Patrick Young | From the Eiffel Tower to the Javanese Dancer: Envisioning Cultural Globalization at the 1889 Paris Exhibition | The History Teacher, 41.3

From the Eiffel Tower to the Javanese Dancer: Envisioning Cultural Globalization at the 1889 Paris Exhibition

Patrick Young
University of Massachusetts, Lowell

ARGUABLY THE TWO MAIN ATTRACTIONS for visitors to the 1889 Exposition Universelle (Universal Exposition), the Eiffel Tower and the live dancers from the Dutch colony of Java make for a provocative juxtaposition. Constructed expressly for the 1889 Exhibition, Gustave Eiffel's 106-story iron lattice tower became not only the world's tallest structure at its debut, it also took on iconic status as a marker of French national prestige in its centenary year. More broadly, the tower signified progress and optimism (as well as a creeping anxiety) in Europe's age of industry and empire.¹ While their renown has proven a less enduring one, the Javanese dancers at the Exhibition attracted an at-times almost delirious attention and fascination among the throngs of spectators, journalists, and artists who witnessed their live performances of courtly dance and music. As a key component of the "living exhibits" of colonial natives organized for the Exhibition, the dancers were intended both to inform and to entertain. Framed as an attraction, they collapsed the geographic distance separating Europe from its colonies while paradoxically underscoring cultural differences between the two.

Photos of Eiffel Tower and Javanese dancer

That those attending the Exhibition might fixate in particular on these two attractions invites reflection upon their possible tensions and affinities as artifacts of the event; and more broadly, upon the connections they might signal between nineteenth-century Western notions of progress and the intensified framing of colonial cultures at a time of feverish empire- and nation-building.² But for teachers, and more particularly students living in an age of accelerated global integration and consciousness, such images cannot help but conjure ostensibly more contemporary questions of globalization as well. With cross-cultural encounter, mass spectatorship, and simulation now effectively normalized as cultural experience, it is worth looking to the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century as a point of germination for many defining practices of our current media-saturated global order. The exhibitions were milestones of global integration, and provide early examples of the use of media to produce enhanced experience and "reality." They promised the world to visitors, in a manner of speaking, and tried to deliver it through intensified efforts of display and viewing. The 1889 Paris Exhibition can offer keen insight into the genesis of global culture, especially when it is approached via an experiential teaching model that incorporates into the analysis students' own viewing of, and contemporary immersion in global media culture. Such an approach, if successful, will not only help elucidate the deeper historical evolution of globalization in the modern period; it will also nurture a more critical and historical disposition toward the dynamics of visual mediation, so novel at the early exhibitions and so commonplace in our own time.³

Teaching the Exhibitions: Issues and Approaches

The tradition of the exhibitions (or World's Fairs, as they would come to be known in America) as global events properly begins with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, which itself expanded upon an existing European tradition of regional and national commercial fairs, as well as a more recently emergent "exhibitionary complex" comprised of museums, public monuments, panoramas, arcades, and early department stores.⁴ The events would after 1851 become fixtures of European and American life, taking place every 1 to 5 years, mostly in major cities in the half-century or so leading up to the First World War.⁵ The 1889 Exhibition in Paris, together with the subsequent 1893 "Columbian Exposition" in Chicago, mark the apogee of this tradition, though the events continue right up to the present day.⁶ The Paris Exhibition attracted 28–30 million visitors and an average of 175,000 per day, making it one of the larger and most profitable of the events.⁷ These were the most striking instances of a dawning culture of mass spectacle in the West, bringing together crowds of varied national, gender, and class composition in a shared experience of visual consumption.⁸

The exhibitions are an extraordinarily rich resource for teaching, though using them as historical artifacts in the classroom does raise specific methodological and pedagogical issues that must be addressed at the outset. A lack of evidence available for direct interpretation is happily not one of these. As spectacular mass events, the exhibitions left behind a great trail of catalogues, official and journalistic accounts, ephemera, illustrations, and photographs that are readily accessible and increasingly available online.⁹ Yet while such documentation can offer great insight into the historical dimensions of the Exhibitions, it can also close off some of their more suggestive aspects if not handled critically. For example, while organizers' deliberations and statements of purpose in official publications are vital to understanding the events, they can also impede consideration of the actual reception of the exhibits by visitors. It can be too easy to mistake the "authorial intentions" of these organizers for the reality of the Exhibition as many millions experienced it. Similarly, merely extrapolating from photographs and catalogues can too readily assume a de-historicized universal and authoritative viewing position, one that confounds past and present and effaces important differences between viewers. Here, perhaps even more than in other teaching situations, it is vital to remain critically attentive to the media through which one is accessing the past.

The alternative I would propose is treating the exhibitions as, first and foremost, an experience—one organized principally around specific practices of display and viewing—and having students engage them interactively on those terms. Presenting historical source material from the exhibitions in two-dimensional fashion as mere artifact or evidence to be read like any other does a grave disservice to the essentially dynamic and participatory nature of these events. It can also mute their vibrant contemporary resonances: as part museum, part theme park, and part reality show, the exhibitions bridge the cultural world of the nineteenth century and the one we ourselves inhabit. Immersed as they are in contemporary mass media culture, students stand well-positioned both to enter into the spectacle and to consider it critically if provided with the historical and theoretical support to do so. I have found it most pedagogically rewarding to invite students to follow along the possible path of a visitor through the Exhibition, with their attention fixed upon how the event "worked" as a visual experience. That is, how did it display its main attractions and structure the viewing of the many millions who attended during its six-month run? What kinds of visual experience did the Exhibition enable, and what in that experience was valuable and/or lacking?

Such an approach is in fact far truer to the spirit and ambitions of the Exhibition itself, which aimed even more than its predecessors at being an "event" and providing a singular and memorable experience.¹⁰ Even as they commonly resorted to established museum conventions in organizing and displaying objects, Exhibition organizers also introduced aspects of simulation and interactivity that would become staples of exhibition strategy in the later twentieth century. With for example its "Street in Cairo" comprising functioning souks (Arab markets), cafés with bournous-wearing Arab men smoking hookahs and drinking thick coffee, donkey rides, impromptu musical performances, and wandering belly-dancers, the 1889 Paris Exhibition pushed at the limits of legitimate museological practice to present distant lands and cultures to Europeans as a virtual and participatory experience.¹¹ In these sections as in others within the vast 237-acre space of the grounds in central Paris, visitors to the Exhibition were very much mobile spectators, facing the challenge of taking in and sorting out a huge quantity of visual information as they moved freely about the exhibits. They were also expectant ones, as the great hype of superlatives and "firsts" surrounding the event both before and during its six-month run actively conditioned their desires and expectations and led them even more to anticipate and to undertake the event as above all an experience.¹²

What made that experience headier still at the time, and more resonant in retrospect, was its ambitious global reach. This was after all an event not only organized expressly for viewing, it was also one which claimed to put the world—or at least what its organizers deemed the most important parts of it—on display. The exhibitions became such singular events in the later nineteenth century because they brought together a seemingly limitless range of human endeavor from around the world within a single central space of visual consumption. In that, they very much foreshadowed conditions of our own time, when media technologies make the world ever more immediately available, albeit as mediated experience.¹³ Far more than their teachers, students will therefore bring to their encounter with the exhibitions a perspective of media-enabled, and now thoroughly normalized, global reach. Rather than proscribe this perspective as presentist, I have found it far more fruitful to allow it into the proceedings as a tension, and to have students engage the events simultaneously in both their historical specificity and their contemporary resonances. Such an approach invites them to be historical, in the truest sense: to consider both their connections to and distance from the past, meaning here the high modern age of industry and empire (and I would add nascent globalization) that the Exhibition so visually embodied.

Viewing Monuments and Machines

Given how comprehensive the Exhibition aimed to be, and how sprawling it in fact was, any number of "itineraries" through it are possible. One must begin with the Eiffel Tower, of course, which emerged above its surroundings as the gateway to the event, imposing itself immediately upon the visual and imaginative horizon of those attending.¹⁴ The Tower served also as the principal icon of the event, its "brand," to use an only slightly anachronistic term.¹⁵ It quickly became a marker both for French national identity and ambitions and for the agendas of the event, as its photographic and illustrated reproductions appeared repeatedly on promotional materials and postcards. It is worthwhile to engage students' associations with this consummately modern monument at the outset: what, to them, does the Eiffel Tower connote? What are the most striking features of the structure, as they observe it in the photographs and illustrations projected before them? How, and of what materials, is it built, and what is the impact of those decisions on the overall visual impression? One can then move backward to the later nineteenth century and the Exhibition of 1889, with an eye toward teasing out how those features of the Tower might connect it to the ambitions of the event, and more broadly to the historical context of late nineteenth-century France and Europe. Why might such an edifice make sense for the event, the country, and the time period, and how might it evoke spectators' fascination and even awe? Or condemnation, for that matter?

The iconic imagery of the Eiffel Tower

It is vital at this point to complicate discussion of this now-banal global icon by reminding students of how striking and even controversial it was at its inception as a monument in 1889. The Eiffel Tower was a spectacular effort at fulfilling the injunction, first advanced at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, that art be reconciled with industry, and that engineering serve aesthetic and even social values.¹⁶ Far from being immediately embraced as the new symbol of Paris and France though, the Eiffel Tower was in fact widely decried in some quarters for its vulgarity, and not only by artists and other self-appointed defenders who felt the older Paris had already been disfigured by Napoleon III's rebuilding of the city in decades prior.¹⁷ That it should nevertheless go on to attain iconic status both within France and globally invites consideration of what exactly in the monument itself or in the changing cultural historical context of the fin-de-siècle enabled it to signify in the way it ultimately did.

Inside the Gallery of Machines

A quick comparison can be helpful in doing so. Before the Tower, the Cathedral of Notre Dame afforded the highest vantage point from which to take in the panoramic view of Paris, and the transition is a telling one.¹⁸ Notre Dame was just as much an icon to city visitors and residents alike, albeit of a Paris and France that were in retreat by the later nineteenth century. Hearkening to the city's medieval origins and to a centuries-old Catholic/Christian universalism, the cathedral is a suggestive foil to the newer universalist symbol introduced in 1889. The Eiffel Tower projected itself outward to the world far more than the restored gothic cathedral, and did so in service not of the ideal of universal Christian brotherhood, but rather of the French nation state, secular modernism, and the gospel of worldly progress. As such, it fit well with the new Paris, a city of spectacle that had to "belong" not only to Parisians, but also to Frenchmen and Frenchwomen more broadly, and to the increasingly large numbers of foreigners flocking to the city as tourists.¹⁹ As a marker for the city and the country, the Tower "traveled" better than the cathedral, lending itself far more readily to visual reproduction, circulation, and instant recognition, and thus to the conditions of a nascent global consumer culture. Indeed, in showing students even a small cross-section of the countless photographic and illustrated views of the monument generated during the Exhibition, one begins to convey how thoroughly mediated Eiffel's iron tower was: obsessively viewed from an endless and always changing variety of angles, mechanically reproduced and distributed as an image, symbolically invested with national and even global resonance. In the testimony it offered to the new power of the visual, the Eiffel Tower was indeed an apt icon for and introduction to the event.

From initial encounter with this great, if contested, symbol of industrial progress, it is worth heading directly across the Champs de Mars along the central axis of the Exhibition to the Gallery of Machines. The Gallery lent itself in 1889 as readily as Eiffel's Tower to the breathless recitation of superlatives: the largest iron-framed building ever constructed to date, it stretched to 125 yards wide and nearly 500 yards long and contained 16,000 machines in its displays.²⁰ France claimed fully three-quarters of the Gallery's exhibition space for itself, displaying mostly productive and energy-generating machinery. Many of these machines were in operation during exhibition hours, powered by electric motors, as well as by steam generators in adjacent buildings connected to the Gallery by underground mains.²¹ Like the Tower, the vast Gallery was made all the more remarkable for being lit by electricity—still a dazzling novelty after its invention only seven years prior—which allowed for evening viewing by the crowds of visitors as well.

As a leading "marvel" of the Exhibition and one of its most popular attractions, the Gallery of Machines certainly offers testament to the broad fascination with and investment in technological modernity in high industrial Europe. Yet, when considered visually and experientially, it can also provide insight into the growing power of visual representation and viewing to reframe social and economic reality. One obvious initial question to pose is what it might have been like to stand in a vast hall amidst 16,000 mostly industrial machines, many of them fully in operation during exhibition hours, and why in the world visitors would crowd into the Gallery at such numbers to do so. As the thrill of gazing at industrial turbines and threshing machines may not be self-evident to students, the often-breathless accounts of contemporary observers can be helpful in evoking the din and the excitement of the Gallery. In considering these, along with photos and illustrations of the Gallery interior and the machines themselves, as well as the larger historical context, students should be able to offer historical explanations for why many in high industrial Europe would find such technology displays inviting. For the majority of the middle-class viewing audience in particular, the experience of the Gallery would surely have evoked some of the boundless power and possibility that these instruments of the modern industrial economy seemed to augur.

Here again, though, actively engaging students' contemporary perspectives can not only draw them more directly into the discussion, but also help deepen the historical analysis. Is the fascination with technology, with machines, and with gizmos (or rather now, "devices") not a central component of a modern sensibility, one that has endured into our own age? Is the excitement surrounding the display of industrial machinery in Europe in the 1880s so different from that which accompanies Steve Jobs' annual trotting out of his latest design miracle? The cleverer student may observe that our own technological objects of fascination tend almost uniformly to be machines of consumption, rather than production.²² Indeed, that student may note as well our own greater inclination, as post-moderns, to find productive industrial machinery ugly and dangerous, and (in the West at least) more relics of the past than harbingers of the future. With our keener awareness of the often dire impact of advanced industrial technologies upon human populations and the natural environment, are we not far more inured to the sanguine visions of progress offered in the Gallery of Machines?

This dissonance is instructive. Not only does it signal an important historical evolution in Western attitudes toward technology and technological modernity; it also raises questions about the power of display to shape and even distort perceptions, ones vital to the purposes at hand. Did the Gallery offer a largely objective and informative inventory of the latest technologies, as its organizers intended? Or did displaying industrial machinery and processes in this way and in this context actually repress the deeper "truth" of industrial society? If they have recently studied the Industrial Revolution, students will be keenly aware of the great contention often surrounding the introduction of an industrial mode of production in Europe over the nineteenth century, from the Luddites to the genesis of trades unions and strikes and the revolutions of 1848. How did the new turn to making industrial machines and processes the objects of display and viewing at the exhibitions fit into this larger and very contentious story?

Accounts of the exhibitions that have taken up this issue suggest there are no easy answers. As Rosalind Williams has pointed out, new visions of possible labor/capital comity in a French "republic of producers" found expression at the 1889 Exhibition, and particularly in the Gallery of Machines.²³ It is worth remembering as well that workers themselves were members of the viewing audience in the Gallery, whether as individuals or as members of labor delegations brought to the Exhibition to observe and report on changes in productive technologies. What exactly did it mean for them to view work, and from the distance that the visual conditions of the Gallery and Exhibition imposed—a distance made literal by the velvet ropes setting off the machines for display and visual consumption?

A separate line of interpretation more informed by Marxist notions of commodity fetishism—and exemplified most suggestively by Thomas Richards in his account of the Crystal Palace Exhibition—regards such "reframing" of industrial machinery and work as a recasting of the social as spectacle; that is, as the elevation of an entrancing displayed surface in place of the deeper and more conflicted reality of industrial production and society. In the same way that a nineteenth-century department store window display might make goods seem alive, communicative, and detached from their socially conflictual origins, so too did the Gallery of Machines help to divorce production from the individuals and conditions responsible for it.²⁴ In either case, what is most important to raise with students is the question of whether visual reconstitution and display in the Gallery of Machines, and in the Exhibition overall, was simply documenting reality or was in fact forging a new domain of "reality." Put differently, was there a new power in the visual to actively shape or even supplant social and cultural reality?

The French Colonial Section's Esplanade des Invalides

Progress and Primitivism in the Colonial Section

Posing that question is indeed the necessary prelude to taking up the knottier issues surrounding colonial representation at the Exhibition.²⁵ The events had included materials from European overseas colonies since the Crystal Palace, and these displays would grow considerably more elaborate and ambitious over time.²⁶ As host nation, France went to the greatest lengths in showing off its recently acquired possessions. Visitors entered the French colonial section through the Palais des Colonies, a building designed as a colonial plantation in hybrid style that offered an introduction to and overview of the French colonial endeavor.²⁷ From there, they passed most directly onto the Esplanade des Invalides, the main artery of the French colonial section, along which were situated the pavilions of France's colonial possessions. The design of the pavilions might best be characterized as "fake-authentic," as the architects and colonial administrators who joined in creating them aimed at a design that might best typify the often large and diverse regions they represented. Thus, in their order of appearance along the Esplanade, were the main pavilions: the Algerian and Tunisian pavilions, complete with dome and minaret; the Vietnamese pavilions of Annam and Tonkin; and the Angkor Pagoda for Cambodia, modeled on the recently excavated ruins of Angkor Wat.

As a visual whole, these pseudo-authentic pavilions, juxtaposed along a single boulevard with the great architectural symbols of French military history and power, the Hôtel des Invalides, and Ministry of War, compose a pastiche that is well worth pausing over with students. Why might French authorities have organized the section in this fashion, and what is its impact upon a viewer moving through it? Such a staged collapsing of distances between France's far-flung Asian, African, and Oceanic possessions certainly served the immediate political need to make palpable the emerging (if still largely abstract) notion of a "Greater France" that was coming to guide French colonization.²⁸ Situating these pavilions in this fashion at the very center of Paris "brought the empire home" and made it tangibly available to French and foreign viewers at a time when many were either ignorant about, skeptical toward, or largely indifferent to the colonial project.²⁹

It is a panoply, though, which speaks beyond its immediate context of nineteenth-century empire building and promotion to more contemporary cultural conditions, ones with which students are likely to be almost instinctively familiar. Indeed, students will often automatically view it as analogous with Epcot Center at Disney World, which at least a few are likely to have visited at some point in their lives.³⁰ There is at play in each a radical compression of space and time which brings together past and present, as well as distant lands and cultures, into a single space of ready viewing and simulated experience.³¹ The contemporary concepts of simulacrum and hyperreality, advanced most influentially by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, can be usefully introduced here to describe the process by which simulations of the real in mass-mediated culture surpass and eventually even supplant the real.³² Was the Esplanade des Invalides "more real than the real," or was it more a feat of (possibly deliberate) falsification? Was it merely good fun, as students are often inclined to recall their experiences of Epcot, or was there power at work in the configuring of such a visual landscape?

Dance troupe from Java

The Esplanade indeed reveals the mixed agendas at work in both the colonial sections and in the Exhibition more generally. During the long deliberations over the planning of the event, Exhibition organizers commonly fell into disagreement and even conflict over how best to balance the competing imperatives to inform and to entertain. From the first, the exhibitions had been motored by the great Victorian middle-class ambition of (preferably non-governmental) public improvement, what in French is called vulgarisation of progressive knowledge and techniques.³³ The emergence in the 1870s and 1880s of the new human science disciplines of ethnography and anthropology introduced a pressure—felt acutely at the 1889 Exhibition—to more fully, truthfully, and informatively represent colonial cultures at the exhibitions.³⁴ Conversely, the banalization of the exhibitions as they became regular events made it necessary for organizers to innovate continually in their efforts of display and amusement, in order to hold the fugitive attentions of an ever-more mobile audience grown increasingly accustomed to spectacle and staged viewing.³⁵ In its effortful verisimilitude and its decidedly hodgepodge quality as a viewed ensemble, the Esplanade had to accommodate both objectives. For the viewer, that meant taking in and processing a new density of information, visual and otherwise; but it also meant still feeling very much at a fair, where one expects to be surprised and even jarred at times, and where a spirit of carnivalesque play is very much a part of the proceedings. The idea of such "serious fun" may seem quite natural to students today; in 1889, it was a new and somewhat uneasy balance, though one that was beginning to make sense within the framework of the Exhibition.

Javanese dancers,illustration, "L'Exposition Universelle," 1889, Supplement 27

Indeed, one finds the idea still present while moving past the building facades, inside the pavilions, and then into the reconstitutions of native life that lay behind them in the colonial section. The pavilion interiors offered a mostly sober—and by then, almost conventional—presentation of colonial goods, cultural artifacts, and information aimed at documenting the defining economic, cultural, and historical features of the area in question.³⁶ The greater novelty at the 1889 Exhibition was the degree to which organizers attempted to move beyond mere description or evoking of the colonies to actually making them present at the event. The 1878 Paris Exhibition had included reconstructed villages, costumes, and dance performances from the non-European world, and the Paris Zoo (Jardin d'Acclimatation) began mounting ethnographic shows in 1881 that included native populations from the colonies, a practice continued at the 1883 Amsterdam Exhibition. The 1889 Exhibition expanded dramatically upon these precedents. At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, for example, visitors encountered an extensive display of "primitive dwellings" from Asia and Africa (and early Europe), as part of an exhibit on the history of human habitation. Along the Champ de Mars they could dip as well into the delectations of the above-mentioned "Street in Cairo" next to the Egyptian pavilion, sample Mexican or Portuguese food and drink, or witness impromptu performances of folk music and dance from around the world.

The greatest public excitement, though, settled on the extensive reconstitutions of the colonial section. These included full Senegalese, Alfourou, and Parouin villages from France's new West African territories; a Cochinchine (southern Vietnam) village; and one for New Caledonia. At the end of the Esplanade, however, sat the largest and most celebrated of these, the Javanese Village or "Kampong." This simulation of Javanese everyday life had debuted to great popular acclaim at the 1883 Amsterdam Exhibition, and its Dutch organizers at the Paris Exhibition went to even greater lengths in attempting to produce a fully authentic rendering. Upon its arrival in Paris, a caravan of Javanese, consisting of forty men and twenty women, began constructing the village themselves, employing only basic tools and indigenous materials.³⁷ Once constructed, the village became the setting to observe everyday life and regular performances of theater, music, and dance by troupes brought to the Exhibition expressly for the purpose. Living in a set of barracks on the exhibition grounds for the duration of the event, the "villagers" were asked to perform typical roles from village life, with the aim of providing not only visual amusement, but also as ethnographically accurate and authentic an encounter with colonial cultures as possible. The Senegalese Village was notable for including two shepherds tending to cows, sheep, and goats while women villagers performed household tasks. In the Javanese villages, as in the other recreated villages, artisanal activity was central in the display, as transplanted workers labored daily under the eye of exhibition spectators to produce pottery, carved wooden and ivory objects, and textiles which were later judged by special juries for the awarding of medals.

Among the performances enacted at the colonial villages, it was the Javanese dance that most captivated European audiences. The dance was a reproduction of a type of opera performed at court in certain sections of the Dutch colony. The troupe of dancers consisted of five young women (ages 13–17) and one man, who performed to live music as at court, though without the singing that had figured in the performances at the sultan's palace. Dancers—who also served as courtesans—were recruited from a corps de ballet of sixty under the control of an independent Javanese prince and brought to Paris by a Dutch colonial administrator and delegate to the Exhibition.³⁸ The dancers' renown drew huge crowds to the colonial section, outlastling the six-month run of the Exhibition. Their image was emblazoned on jewelry and decorative textiles, and the troupe continued performing in Europe after the Exhibition's close, giving additional performances in Paris and other cities. Contemporaries documented the performers and their appearances in ethnographic photographs, prose recollections, and illustrations appearing in popular magazines like L'Illustration, and these can all be used to evoke the experience of viewing in the Kampong.³⁹

Was the Exhibition then, in its more effortful visual mediation (i.e., display and simulation) of indigenous colonial cultures, merely representing those cultures, or was it contributing actively to the forging of the colonial relationship? Put differently, on what terms exactly did the Exhibition make the colonies available for viewers, and did power inhere in the practices of display and viewing that provided such access? That the colonial exhibits signaled colonial control and possession is scarcely debatable; those cultures and individuals on display in the colonial section were clearly marked off as being under European political authority, occupying an area of the Exhibition that was formally separate from the main axis of pavilions along the Champ de Mars. Indeed, the displays made that control and possession tangible for spectators by presenting colonial territories as a succession of systematically ordered material artifacts. In considering the living displays specifically, students will have little difficulty conjuring a visceral and wholly contemporary distaste for what seem to have been "human zoos," exhibiting natives as captive entertainment for Europeans. They will be able readily to see how such display might serve to reinforce feelings of cultural superiority in the viewing population, uniting it as well across lines of class, gender, and nation behind a shared Western and white perception of the native other. To say so, though, is only really to scratch the surface of how the Exhibition's dynamics of display and viewing were helping to generate colonial power.

Here again, I would suggest, considering the Exhibition as an experience can be key to opening up its deeper historical dimensions. A common thread running through Exhibition visitors' recorded accounts is fascination at the immediacy and seeming authenticity of the colonial displays. "One needn't cross the Mediterranean, or go by horse, or on the back of a donkey or camel hundreds of kilometers in the mountains or desert," one article on the re-creations typically enthused, "there is, not far from the Palais des Colonies, an encampment, a veritable encampment of Kabyles (Berbers from North Africa)." Another observer claimed, "At no other time has one had in France, or in Europe, the chance to take in in the blink of eye so many original things."⁴⁰ Though they might seem merely to echo the breathless promotional language surrounding these events, such sentiments were widely shared among genuine viewers, and they make considerable sense in historical context. The Exhibition's colonial displays were one instance of a broader transition in the representation of non-Western cultures in Europe. While the European middle classes had over the nineteenth century gradually embraced the practices of travel and tourism on the continent, voyages to Africa and Asia tended still to be rare. Direct contact with the cultures and peoples of these areas was limited, a matter more for literary or artistic evocation than personal viewing. Thus an older romantic-exoticist way of imagining and representing them continued to hold sway in the West, with writers, artists, and elite travelers the privileged arbiters of Western perceptions of the non-Western world.

This began to change by the later decades of the nineteenth century, and the colonial displays at the 1889 Exhibition were a key element in the shift to a more popular, immediate, and "normalized" access in mass culture to what had formerly been exotic and shrouded in mystery. When the Exhibition and its immediate predecessors began offering direct contact with colonial cultures, most Europeans still relied commonly upon paintings or traveler narratives and drawings to form their ideas about distant areas of the globe. While photography significantly expanded the stock of images and promised a new documentary accuracy, reproduction of photographs in books and newspapers was really just beginning to become a technical and financial possibility at the time of the Exhibition. In providing such a seemingly direct encounter with colonial cultures to a truly mass audience in Europe, the Exhibition and its successors were therefore key in altering the terms of contact between Western and non-Western cultures, making the latter seem far less distant and far more "real" than ever before. This was one vital component of an emergent urban mass culture that, as Vanessa Schwartz has suggested, offered viewers access through new media—sensational faits divers (pulp news stories), morgue visits, the Musée Grevin wax museum, and early cinema—to a newly fascinating and consumable social "reality."⁴¹

Like these other instances of an emerging culture of mass spectacle in the West, the 1889 Exhibition promised a highly mediated access to deeper (or in this case distant) realities formerly shrouded from view. It is by no means coincidental that the events proved to be such a hatching ground for the development of modern social science fields like anthropology, ethnography, and sociology, as early practitioners of these disciplines found the exhibitions' representational framework on the whole very accommodating of their scientific and didactic objectives.⁴² The convergence attests to a changing colonial relationship: put crudely, an older and more imaginatively-mediated contact was giving way to the impulse to view directly, to understand, to generate knowledge, and to advocate. The French went to great lengths, for example, in assembling inventories of cultural artifacts and undertaking systematic campaigns of preservation and mise en valeur (putting into value) in the colonies themselves, and in making those artifacts available for study and popular viewing in the Metropole.⁴³ One famous example was the Musée de l'Homme (Museum of Man), established at the 1878 Paris Exhibition to serve as a more permanent home for the colonial artifacts more commonly on display at the exhibitions and to spur to further ethnographic inquiry and public interest in the colonies and the colonial project.⁴⁴

The question for students considering the Kampong and the colonial section of the Exhibition is whether there was a power at work in this new effort to define and display non-Western cultures, and to make more authentic and immediate contact with them. How, I have frequently asked my students, can impulses to study distant cultures, make direct contact with them, or even consume them be anything other than benign? Do we not risk anachronism, or even condescension to the past, in reproaching nineteenth-century Europeans for seeking encounter with other cultures in the media available to them? To pose such questions is to invite students to reflect both upon the changing historical conditions of cross-cultural encounter, and upon how the medium for that encounter might circumscribe or even distort it. Stimulating skepticism toward the Exhibition's claims to authenticity and scientific authority is not difficult, given the degree to which Western claims to knowledge about the non-Western world have come under critique in recent years. In the thirty or so years following the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, scholars across a range of disciplines have grown far more critical of claims to authority, objectivity, and political innocence in Western attempts at understanding and representing the non-Western. Is the Exhibition not indeed a cardinal example of how knowledge and control were becoming mutually-reinforcing objectives in the colonial relationship? Was it not revealing of the essentially imperial ambitions of the event that it proposed a perspective from which all of the world's cultures might be viewed and authoritatively understood?

If the Exhibition's claims to authority and authenticity look highly questionable in retrospect, they struck some as far-fetched even at the time. The Goncourt brothers, the most famous Parisian cultural arbiters of the fin-de-siècle, were typically caustic in their assessment: "The fair has no reality: it is almost as if one were walking onto the set of an Oriental play." "At bottom," Edmond Goncourt elaborated, "it's too big, too immense, there are too many things and one's attention, diffused, attaches itself to nothing."⁴⁵ For all of the attempts at documentary and ethnographic accuracy, did such a medium of representation in fact allow for anything other than a distorted view? Which views of the colonies did the Exhibition in fact authorize, and which did it proscribe? Put more simply for students, how real were those displays and re-creations, and could they really aspire to being anything other than superficial, or even fraudulent or injurious?

The endeavor to inventory and display an entire culture certainly imposed a pressure upon colonial artifacts and native populations to be representative and "typical" in a readily legible way for exhibition audiences. Thus, for example, did many enraptured viewers of the Javanese dancers imagine themselves to be witnessing authentic "traditional" dance, when in fact what they saw were components of a rather recent performance style, cobbled together into a form presentable at the Exhibition. Similarly, the "Street in Cairo" conveniently excised the modern European buildings that had been encroaching upon even the older neighborhoods of the Egyptian capital under British imperial rule, thus preserving an authentic Cairo that no longer really existed outside of European simulation and tourist promotion.⁴⁶

In representing both colonial cultures and natives themselves, the Exhibition as a medium had to offer forth the surface "types" that could best signify cultural particularity in the taxonomies of social scientists and in the fugitive gazes of viewers. It also tended to dictate that these cultures be made to perform, resulting in a foregrounding of their more ritualized, aesthetic, and artisanal aspects at the expense of those less immediately conducive to viewing. Sylviane Leprun's depiction of the exhibitions as a kind of theater suggests that the events locked both actor and audience into prescribed roles and expectations, respectively, making the encounter far more a performative than authentic or scientific one.⁴⁷ It afforded little room for the more complex experience and hybrid identity of some indigenous city dwellers, for example, nor for individual personhood in the natives displayed or genuine historicity in the cultures catalogued. Those on display had to signify an enduring and identifiable cultural essence. Thus, a newly mobile and visually empowered European spectator encountered a native fixed for viewing—an object fully embodying tradition and typicality, recently made available and comprehensible through European cultural taxonomies and mass spectacle.

Even as they tease out these power dynamics, though, students will hopefully retain from their own contemporary cultural experience an appreciation for the contingency of viewing. Then, as now, spectacles of such scale and complexity can never fully contain the meanings viewers take away for them; long before camp and sampling, early consumers of mass culture at the Exhibition were already learning to shape meanings to their own needs. The Javanese dancers, for example, never stirred exclusively one-dimensional reactions among European viewers. Though less controversial than the notorious belly dancers of the "Street in Cairo," the Javanese dancers provoked visitors with what seemed to many an expressive sensuality and enticingly liberal exposure of flesh.⁴⁸ After viewing images of the dancers alongside photographs of exhibition spectators meandering about the Exhibition grounds in their heavy dark suits and corsets, students might consider whether the dancing displays appealed to visitors needing fodder for the erotic imagination. As much as the colonial displays were made to underscore Western superiority, they could also activate for some a more mixed palette of longings for release and anxieties about possible over-civilization. Along these lines, the artists who made eager pilgrimage to the Javanese performances and to the colonial pavilions brought their own agendas, again, often at a considerable remove from the intentions of organizers. Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and Debussy were only a few among many nascent artistic modernists inspired by their viewing of colonial cultural artifacts in turn-of-the-century exhibitions and ethnographic museums. The Paris exhibitions in particular were an unlikely hothouse for what would become the European avant-garde's rejection of received artistic and taste hierarchies.⁴⁹ The ready availability of these and other kinds of unsanctioned views at the 1889 Exhibition only further underscores the degree to which the events signaled the new power and possibilities of mass viewing.

Returning, then, to the juxtaposition with which this article began, one can better understand what connected these two popular Exhibition "views." Located along the same visual landscape and within the same exhibition experience as the Gallery of Machines and the Eiffel Tower, the colonial exhibits surely helped to shore up European notions of progress and civilizational/racial hierarchy, and the self-perceptions those beliefs sanctioned. Along the path from the Tower to the Kampong, the Exhibition effected a visual ordering of the world, one in which Western spectators moved and viewed with new latitude amidst an environment configured expressly for their consumption. I hope to have demonstrated how the Exhibition's spectacular framework made possible the illusion of a world on display. In this, even more than its predecessors, the 1889 Exhibition was an early harbinger of our own media-saturated world—a world in which the power of the eye is even less bounded by space and time, and viewers even more feverishly seek out "reality" through media. In their direct encounter with this early mass spectacle, then, students can gain new insight into the historical genesis of their own global cultural positioning; they may also, hopefully, come more to appreciate history as the necessary counterweight to the limitless allure of the viewed surface.

Notes

^1.� In this country, a museum show entitled, "When the Eiffel Tower was New," toured in New England at Mount Holyoke College, Wesleyan University, and then MIT. The emphasis of the show was upon technology and notions of progress, with little attention dedicated to the colonial content of the Exhibition. Its useful catalogue was written by Miriam Levin, When the Eiffel Tower was New: French Visions of Progress at the Centennial of the Revolution (South Hadley, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). Rosalind Williams reviews the show in Technology and Culture, 32(1), 1991, 102–105.

^2.� Though overshadowed, not surprisingly, by the often charged discussions surrounding the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the centenary of the 1889 Exhibition did occasion some revisiting of the event in France. In 1989, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris mounted a show on the Eiffel Tower and the Exhibition from May 16 through August 15. The show's catalogue is 1889: La tour Eiffel et l'Exposition universelle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989). The French Journal Mouvement Social dedicated an entire issue to historical consideration of the Exhibition in the year of its centenary, under the title "Mise en scene et vulgarization: l'exposition universelle de 1889," vol.149, October-December, 1989. The best overview of the Exhibition is Pascal Ory, 1889: l'Exposition Universelle (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989); Charles Rearick discusses the 1889 and 1900 Paris exhibitions in the context of an emerging culture of mass leisure and public festivity in his chapter, "World's Fairs and Other Extravaganzas," in Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn of the Century Paris (New Haven: Yale, 1986), 117–146.

^3.� By mediation, I mean the process by which media technologies make a great variety of social and cultural experience more widely and immediately available.

^4.� On the Crystal Palace and its influence, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. Chapter 1, "The Great Exhibition of Things," 17–72. Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," New Formations, 4: 73–102; see also his The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).

^5.� The most comprehensive consideration of the tradition of the Great Exhibitions is Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University, 1988). Basic factual information on the Fairs is available in John E. Findling, Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

^6.� On the American World's Fairs, see in particular Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984). The fairs were revived in the 1930s, after disappearing from 1915 through 1929, and enjoyed renewed public success during that decade.

^7.� Even more than its predecessors, the 1889 Exhibition was aimed at a mass and, in France at least, democratic public. Admission charges varied between 30 and 80 centimes, depending upon the day of the week, and the main French train company offered a 25% reduction on round trip travel to Paris for the duration of the Exhibition. Madeleine Rebérioux, "Au tournant des expos: 1889," Mouvement Social, 149 (October-December 1989): 8.

^8.� France and Paris in particular were the principal sites for this emerging culture of spectacle. The capital city hosted more Exhibitions than any other, including not only in 1889, but also 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1900. It is not at all coincidental that the Olympic games were revived and reinvented as modern spectacles of national competition in this period. The Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin was largely responsible for organizing the Athens Olympics, and the French Tour de France has its origins in this period as well. On the new prominence of sporting spectacle in turn-of-the-century France, see Eugen Weber, France: Fin-de-Siècle (Belknap, 2006), Chapters 10–11; on the origins of mass culture and spectacular representation in France and particularly in Paris, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California, 2002).

^9.� The Library of Congress has a rich collection of superb-quality photographs of the Exhibition, ranging from aerial and panoramic views to shots of individual pavilions, exhibits, simulations, and crowd scenes. Much of the collection is available at the Library's Prints and Photographs Division website, at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/250_paris.html.

^10.� Though space does not allow full consideration of it here, the great wealth of ephemera generated by the Exhibition—from promotional materials to souvenirs—was key in extending the boundaries of the event beyond the time and space of its six-month Paris run. This evidence can be easily incorporated into analysis of the Exhibition to suggest how an emerging culture of spectacle was fundamentally altering the parameters of cultural experience.

^11.� Such was the popularity of the "Street in Cairo," that it was reproduced at the subsequent Chicago, Paris, and St. Louis Exhibitions in 1893, 1900, and 1904.

^12.� In France, a weekly journal entitled L'Exposition de Paris de 1889 offered descriptions and illustrations of the coming attractions at the event, as well as progress reports, from October 15, 1888 forward. Following the Crystal Palace pavilion in 1851, it became common for residents of the host cities to gather to view the construction of the exhibition pavilions and grounds before the opening of the events. Denys Lombard, "Le Kampong javanias à l'Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889," Archipel 43, 1992, 115.

^13.� The Internet is one obvious contemporary point of reference for the Exhibitions. Internet pioneer and MIT Professor Carl Malamud initiated in the 1990s a "World's Fair for the information age" to commemorate the arrival of the global village, staging an online World Exhibition in 1996. The genesis and ambitions of the event are recounted in Carl Malamud, A World's Fair for the Global Village (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

^14.� For general background on the Tower, its design, and its designer, see Joseph Harriss, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1975).

^15.� That the Exhibitions were key in the emergence of modern publicity and the advertising industry is an argument advanced most fully by Thomas Richards in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Roland Barthes famously offers a structuralist reading of the Eiffel Tower in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).

^16.� Rosalind Williams, "When the Eiffel Tower was New at the MIT Museum," Technology and Culture, 32(1), 1991, 103.

^17.� One of the aims of the Exhibition of 1889 was precisely to show off the new Paris. David Pinkney's older account of the rebuilding of the city is still useful, even if it largely ignores issues of spectacle and the new consumerism in favor of the political and technical challenges of the rebuilding, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). A more recent and nuanced account of the city's modern reinventions is Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Belknap, 2002).

^18.� Ascent of the Tower indeed became one of the principal "entertainments" of the Exhibition, to the surprise of its organizers, as millions took elevators to the upper viewing platforms or dined in the Tower's restaurants. See Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque.

^19.� Harvey Levenstein discusses American travel to France, and particularly to Paris, in Seductive Journeys: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998).

^20.� On the Gallery of Machines, see John W. Stamper, "The Galerie des Machines of the 1889 Paris World's Fair," Technology and Culture, 30(2), 1989, 330–353.

^21.� Stamper, 347.

^22.� As Rosalind Williams suggests, the space accorded to consumer goods and entertainments at the exhibitions steadily encroached upon the productive technologies and scientific displays. It was a transition already fully apparent at the 1889 Exhibition. Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California, 1982), 59.

^23.� Williams, Dream Worlds.

^24.� Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England; Karl Marx's famous discussion of "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret" appears in Chapter 1, section four of Capital. Other influential elaborations of Marx's concept are Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–252; and Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Cambridge: Zone Books, 1995).

^25.� Scholarly treatments of the exhibitions have tended to treat the colonial sections separately from those sections highlighting Western technology and progress. Among the more useful analyses of the colonial components of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions are Sylviane Leprun, Le théâtre des colonies: Scénographie, acteurs et discours de l'imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855–1937 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986); Rydell, All the World's A Fair; and Eric Breitbart, A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World's Fair (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997). Timothy Mitchell links exhibitionary practices to the larger colonization of Egypt in his influential Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), see especially Chapter 1, "Egypt at the Exhibition," 1–31.

^26.� France would thereafter organize separate Colonial Exhibitions in 1894 in Lyon, in 1906 and 1922 in Marseilles, and, most famously, in 1931 in Paris, dedicated entirely to the display of "Greater France," as well as the colonial holdings of other European nations. As far and away the most ambitious of these, the 1931 Exhibition has attracted the greatest scholarly attention. See Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, 1931, L'exposition coloniale (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1991); for an excellent study of the architectural issues surrounding design of the 1931 colonial pavilions, and their relationship to larger issues of colonial politics in France, see Pat Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Herman Lebovics, True France The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994), Chapter 2, "The Seductions of the Picturesque and the Irresistible Magic of Art," 51–97; see also Elizabeth Ezra, "The Colonial Look: Exhibiting Empire in the 1930's," Contemporary French Civilization 19 (1), 1995, 33–47.

^27.� The Palais des Colonies was designed in a peculiar hybrid style combining motifs from all of France's possessions, without any single element dominating. Lombard, 115.

^28.� For a general history of French colonization, see Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (New York: St. Martin's, 1996). The Exhibition provided a setting for one of the first international colonial congresses as well.

^29.� Older histories of French Empire tended to downplay French popular support for the imperial project. For example, in his book on the French colonial lobby, Stuart M. Persell shows how a loose grouping of colonial advocates came together in the 1890s to promote imperialism before an often skeptical public and political class; Stuart Persell, The French Colonial Lobby, 1889–1938 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1983). More recently, the tendency to conceive colonial history as a sub-field within diplomatic and political history, and colonialism as a largely elite-driven endeavor with only limited popular support, has given way to more focused consideration of the idea of la plus grande France ("Greater France") and of the cultural circuitry that linked the colonial endeavor to the forging of social and national identities within the Hexagon. Far from representing simply the projection outward of a stable national idea, French colonialism has emerged in this work as a more fluid and reciprocal relationship between colony and Metropole. For a critical overview of this work, see Daniel J. Sherman, "The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism," in French Historical Studies 23, 4 (Fall 2000): 707–729. In either case, the Universal and Colonial Exhibitions played a key role in manifesting and advancing the "cause" of empire.

^30.� The Disney ride and theme song "It's a Small World After All" of course had its origins in the World's Fair of 1964–5 in New York.

^31.� Stephen Kern traces this theme more broadly in European culture of the period in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2003).

^32.� Jean Baudrillard, Simulacrum and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995).

^33.� This was, along with the notion of "mise en scene," or staging, the guiding principle of the 1889 Exhibition, according to the contributors to the special issue of Mouvement Social cited above; Mouvement Social 149 (October-December, 1989).

^34.� Sylviane Leprun has argued that the 1889 Exhibition marked a transition point, where an older romantic-exotic vision of the non-West as mysterious and other begins to give way to a more ethnographic sensibility aiming at capturing the "truth" of the colonies. Sylviane Leprun, "Paysages de la France Extérieure: La Mise en Scène des Colonies à l'Exposition du Centenaire," Mouvement Social 149 (October-December, 1989): 99–128.

^35.� Arguments among Exhibition organizers over the relative importance of the event's popular and "scientific" missions figure prominently in the accounts of Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque; and Brenda Nelms, The Third Republic and the Centennial of 1789 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1987).

^36.� One must add, of course, the frankly promotional intent of these pavilion displays, highlighting as they did the goods and natural resources of the territories in an increasingly global and competitive international economy. In the case of Java, for example, Dutch economic interests played a key role alongside colonial administrators and academics in promoting Javanese products at the Exhibition, after the crisis of the colony's coffee economy in the 1880s. Jean-Pierre Chazal, "'Grand Succès pour les Exotiques:' Retour sur les spectacles javanais de l'Exposition Universelles de Paris en 1889," Archipel 63 (2002): 111.

^37.� Lombard, 116.

^38.� Lombard, 122; Chazal, 112–117. The dancers were not aristocratic, as many viewing their performances at the Exhibition imagined, but rather served as courtesans at the court, in addition to performers.

^39.� One must remain critically attentive to the medium here, as the visual conventions and limitations of these different media actively structured the representation. Ethnographic photographs, for example, depicted stationary or posed renderings of their subjects, in line with the objective of studying them as distinctive types. Conversely, illustrations were composed from memory at a later date, and therefore often filtered through the residual conventions of Orientalist exoticism. Illustrators commonly made the dance and the dancers more sensually evocative than was actually the case in the performances. On the conventions of anthropological photography at the exhibitions, see Eric Breitbart, A World on Display.

^40.� "Ce qu'on voit à l'Exposition," Le petit français illustré, July 20 1889, p. 263; Eugène Monot, L'Expo Universelle de 1889 (Paris: Dentu, 1890), 139; quoted in Sylviane Leprun, "Paysages de la France extérieure: la mise en scène des colonies à l'Exposition du Centenaire," 100.

^41.� Schwartz, Spectacular Realities.

^42.� On the importance of the exhibitions for the development of anthropology, see Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World's Fairs (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1983).

^43.� This shift was related to a broader shift in French colonial policy from one based in cultural assimilation to a more "associative" one in which the difference of the colonies was more actively fleshed out. See Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

^44.� On the Musée de l'Homme, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). The French Government recently shut down the ethnographic section of the Musée de l'Homme and replaced it with the controversial new Musée du Quai Branly. For a critical review of the new museum, one which explores some of the political questions surrounding cross-cultural display in post-colonial context, see Michael Kimmelman, "A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light," New York Times, 2 July 2006.

^45.� As Charles Rearick suggests, the exhibitions were also milestone events in the history of boredom, as the imperative of surpassing previous exhibitions in scale and stimulation could leave viewers overwhelmed and exhausted. Rearick's book, as well as Schwartz's, give some inkling of how thoroughly exhausting and overwhelming Paris itself was becoming by this time as a setting for an almost unrelenting amusement.

^46.� Breitbart, A World on Display, 42.

^47.� Leprun, Le théâtre des colonies.

^48.� Some moralists decried the belly dancing of the "Street in Cairo" as indecent, and even prompted discussion of whether the display should be banned.

^49.� While the self-conscious "primitivism" of much turn-of-the-century art in Europe has long been a truism of art history, understanding the impact of Exhibition encounters upon modern music has come more recently. See Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair, Eastman Studies in Music, 32 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press and Woodbridge, 2005). At the time of this writing, the National Museum in Cambodia is mounting an exhibit of Auguste Rodin's drawings of dancers from the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, whose performances he witnessed in Paris in 1906.