| Summary: | In August 1877, fourteen Africans from Nubia were
exhibited among giraffes, camels and elephants for the gaze of
the Parisian public at the Jardin d'Acclimatation, a botanical
and zoological garden founded to "acclimatate, breed and
disseminate to the public animal and vegetable species newly
introduced to France." Three months later, six Eskimos from
Greenland were also put on display. This new practice of
displaying non-Europeans amidst exotic flora and fauna became
an immediate success.
The subsequent appropriation of such an exhibiting
practice by the French government at the 1889 Exposition
Universelle bestowed further legitimacy to human displays. At
the Exposition, France displayed more than 900 of its colonial
subjects in specially reconstructed pavillions and villages.
The colonial section, one of the major highlights of the
Exposition, was so successful that it served as a model for
future displays of races in both France and the United-States.
If members of non-European peoples had been sporadically
exhibited as curiosities at circus side-shows since the
sixteenth-century, they were, in the last two decades of the
nineteenth-century, displayed in legitimate institutionalised
settings. These so-called 'ethnographic' exhibits were hailed
by both the scientists and popular press as having scientific
and educational value.
This thesis explores both the ways in which the displays of non-European peoples at the Jardin d'Acclimatation and the
1889 Exposition Coloniale became accepted as normal and
natural, as well as the various political and economic
agendas they fulfilled. Some of the ideological functions of
this exhibiting practice are examined by looking at how the
Third Republic used the display of its colonized subjects in
1889 to convince the public of the benefits of imperialism. I
argue that the way in which the exposition was visually
organized and the mobility that it allowed the viewer were
crucial in winning the public to the colonial cause.
To answer the central question of how such a practice
came to be accepted as normal and natural, I investigate how a
variety of discourses and practices worked together to make
the cultural natural. I contend that exisiting notions of
racial hierarchy, the impact of Third Republican educational
theories of "knowledge through seeing" inherited from the
Enlightment, and modes of visual consumption associated with
tourism and department stores, worked together to legitimize
the display of races, thereby facilitating the naturalizing
process.
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