Imperial spectacles produced colonial certainty rather than merely reflecting it

Evidence

These symbolic representations of the world’s cultural and colonial order, continually encountered and described by visitors to Europe, were the mark of a great historical confidence. The spectacles set up in such places of modern entertainment reflected the political certainty of a new age. ‘England is at present the greatest Oriental Empire which the world has ever known’, proclaimed the president of the 1892 Orientalist Congress. ‘She knows not only how to conquer, but how to rule.’ Exhibitions, museums and other spectacles were not just reflections of this certainty, however, but the means of its production, by their technique of rendering history, progress, culture and empire in ‘objective’ form. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 64

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Horkheimer/Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment and the culture industry critique — spectacle as ideology-producing rather than reflective.