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Article
Title: 'Gorilla Trails in Paradise': Carl Akeley, Mary Bradley, and the American Search for the Missing Link
Journal: Journal of American Culture
Year: 2006
Author(s): Jeannette Eileen Jones
Reference: pp. 321-336
Synopsis: This article explores the impact of American scientific and public discourses about Darwin’s theory of evolution, (specifically the theory that ‘man’ descended from apes), on popular thought and culture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Of particular concern is the search for the creature, euphemistically referred to as “Mr. Darwin’s Missing Link,” that represented the evolutionary leap from simian to human. Early proponents and skeptics of Darwinian evolution speculated that such a creature could have resulted from a coupling between an African woman and a male gorilla. Such speculation lay rooted in centuries of images of African/Black women as promiscuous and bestial in their sexuality. The article reveals that this multilayered discourse influenced a surge in expeditions to the Belgian Congo to secure both live and dead specimens of gorillas to bring back to the West. As the journals and travel narratives of naturalists Carl Akeley and writer Mary Bradley illustrate, the Western obsession with collecting gorillas was very much implicated in the racialized and sexualized debates surrounding the “missing link.”