File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0010, message 62


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 09:16:43 -0700
From: Pat Morton <pamorton-AT-ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Museumizing the 'other'/'Native' as spectacle?


My book, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931
Colonial Exposition, Paris (MIT Press, 2000), has a chapter on displays of
natives at the Exposition.  I describe the displays and the anticolonial
resistance generated by these displays.  (Forgive the self-promotion.)  You
might also find the chapter on the Musée des Colonies (now the Musée d'Art
océanien et africain) useful.

Other sources:
Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World's Fairs (London and Berkeley:
Scolar Press, 1983).  Benedict analyzes the different types of human
displays and their function within colonial representational regimes.

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography,
Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New
York: Routledge, 1995).

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: world exhibitions, 1851-1939
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989).

Robert Rydell's books on American world's fairs contain extensive sections
on their human displays.
All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984); and World
of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993).

An excellent anthology on museums:
Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politcs of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

I also have sources in French, if anyone is interested.


Patricia Morton
Art History Department
University of California, Riverside
<pamorton-AT-ix.netcom.com>




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