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8454.
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8455.
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8458.More information
AbstractRecent studies on World's Fairs overwhelmingly prefer to characterise the inventorisation of cultural identities inside the National Pavilions as “reifying” or “folklorising”, just as they do the Fairs' representations of material culture, be they architectural, ethnographic, or commercial. This article instead focuses on another aspect of World's Fairs, the non-museological spaces of festival, spectacles, and the food booths found in the colonial section of the Paris World's Fair of 1889. This allows us to grasp different intercultural dynamics at the heart of the dialectic of World's Fairs, between their inclusive character favouring an interpenetration of cultures, oriented towards a worldwide utopia and civilisation on a global scale, and their exclusive character which in contrast tends to close off the different cultural communities represented through museum artefacts. It appears as well that through these three devices of encountering otherness, intercultural contact was seen as integral to a global discourse which led not to the rejection of the colonised peoples as “other” but rather to reinforcement of the civilising mission of French colonialism. Documentation of visitors' accounts to the World's Fair of 1889 was used to understand the different above-named sites and manifestations.
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8459.
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