crew filmed the first crew, and a third crew filmed the reactions of innocent passersby who happened upon the entire spectacle. At the center of the action is the (purportedly) bumbling director, William Greaves, who appears on camera throughout the film struggling (perhaps ostensibly) to give his cast and crew adequate direction. The result of this complicated exercise in acting and documentary filmmaking is a series of technical failures caused by Greaves's incompetent direction in addition to various equipment issues. This article considers the political dimensions of these technical failures that constitute the film's aesthetics. It argues that these technical failures create space for surprising critiques of 1960s American racial and sexual politics. Through its close readings, the article highlights the film's often overlooked themes of sexuality and offers a more capacious understanding of the revolutionary possibilities of failure in documentary cinema aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]