In the last decades of the 19th century, the colonization of the African continent coincided with the popularity of ethnographical spectacles in Europe. On tour in European zoos, cabarets, fairs, as well as in colonial and universal expositions, these representations displayed indigenous groups of individuals from recently or soon-to-be colonized regions. While France, Great Britain and Germany competed overseas to affirm their colonial power, these countries welcomed the same spectacles in their respective capital cities and provincial towns. Drawing on examples borrowed from France, England, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this study examines the ways these spectacles were represented in European literatures and visual arts. Although these spectacles “displayed” a wide variety of peoples, not only groups from Africa, this article focuses exclusively on works which depict peoples from this continent. In treating the works in question as “cultural signals”, to use Jean Devisse’s expression, it aims to identify the types of visual or literary consumption that these artistic productions elicit. The article adopts an essentially rhetorical perspective in order to attempt to determine the types of identification which the reader /consumer is encouraged to assume. These may be a naïve, imperialist consumption of the “savage” animal, a form of civilizing compassion that can change to suspicion during war times, or an erotic complicity that can go as far as sketching out a challenge to ethnocentrism.