With the first World’s Fair—London’s Great Exhibition, held in 1851 at the Crystal Palace, a towering structure of cast iron and glass—mass entertainment fused with a celebration of commerce and industrial innovation, making a spectacle of global capitalist modernity. Host cities were transformed for the occasion by feats of architecture and engineering—from the Crystal Palace to Paris’s Eiffel Tower, from the Barcelona Pavilion to Montreal’s Habitat 67. Visitors encountered displays and demonstrations of industrial methods and technologies, scientific instruments, fine and applied arts, and artefacts from around the world, crudely taxonomized within the imperial core. Expositions like these were, in their very inception, inextricable from colonial ambitions: attractions, including “living exhibitions” that placed Indigenous persons into crass diorama displays, were underwritten by colonial epistemologies that advanced notions of civilization, progress, and racial hierarchy. What sort of training school in the commodity fetish (to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin) were these World’s Expositions? How were publics instructed in ways of seeing themselves from the point of view of capital and empire? How did international expositions both reflect the modern metropolis and transform it?
In this course, we will examine the history and legacy of world’s fairs and expositions, with an interest in what such events reveal about the entangled histories of commerce, nationalism, and cultural production. Taking several significant expositions as case studies—including the Great Exhibition of 1851, Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1889, the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, New York’s World’s Fair of 1939, and Montreal’s Expo 67—we will track changes in the social, economic, and ideological function of these events, as the 19th century emphasis on industry and empire gave way to 20th century rhetorics of cultural exchange and social progress. Throughout our exploration, we will ask: what forms of nationalism and internationalism were thus promulgated? What has been the lasting impact of the world’s fair on notions of cultural heritage and on practices of exhibition and display? A range of historical, philosophical, literary, material, and visual sources will aid us in understanding how world’s fairs transformed the material and social fabric of cities and shaped the perceptual apparatus of capitalist modernity. Objects of study will include selections by Walter Benjamin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Rydell, Tony Bennett, and Paul Greenhalgh, among others.
