Naturalized seeing/colonial vision : interrogating the display of races in late nineteenth century France ...

• Main Author: Wan, Marilyn
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: eskimo*; Greenland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0086649; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0086649

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 ...