Kunapipi XXVI:1

LUZ MERCEDES HINCAPIÉ
Race And Gender At The Chicago Columbian Exposition, 1893: A Cuban Woman’s Perspective

During the nineteenth century international exhibitions and world fairs constituted an important apparatus of empire for European countries and the United States. Through the exhibitions these countries educated their masses on the merits of empire and industry while also trying to out-do each other by showing greater wealth and political power. One way of doing this was through the many displays of non-Western peoples usually under their imperial dominion. For European nations who controlled an empire, the showing of native villages,

placed hitherto unrelated peoples of different parts of the empire together, physically and psychologically, and it centred the empire on the controlling imperial nation. The public could see at a glance the extent of the imperial pickings and feel in a real sense that they belonged to them. More importantly, it ‘revealed’ the apparently degenerate state the conquered peoples lived in, making the conquest not only more acceptable but necessary for their moral rescue. (Greenhalgh 84)

Having arrived late to the spoils of empire, the United States was unable to boast its own imperial display until the Buffalo Pan American Fair of 1901 where Hawaiian, Filipino, and Cuban villages (Greenhalgh 101) celebrated its gains due partly to the Spanish-American War three years earlier.

Nevertheless, the United States had already initiated the genre of displaying non-Western villages, following the examples of France and England in particular, in its Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. In this Exposition, seventeen villages of non-Western peoples were built including Dahomeyan, Chinese, Javanese, Soudanese, Alaskan, Arab, South Sea Islanders, Algerian and American Indians (Greenhalgh 97). These displays, according to Paul Greenhalgh, were similar to ‘freak shows’:

In Chicago displays of people suffered more than ever before from exaggeration and caricature. Each day, the people from the villages, accompanied by various Arab groups from other exhibits, were paraded up and down the Midway Plaisance [the entertainment area] before returning to their display areas to commence their day of public living. The humiliating racism of this spectacle, apart from fulfilling a propaganda role for the co-operating foreign nations, had a distinct purpose for reactionary elements within American society. (Greenhalgh 98)

The reactionary elements to which he refers were the population of Native Americans, and Negroes, not to mention the Spanish speaking minorities of the conquered Southwest, which presented grave problems to the organisers who promulgated freedom and democracy as the ideals of the Exposition, but gave no position of equality to these groups.