European display practices degraded non-European visitors as a necessary feature of the spectacle

Evidence

The exhibition and the congress were not the only examples of this European mischief. Throughout the nineteenth century non-European visitors found themselves being placed on exhibit or made the careful object of European curiosity. The degradation they often suffered, whether intended or not, seemed nevertheless inevitable, as necessary to these spectacles as the scaffolded façades or the curious crowds of onlookers. The façades, the onlookers and the degradation seemed all to belong to the organising of an exhibit, to a particularly European concern with rendering things up to be viewed. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the book’s central frame of rendering-things-up-to-be-viewed, which will connect to Egyptian staging of Paris and aligns with the reader’s interest in how infrastructure/spectacle constitutes power.