The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, objects from India were repeatedly assembled for display at international exhibitions, known then and now as world fairs. Their transience and ephemerality set world fairs apart as extraordinary phenomena in the world of collecting. They are special because, despite the permanence they imply, they do not last; they come and they go. Their buildings are constructed, and then, by international charter, they are deconstructed. They are also special because they place objects in the service of commerce and in the service of the modern nation—state, with the inevitable imperial encounters that these two forces promote. In doing so, they yoke cultural material with aesthetics, politics and pragmatics.

It’s because we’re Indian, innit?’ Cricket and the South Asian diaspora in post-war Britain

“…These descriptions in journals such as Wisden bear the vestiges of the 'great exhibitions' held at the end of the twentieth century, where exhibits from imperial lands were put on public display (Breckenridge 1989). But what was being exhibited through cricketing discourse was an idealised post-colonial subject.…”

Native subjects on display: reviving the colonial exposition in Marcos' Philippines

“…It is widely held that colonial expositions utilized the classificatory and narrative techniques of the evolutionary sciences of empire and contributed to the modern public museum's technologies of collection and display (Bennett, 1995(Bennett, , 2004Breckenridge, 1989;Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1998;Rydell, 1984Rydell, , 2006. The encyclopedic orientation and teleological narratives of expositions are often juxtaposed with their commercial operations as popular amusements.…”

Indian Jute in Australian Collections: Forgetting and Recollecting Transnational Networks

“…There are museums of packaging in London and Heidelberg and, as Carol Breckenridge points out, it is now a commonplace that museum displays transform everyday articles into objects of fascination through what she terms the 'spectacle of the ocular'. 16 As Sharon Macdonald puts it, objects gain a symbolic value by being removed from the sphere of trade. 17 The British Museum holds a jute sack that had been used as a cover for a rickshaw seat in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the 1980s.…”