Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Alaska, and Hawaii. Colonialism, imperialism, and racism shaped these rep-
resentations of the “world” at the same time that the inhabitants of these
villages (often paid entertainers) created their own communities and
resisted the racist and sexualized gaze of their predominantly white middle-
class audiences.
Despite their supposed universalism and transcendence (a discourse
that the world's fairs share with the modern Olympics, both of which
emerged from Britain at the height of its imperial power), world's fairs reveal
far more about the power and ambitions of their host nations and cities than
about the “world” they purportedly represent. h e very fi rst of these in 1851,
“h e Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” (also known
as the Crystal Palace), showed the glories of the Industrial Revolution at the
height of Queen Victoria's reign and the global power of the British Empire.
h e Eiff el Tower is the most famous remnant of the 1889 World's Fair. Chi-
cago's hosting of the 1893 Columbian Exposition paralleled America's
increasingly imperial excursions in Cuba and the Philippines in that tumul-
tuous decade. h e 1915 Panama-Pacifi c International Exposition highlighted
San Francisco's recovery from the devastations of the 1906 earthquake and
fi re; the 1939 New York World's Fair set up a technologically optimistic nar-
rative through the GM Futurama Ride in the “World of Tomorrow,” a testa-
ment to America's utopianism during the Great Depression on the brink of
World War II; and the 1962 Seattle World's Fair left the Space Needle as an
icon to the Space Age.
Examining the history of world expos reveals the particular historical
contexts of the host countries and the cultural concerns of their time. To be
sure, the old expo impulse to display and control are prominent in contem-
porary Chinese theme parks, most notably the Beijing World Park (the site of
Jia Zhangke's melancholic fi lm
h e World
), Shenzen's Windows of the World
(where you can ride a camel among the Egyptian pyramids, and a pony in
the American West), and in the hundreds of “ethnic villages” that dot the
