Imperial expositions staged Africans to demonstrate civilizational progress through trivial signs like shoes

Evidence

The popular press reinforced this message and the attendant stereotypes of Africans and Asians as peoples lacking civilization. An increasingly vocal colonial lobby of deputies and businessmen with colonial interests added its voice in the 189o’s. The universal expositions of 1889 and 1900 imported colonial subjects to provide living examples of civilization in the making. These examples apparently worked, albeit in the crudest possible fashion. The official commentator of the 1889 fair in Paris, which included a large colonial section, wrote happily of the Africans present that they had shown themselves capable of progress. The proof was that, having arrived barefoot in a state of almost “complete savagery,” the “blacks” in question had at least left France fully shod. Thanks to such innovations, the author concluded, “the moralizing role of France among these peoples still so far from our civilization” would be easier than in the past. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 62

Categorization

• SEED: Angles for the reader’s republicans-in-West-Africa work: how French self-image as moralizer was built on staged spectacles that reduced Africans to caricatures of their own progress.
• XREF: Connects to critiques of World’s Fairs anthropology exhibits and how spectacle manufactures racial hierarchy.