Performing Racial Difference at the Colonial Exposition of 1931

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the unabashed moment of imperial pride that was the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. It explains how music making at the Exposition performed ideas about race. The Exposition presented challenges and possibilities for colonial subjects trying to work out where they belonged, how they belonged, and whether they wanted to belong in the French Empire. The chapter examines both the official, state-sanctioned representation of race and ethnicity at the Exposition and some critiques of it generated by anti-colonial groups. The Exposition demonstrated hierarchies of race through displays of music and dance. It asserted the value of France’s “civilizing” influence based on those representations. French colonial subjects exposed some of those representations as false and promoted their own “authentic” music and dance performances both at the Exposition and at an anti-Exposition organized by surrealist, communist, and anti-colonial activists. The chapter argues that the Colonial Exposition had such a high profile that it galvanized French men and women of color to resist misrepresentations of their cultures. It may, therefore, have had a longer-lasting effect on them than on the white metropolitan French population targeted by the Exposition.