Description
MISC Hybrid Modernities: Architecture And Representation At The 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris by Morton
How the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris blended the Western and "Oriental" cultures whose segregation it ostensibly demonstrated.
The 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris was a demonstration of French colonial policy, colonial architecture and urban planning, and the scientific and philosophical theories that justified colonialism. The Exposition displayed the people, material culture, raw materials, manufactured goods, and arts of the global colonial empires. Yet the event gave a contradictory message of the colonies as the "Orient" -- the site of rampant sensuality, decadence, and irrationality -- and as the laboratory of Western rationality. In Hybrid Modernities, Patricia Morton shows how the Exposition failed to keep colonialism's two spheres separate, instead creating hybrids of French and native culture. At the Exposition, French pavilions demonstrated Europe's sophistication in art deco style, while the colonial pavilions were "authentic" native environments for displaying indigenous peoples and artifacts from the colonies. The authenticity of these pavilions' exteriors was contradicted by vaguely.