Exhibitions framed the visitor as the central point of the world

Evidence

I am talking about experiencing oneself, thinking about one’s society and one’s future, from the position of a colonial subject. I left for England twelve years before independence. My whole formation had been as a child of colored middle-class Jamaican society. That is to experience oneself as “colonized”—that is, fundamentally displaced from the center of the world, which was always represented to me as “elsewhere” and at the same time dislocated from the people and conditions around me. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1191 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The real world came to resemble an extension of the exhibition; Modern Europe grasped the world itself as though it were an exhibition; The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial subjectivity means experiencing the world’s center as elsewhere and outside oneself. #complicates (0.74) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1191
• The strange power of exhibitions came from their claim to an external real #complicates (0.72)