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TOURNAMENTS OF VALUEArgentina and Brazil in the Age of Exhibitions

◆ JENS ANDERMANN Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Abstract The ‘Age of Exhibitions’ included the newly independent Latin Americannation-states almost from the very outset. This article studies the complexstrategies of material and visual display, architecture and writing through which representations of Argentina and Brazil were fashioned at the worldfairs. It argues that, as peripheral afliates of the emergent capitalist world-system, Latin Americans had to negotiate the material and symbolic valueof their commodities and cultural samples with a host of agents, includingnot just foreign audiences but also exhibition organizers, artists, architects,and so on. National pavilions, therefore, rather than being seen as materialtexts authored by state governments, could be understood as ‘contact zones’, performative spaces for the exchange of objects, gazes and words. The articleconcludes by comparing the world fairs with trade and industry exhibitionsheld in Brazil and Argentina themselves. In these, it observes the emergenceof a dissident gure of national modernity as ‘development’, challenging

hegemonic regimes of value. Key Words ◆ Argentina ◆ Brazil ◆ developmentalism ◆ modernity ◆

national exhibitions ◆ world fairs

Value transforms any product of labour into a social hieroglyph.(Marx, Das Kapital )

Modernity’s rst truly mass-mediatic form, the great trade and industryfairs taking place across Europe and the Americas during the second half of the 19th century represent a kind of trans-Atlantic rite of passage

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Journal of Material Culture http://mcu.sagepub.comCopyright©The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/journalspermission.navVol. 14(3): 333–363 [1359–1835 (200909)10.1177/1359183509106424]

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during which people and things entered the new, global time–space of capital. From London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the world fairs suc-ceeded in dispersing and re-assembling the multitude, which, in Europe,had shown its threatening face in 1848, by inventing a different kind of mass movement. The Paris Universal Exposition of 1878 alone was seenby 16 million people; more than twice that number ocked to the sequelin 1889; and almost 50 million to the show of 1900. In the United States,international exhibitions at Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, St. Louis andother cities were visited by 100 million people between 1876 and 1916;10 million alone – a fth of the entire US population – visited the Phila-delphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 (Greenhalgh, 1988; Rydell, 1984).Attendance gures for the trade and industry shows which, from Rio de

Janeiro’s National Exhibition of 1861 onwards, started to multiply through-out Latin America during the same period, are notoriously hard to obtain.However, the examples of Santiago de Chile’s Colonial Exhibition of 1873(3,000 visitors per week) and of Rio de Janeiro’s National Exhibition thesame year (7,500 per day, and up to 80,000 during the entire two-monthevent) provide some evidence, albeit on a more modest scale, of similar

processes of emergent urbanized mass audiences and forms of commod-ity consumption (Schell, 2003; Turazzi, 2006: 146).1 On both sides of theAtlantic, then, new forms of display and spectatorship re-organized localsystems of value, as well as interconnecting them in the cultural spaceof an emergent world bourgeoisie.Appadurai, in the introduction to his by now classic collection of essays on material culture,The Social Life of Things (1986), has attemptedto capture the ritual and spectacular aspects of the social production of value through the concept oftournaments of value , which he denes as:

complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-dened way from the routines of economic life . . . What is at stake in such tourna-ments is not just status, rank, fame, or reputation of actors, but the disposi-tion of the central tokens of value in the society in question. (p. 21)

Appadurai therefore argues for a politicized notion of value, since theconstruction of things as objects of exchange, rather than being connedto exclusively economic relations of supply and demand, always alsoinvolves complex and contested relations of power and knowledge, both

within a particular society and between it and another. ‘Regimes of value’,in fact, are never self-enclosed but by necessitytranscultural , as they arealways already mediated through (intervened by) another – oran Other’s– evaluation. Value, as Appadurai shows, emerges as a contested, political

relation as things travel from the site of production to those of exchangeand consumption, all of which are unevenly invested with power–knowledge (for instance, a technical–empirical ‘production knowledge’versus an evaluative–ideological ‘consumption knowledge’). In fact, he

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contends, these power–knowledge formations are interwoven in complex ways with one another in the form of ‘specialized mythologies’ (p. 48)at each end of the commodity process, magically re-investing the object with a surrogate reality for the part lacking from its material biography– or, in Marxian terms – phantasmatically re-animating that part of the‘social life’ of things that has been abstracted into exchange value (Keenan,1993: 180). In this way,tournaments are a central site of public rehearsal– of the symbolic production and reproduction – of these mythologies of value; a way of dramatizing and, thus, of encountering forms of resolvingand containing in a renovated set of values, the power struggles andcontradictions that are both expressed and occluded by the latter.

This article attempts to employ Appadurai’s insights into the politicsand theatrics of value production to analyse how themise-en-scène of Brazilian and Argentine goods at universal exhibitions produced monu-mental installations that can be taken, in Fernández Bravo’s words, as‘ctions of the state’, magically presupposing the sovereign archivalsubject that was, in fact, the display’s structural effect rather than itsauthor (Fernández Bravo, 2000: 173). Moreover, I wish to compare theserepresentations with the images of national and universal industry and progress staged at the smaller-scale national exhibitions held in Argentinaand Brazil themselves during the same period. In the latter, I argue, aspace of showing and seeing rather different from the one set out at theuniversal exhibitions unfolded, one that could be related, at least to anextent, to a dissident project of national modernity, at odds with the onethat was being showcased for overseas audiences.2 In comparing thestagings of the national in the context of the universal exhibitions (of a particular, peripheral type of nationality, moreover, whose very belongingto the exhibitions’ time–space of modernity was very much at issue) with those of the ‘universal’ blessings of industry and progress at LatinAmerican national exhibitions, I shall not simply counterpose a ‘global’to a ‘national’ kind of space. Rather, I want to show how both of these

emerged as mutually implied in one another, albeit in ways that differedaccording to the places in which these spatio–temporal representationsappeared and which, to a large extent, they helped shape. That is, I wishto draw out the spatial dimension of Appadurai’s concept of value as nego-tiated, and performatized, in the course of things and actions travellingfrom one place to another.3 Exhibitions will therefore be analysed herenot as texts or images but as multidimensional sites of encounter anda clash of interests and agencies, in a reading that straddles a range of materials from architectural and sculptural forms to photographs, writings

and various kinds of merchandise.In his intriguing history of Latin American material culture, Bauer(2001) distinguishes between two different attitudes towards industrialmanufacture after independence from Spain and Portugal. The rst of

Andermann: T O U R N A M E N T S O F VA L U E








these – prevailing over the 19th century – generated ‘modernizing goods’,associating foreignness with progress and civilization, whereas the second– spanning the cycle of national populism from approximately 1930 to1970 – privileged ‘developing goods’ through import substitution andthe active promotion of nationalist consumer ethics (pp. 13, 152, 165).However, Bauer admits, long before ‘development’ would challenge‘modernization’ as the region’s hegemonic political lexic, local manu-facture had already begun to conquer vernacular markets, particularlyin the areas of consumer goods and light manufacture: textiles, furniture,food and beverages, etc. (pp. 140–1). To an extent, this helped deatetensions arising from industrial capital’s conicting needs for cheap

primary goods thanks to low-wage mono-crop production imported fromabroad, and for market expansion through re-exporting manufactured

produce into these same areas, thus effectively having to stimulatedemand at the same time as keeping production costs low by obstructingsocio–economic change. Yet, however timid, Latin American industrial-ization in the 19th century also prompted an incipient ‘national develop-mentalism’ to question the assumptions underlying the spectacle of

progress staged by the dazzling displays of industrial commodities fromoverseas – though not the spectacle of commodities as such. What I willbe looking at, then, is a tension, a struggle of accents,within the regimeof value forged by and through commodity display, and thus related todifferent modulations of the scopic regime of liberal capitalism. Forreasons of brevity, I will focus on Argentina and Brazil, the two countries(together with Mexico) most heavily exposed to overseas immigration andcapital investment4 and (in part for these reasons) also the most regularLatin American exhibitors at international exhibitions.5

TRAVELLING TROPICS

Located at the eastern end of the neo-gothic Main Hall, in the immediate

vicinity of France, Belgium and the Netherlands (together composing the‘Latin races’, according to contemporary guidebooks, evidencing a ratherliberal use of historical geography), the Brazilian pavilion at the Phila-delphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, designed by US architect FrankFurness, was a great success with the local press and public (Figure 1).

Through intense lobbying of the exhibition organizers, reinforcedby the presence of the Emperor, D. Pedro II (who inaugurated the fairtogether with US President Ulysses Grant and remained an object of curiosity throughout his intensely publicized stay in the country), the

Brazilians had succeeded in obtaining a more prestigious spot than theirSouth American neighbours, who were allocated space at the opposite endalongside Japan and China. Thus, they successfully avoided the stigmaof exotic otherness, and the Brazilian display also strongly impressed the









‘Though richly endowed in many other elds, our country cannot boastthe same profusion of nature’s gifts as Senhor Dom Pedro’s dominions’(Guimaraens, 1998: 173–4).

From a stand or stall inside huge exhibition halls, the national pavilionhad developed over the course of the century into a self-contained pieceof ephemeral architecture, the planning and design of which was super-vised by state-appointed national commissions. Often employing a lightsteel, glass and wood frame camouaged towards the outside by sump-tuously ornamented façades in plaster or light cement, the illusionistarchitecture of exhibition pavilions inscribed utopian meanings into thematerials of the industrial age precisely by draping them in the orna-mental forms of a mythicized past.6 This peculiar archaism offered LatinAmerican exhibitors a way of accommodating exotic perceptions of theircountries from abroadwithin a modern architectural idiom, and thus of demonstrating their literacy and up-to-dateness with European trendsand fashions. At the same time, this made it difcult to challenge thevery preconceptions the architectonic packaging of exhibits was activelyreferencing. Much of the exhibition design for Latin American pavilions

was, in fact, the work of European and North American artists and archi-tects working on commission, often with only sparse knowledge of thecountries they were supposed to represent. They would usually work intandem with diplomats and commissioners, mostly members of LatinAmerica’s cosmopolitan elite, entrusted with the task of ensuring thatnational representations responded to the fashions and tastes of the hostcountry. Thus, national pavilions, rather than the immediate expressionof the state-as-author, were complex and negotiated performances of thenational image involving multiple intermediaries; a crossroads of gazesand voices to which the verbal and visual accounts of exhibition visitors

would add further layers of meaning.In 1889, Brazil participated in the Paris show with another Moorish

fantasy, the work of French architect Louis Dauvergne, featuring a 45-

metre ‘minaret’ tower which contained the staircase connecting the lowerand upper levels (Figure 2).Surrounding the pavilion was a tropical garden (designed and main-

tained by the Brussels-based International Horticultural Society), at thecentre of which a ‘tropical lagoon’, complete with plaster crocodilessculpted by French artist François Ambroise Gilbert, contained severalvictoria regia – the world’s largest owers – thanks to water tempera-tures being articially kept at 30 degrees Celsius. A small kiosk offeredfree coffee and other tropical beverages such as fruit juices and cachaça.

The pavilion itself was adorned with six statues of indigenous couples wielding oars, in representation of Brazil’s great rivers, also created byGilbert. Their naked bodies – modelled on European neoclassical notionsof beauty – emerging from lush vegetation, the statues reinscribed a









central trope of Brazilian Roman-ticism, simultaneously invoking theindigenous past and dismissing itin the name of future progress andabundance. According to Barbuy(1996):

As Indians, they represented abor-igineity; as couples, fertility, the

promise of abundance and also theintegration of the territory. Strongand young gures, they expressedthe country’s energy, vitality, and

youth. The vegetation representedthe territory in its natural state; theoars, the idea of its crossing andtaming. (p. 221)

Passing through an iron vestibuleon the ground oor, visitors wouldcontinue into the central rotunda,illuminated by natural lightentering through the pavilion’sglass dome, which led to an atrium

painted with bouquets and garlandsof owers, and tropical fruits on abackground of gold, repeated on several stained-glass windows, the workof French artists Haber-Lippmann and Champigneuille. On large woodenbenches at the left and right of the central hall, glass boxes, bowls andsacks offered to the gaze varieties of coffee beans, surrounding a largeglass showcase containing mineral samples and silverware from MinasGerais. Other raw materials including woods, marble, coal and rubber were arranged in a circle around the central showcase, also featuring a

full-scale wooden replica of the Bendegó meteorite from Bahia, on displayat Rio’s Museu Nacional . Ascending the staircase, the upper level invitedvisitors into an exhibition of manufacture: the rst oor containedsamples of textiles, hats, shoes and leathers, glassware, canned food,ceramics, perfumes, candles, liquors, chocolates, musical instruments, printing presses for wallpaper and stamps, pharmaceutical and chemical production units. On the second oor, this image of a ourishing industry was completed by a small exhibition of crafts and ne arts, featuring acollection of prints, engravings and folio volumes, as well as the essen-

tials of the urban bourgeois interior: furniture, delicate handbags, silks,laces and other fashion articles. A collection of paintings was shownseparately on the ground oor, including various still lives by Estevão daSilva, a local master of the genre and one of the few black artists holding


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FIGURE 2 The Brazilian Pavilion atthe Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889.Paris: N.D. Phot., 1889.








a chair at the Academy of Arts, historical allegories, including a monu-mental Abolition of Slavery , and folk scenes by Almeida Júnior. Theexhibit also comprised a large photography section, including GeorgeLeuzinger’s much-lauded panorama of Rio de Janeiro and a collection of maps, among which those dedicated to railways and coffee production

were the most prominent. The entire Brazilian section included 1,600exhibitors, the largest display ever organized by the Imperial state(Barbuy, 1996: 222–8; Schwarcz, 1998: 403–5).

Next door, adjacent to Mexico’s ‘Aztec Palace’, was Argentina’s iron-and-glass pavilion designed by the Frenchman Albert Ballu.7 In contrastto its Latin American neighbours, the pavilion cautiously omitted anylocal references, suggesting, through the similarities between its domeand entrance archways with other attractions such as the Eiffel Towerand the Machinery Hall, a country completely assimilated into Europeanmodernity and progress (Figure 3). In the words of Santiago Alcorta,editor of Argentina’s ofcial Guide to the exhibition (1890):

The construction of the pavilion is very simple. The brief was to design abuilding that could be disassembled and transported to Buenos Aires, for the purpose of which the architect has established an iron frame whose differ-ent parts have simply been screwed together for now, to be joined in a more permanent way later . . . On the outside, the vertical spaces in between theiron nerves have been covered with tiles, mosaics, porcelain and glass llings,either plain or in the shape of balloons illuminated at night by electric light. . . The architect, whose frequent travels to the Orient have made himfamiliar with polychrome construction, has not hesitated to break with tradi-tion in many aspects, and to employ entirely new materials. (p. 374)

The semi-translucent frame of the pavilion allowed it to play its partin the nightly cité féérique on Champ de Mars, burning and glowing, in

the words of a French journal-ist, ‘like a lightning ray from a

myriad of Bengal lights’ (Varigny,1889: 248).8 By hiring Frenchartists and architects to create afashionable Orientalist fantasy,made from the most modern of building materials in such a

way that it could be entirelydis- and re-assembled, Fey (1999)argues, Argentine elites clearly

stated their aspirations: ‘throughthe exploitation of their nation’snatural wealth, they would pur-chase the trappings of modernity


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FIGURE 3 The Argentine Pavilion atthe Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889.Buenos Aires: El Sudamericano , 1889.








in Europe and transport them whole back to Argentina’ (p. 67). Indeed,after the exhibition of 1889, the pavilion was shipped to Buenos Aires, where it was reconstructed to house the National Museum of Fine Artsuntil its demolition in 1933.

Similar to the Brazilian pavilion next door, the ground-level exhibitscombined samples of Argentine primary goods with allegorical imagery(produced by European artists), inscribing New World nature withmodern, civilizing meanings. Above the entrance portal was a gold statueof a woman resting on a huge bull, a ‘new Europa’ allowing herself tobe abducted into the land of prosperity and progress. Further statuessurrounding this central gure represented rural work and craftsman-ship, anking a stained-glass window with the national and provincialcoats of arms, and mosaics with scenes of agriculture, cattle- and sheep-farming. Having been lured into the main hall by this bombardment of allegorical images, visitors were greeted by another female statue repre-senting the Argentine Republic, offering them her outstretched hand. Atthe centre of the foyer, under a huge circular dome, a crypt-like structurecontained a huge chunk of frozen meat, courtesy of the Sansinena meat-freezing plant (Figure 4).

Slices of beef and mutton wereregularly defrosted for perusal, andcooked samples distributed for free.To the right of the Sansinena ex-hibit, a monumental relief map of the country in plaster indicated itsmain cities, rivers and mountains,as well as highlighting the vast, ‘un-inhabited’ spaces awaiting Euro- pean immigration. The country’s welcoming stance towards all thingsEuropean was also illustrated by a

stained-glass window on the otherside of the meat exhibit, wherethe Argentine Republic could beseen paying homage to her French‘sister’ seated on a throne. Thedome was painted with frescoesby French artists Alfred Roll, JulesLefèbvre, Fernand Cormon andLuc-Olivier Merson, depicting ‘agri-

culture’ (Figure 5), ‘industry’, ‘com-merce’, ‘railroads’, ‘art’, ‘science’,and so on – in short, yet anothervision of America’s ‘natural wealth’


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FIGURE 4 Exposition Universelle,Paris: interior of the Argentine Pavilion.Buenos Aires: El Sudamericano , 1889.








made accessible by and to Europeancivilization and progress.

Consequently, the ground-level ex-hibition focused on primary materials(woods, minerals) and agricultural products (corn, wheat, barley, sugar, wine, etc.), while materials related toindustry, education and culture weredisplayed on the upper level: shoes,hats, textiles, furniture, musical instru-ments, perfumes, as well as nationalnewspapers, journals, textbooks, novelsand poetry. Next to these, numerouscollections of photographs, statistical

charts and maps were on show, alongside a collection of minerals,reptiles and sh from the University of Córdoba (here representing notso much ‘nature’ in its primal state as the order of classication workedon it by Argentine scientists) (Fernández Bravo, 2000, 2002; Fey, 1999).

In 1889, Argentina widely outspent its regional competitors to pur-chase European modernity wholesale, in a complex game of mirrors that

was to attract the gaze of Europeans as well as to project back to BuenosAires the scene of Europeans watching:

Now that the pavilions of Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, etc.,have all been completed and inaugurated – a French chronicler duly reportedin the illustrated journal El Sudamericano – I could easily see that it is theArgentine Republic which has earned the most unanimous enthusiasm andadmiration on behalf of the French and of all the foreigners who have cometo Paris. (Méry, 1889)

However, the words of another European commentator showed suchapplause to be conditional on Latin Americans’ self-erasure as subjects

of representation, thus clearing the way for the bright and bountifulfuture their countries were about to enter:

[The Americas] are aware that the future is theirs, and we, their elders, whohave shown them the way, we who, for centuries, have offset to those newlands our population surplus, our poor and disinherited, we can be proudof the results obtained by these exiles from Europe. It is them, men of theNorth and the South, English and French, Portuguese and Italian, Spanishand Irish, who have made these Republics and this vast Empire of Brazilourish, making its uncultivated lands valuable and multiplying tenfold the

shared active capital of humanity. (Varigny, 1890: 74)While commending Latin Americans for the display of natural re-

sources – anticipating their exploitation by Europeans and North Amer-icans – chroniclers were generally less enthusiastic about the displays of


342

FIGURE 5 Alfred Ph. Roll, Agriculture . Al-fresco painting inthe Argentine pavilion, Paris, 1889(reproduced in Schiafno, 1933).








Latin American manufacture, science and culture. Press coverage of the1889 exhibition hardly mentioned the industry and crafts displays on theupper oors of the Brazilian and Argentine pavilions, clearly preferringthe monumental allegories on the ground oor, where Brazil offereditself up as a giant tropical plantation and mining site, and Argentina asa great cattle plain, ready to receive European surplus labour and capital.Borrowing a term from Pratt’s (1993) seminal study of European travel writing, we could understand the Latin American pavilions at the worldfairs as ‘contact zones’ – not so much because they put local visitors intouch with a ‘distant reality’ but rather because they provided a sym-bolic arena for playing out the tension, negotiation and struggle over theterms of introducing a post-colonial margin into the global time–space of capital in the exchange of images, gazes and words. In these performancesof showing and seeing, I argue, we can read the struggle of accents overthe implementation of capitalist relations, in other words, over how todistribute the gains reaped from a new round of accumulation. Yet, for allthe conict, there was also broad agreement among all parties involvedin the gathering, classication, display and evaluation of exhibits over what had to be excluded from the representations of Argentina andBrazil at the fairs. Both were made to appear as simultaneously full andempty: overowing with mineral, animal and vegetal wealth, at the sametime as still awaiting the spark of capital and labour that would bringtheir dormant resources to life. These images of an empty fullness wereso powerful in late 19th-century Europe because they responded todesires otherwise radically opposed to one another: if the absence of a properly constituted people, in the eyes of prospective emigrants, spelled‘lands and opportunities’, from the point of view of prospective investorsit also contained the silent promise of a ‘labour without rights’. One’svision of freedom was another’s vision of absolute subjection – without,and this is the important point, being in contradiction, as both could co-exist and be invested in one another, in the image of triumphant imposi-

tion of progress and civilization over ‘nature’.

NATIONAL ECONOMY AT A GLANCE

However, as in a Russian doll, the exhibition pavilion also containedmultiple forms of depicting, collecting and mapping the nation thatoffered those visitors willing to have a second look a more nuanced picture: panoramas, photographs, maps, guidebooks, statistical treatises,and so on. Although not necessarily in conict with the representational

strategies of the pavilion, these ‘secondary exhibitions’ sought to appealto visitors with a less eeting kind of interest as well as to assert a certaindegree of agency and control over national self-representation, on behalf of national organizing committees. Guidebooks and catalogues were a way of, quite literally, writing the nation into the picture, as the author









and subject of its own story. In placing authorship and authority with anational subject of self-exhibition, these guidebooks located themselvesmidway between the pavilions catering to, and to a large extent designedby, the ‘Imperial Eye’, and the national exhibitions I discuss later, whereArgentinians and Brazilians themselves assumed directorship of thespectacle of display. National guidebooks offered a pact to their reader-ship, promising, in exchange for the latter’s attention and willingness tolook below the surface, to deliver the whole – that is: the invisible – truth:‘It must not be believed,’ the Brazilian catalogue at the Vienna Exhibitionof 1873 assures us,

that in publishing the present work we have been led by any kind of false patriotism, exaggerating the advantages of a country whilst hiding the

shadowy sides. In order to represent Brazil as it really is, and to instructemigrants about it, we have followed a single guideline, namely, the truth.( Das Kaiserreich , 1873: i)

Federico de Santa Anna-Néry, head of Brazil’s organizing committeeof 1889, complains in his Guide to the pavilion that: ‘until recently, peoplehave confounded us, to our damage, withthe colonies . Little was knownof Brazil but the operetta version of the Brazilian, yellow fever, and snakes.’Thanks to the Empire’s persistent efforts at the world fairs, however,‘things have changed since. We have been divulgated’ (Santa Anna-Néry,1889).‘Argentina’, the authors of the country’s Guide to the Roubaix Exhi-bition of 1911 agree, ‘thanks to its great exhibitions, has alerted the entire

world to its treasure of natural energies, its industrial activity, and itsgreat power as a country of producers’ (Souvenir , 1911: i).

To de-link themselves from the colonial parts of the world organismand to rmly place themselves among the ‘concord of nations’ were primeconcerns for these writers. Although the Brazilian Guides largely parti-cipated in the pavilion’s advertising of their country’s still unexplored, and

hence available, natural resources, they also referred in the same breathto the explorations and engineering works undertaken by the BrazilianGovernment in order to open up the savage backlands to modern rail-roads and steam navigation. ‘The climate is among the best and mostenjoyable you could wish for,’ readers are assured by the authors of the1873 Guide in their description of the country’s interior. ‘The air is pureand dry, neither morning fogs nor evening dew is known. The sun risesin all its splendour, and persistent winds rinse and clean the atmosphere’( Das Kaiserreich , 1873: 67). And even in 1910, the Guide to the Brussels

Exhibition insists: ‘Brazil possesses every kind of climate, it allows forevery kind of agriculture, and it can sustain every kind of colonization’( Le pavillon , 1910: 13). Admittedly, the authors of Philadelphia’s 1876Guide concede, epidemics had ravaged many coastal cities between 1850









and 1855; yet none had been registered since, and statistical evidenceeven ranked their hygienic conditions above those of many Europeancapitals. ‘Far from infrequent’, they conclude, ‘are cases in which peoplehave lived to very old age’ ( Das Kaiserreich , 1876: 24).

Slavery and race, nally, are the objects of a similar disavowal: ‘Thesavages roaming through the backlands and forests at the heart of theEmpire are estimated at 100,000,’ the Philadelphia Guide explains, onlyto proceed immediately to the system of settlement and catechesisadopted by the authorities, promoted as an example for the host nation just then engaged in a ferocious frontier war with the Sioux. As forAfrican slaves – a sensitive subject in the US less than a decade after theend of the Civil War – the Guide explains that ‘they are being treatedhumanely, all of them living in solid barracks and enjoying good nutri-tion . . . Neither are slaves urged to work excessively’ ( Das Kaiserreich ,1876: 95). In the Guide to the Brussels Exhibition of 1910, Indians andBlacks have miraculously disappeared altogether: ‘Brazil can claim foritself not just territorial unity and homogeneity, but also homogeneity of race and unity of language’ ( Le pavillon , 1910: 33).

Whereas Brazilians sought to purge the image of their country fromthe colonial stigmata of an insalubrious climate, racial inferiority and aregime of production increasingly condemned as immoral, their Argen-tine peers had to address concerns about Indian raids and internal strife, which had provoked several ofcial warnings from European govern-ments to prospective immigrants in the 1870s. ‘From the beginnings of this century’, the authors of the Guide to Bremen’s Argentine Exhibitionof 1884 explain,

the people of Spanish America have struggled for freedom and a digniedexistence; but whereas most of them have only gained the right to be disap-

pointed, the Argentine Republic is among the few that can look back withsatisfaction at the dangers successfully mastered, and can condently takeup their place among the civilized nations.

Having defeated the ‘wild element of the gauchos ’, and following the‘cleansing of the vast Pampas, from the Indian hordes that incessantlythreatened the southwestern settlements’, the review continues:

The Argentine Republic today faces us as a solidly founded, consolidated state. . . The old differences of party and province are forgotten, and the thoughtof the fatherland, united after so much bloodshed, makes all hearts beat withthe same enthusiasm. The borders are secure, the bandit Indians subjugated,and a vast territory has been opened for agriculture and the arts of peace.(Geographische Gesellschaft , 1884: 3, 6)

Towards the end of the century, with cheaper technologies of visualreproduction such as chromolithography and offset printing at their disposal, the guidebooks’ descriptions received further backup from various









forms of visual illustration, most notably photography. The Brazilian Guideto the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1904, for instance, featured orna-mental arrangements of photographs as ‘ower bouquets’, documentingnot only the exhibition itself but also a juxtaposition of scenes fromBrazilian agriculture or medicine (Figure 6), as well as the already con-ventional overview of natural marvels and urban sights and monuments.

Borrowing at the same time from a photographic rhetoric of orderand progress and from the natural picturesque tradition of ornamentalabundance, these visual collages convey the notion of a ‘land of oppor-tunity’, not only for what they show (irrigation systems, a sanatorium,the beauty of Rio’s urban skyline), but also for the way in which theyempower the viewer’s gaze. They invite a panoptic, unobstructed view-ing that nds distant locations and their contents at its disposal, neatlyarranged for visual purchase, much in the same way as, at the exhibi-tion of commodities, the country’s resources and produce are submittedby the state to the perusal and purchase of foreign capital.

Rather than merely adding another layer to the exhibition display,guidebooks also worked the exhibition-form on the country at large. InMitchell’s words, universal exhibitions ‘were not just exhibitions of the

world, but the ordering up of the world itself as an endless exhibition . . . what was to be made available onexhibit was reality – the world itself’(Mitchell, 1989: 218, 226). What theguidebooks added to this exhibition(or, self-revelation) of the real, throughverbal or graphic means, was an in-sight into the underlying structure or pattern of commodity production; intothe otherwise invisible movements of political economy of which the displaygave material and visible proof. The

Guide to the Argentine Exhibition atGhent, for instance, displayed photo-graphic illustrations alongside statis-tical charts, in a way that allowedreaders to simultaneously observe a particular production technology –such as meat-freezing – and its over-all impact on import–export balances(Figure 7).

Elsewhere, images of the cosmopolitan capital city with its ‘European’architecture featured as monumentalevidence of the rapidly increasing


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FIGURE 6 Brazil at the LouisianaPurchase Exhibition: ‘Medicine’.St. Louis: Brazilian Commission,1904.








wealth, improving conditions of living and population change throughimmigration, evidenced by the diagrams on the opposite page. Photo-graphs and statistical charts were providing both the evidence and thelegend for one another. This seeing-together also re-joined the nation’stwo bodies, its political body as civil society and its economic one as aunit of production, which – as Susan Buck-Morss (1995) has shown – had

come apart in the discourse of liberal political economy and its visualmanifestation in relational graphics charts. For, if the latter expressed‘patterns of market behaviour that emerge unintentionally from the aggre-gate of individual decisions’, picturing not ‘the social body as a whole,but statistical correlations that show patterns as a sign of nature’s plan’(pp. 129–30), its display alongside photographic images of public life re-united the ‘two visions of the social collective’ that classical liberalismhad separated. This particular combination, in images and words, of the languages of national economy and of sightseeing put forward in the

guidebooks re-introduced the state and national society as a kind of economicauteur onto the stage of commodity display.This re-joining of the economic and the civic ‘vision’ of national

societies was an expression of the ways in which capital called on the


347

FIGURE 7 ‘Le commerce extérieur argentin’, La République Argentine à

l’Exposition Universelle de Gand (Belgique), 1913 , Museo Social Argentino.Ghent: Commissariat Générale de la Section Argentine, 1913.








state-form to facilitate the space and time into which it could expand, just as state consolidation could only thrive on the intensication of capitalist relations of production and exchange. Participation at the worldfairs sparked massive data-gathering operations that gave a major boostto surveys of the geography, natural and human resources of the Argen-tine and Brazilian interior, helping to consolidate national museums, geo-graphical societies and other knowledge-gathering institutions locatedin the capital cities. The Brazilian organizing committee of 1876, forinstance, commissioned studies on the production of coffee, natural bres,textiles and on the national ora, as well as the rst comprehensive studyof Tupí-Guaraní language and culture since the Jesuits: José Couto deMagalhães’sO selvagem (The Savage , 1876). Argentina undertook its rstmajor livestock census in 1888, at the request of the national committeefor the Paris Exhibition of 1889.9 In this way, exhibitions triggered enor-mous, concerted archival operations, transporting representations from

province to national capital to transatlantic metropolis, and vice versa:objects, images, descriptions and statistical charts that were supposed toconvey, as much as call into being, torrential ows of labour and of capital.More importantly, these para-statal archives were gathered not primarilyto enable the surveillance of bodies and localities by a centralized stateapparatus, but in order to facilitate their exposure to the transnationalgaze of the world market.

GREENHOUSES OF PROGRESS

However, the meaning of these composite images depended, at least asmuch as on their content, on the places where they could be seen. If the national pavilions at the world fairs could indeed be understood asnegotiated visual and material performances of the ‘value’ of national

produce in the context of global ows of capital and merchandise, thenational exhibitions organized in Brazil and Argentina inverted to some

extent the relations of showing and seeing that supported these perfor-mances. The effect of seeing-together vernacular produce and overseasindustrial technologyon a national stage was an emergent vision of ‘national development’ in which the nation-state became the host of,rather than a minor guest at, the spectacle of progress.

In Brazil, an ‘Auxiliary Society for the National Industry’ (SAIN) hadbeen in existence since 1827, pressing for the celebration of nationalexhibitions. Commenting on the example of European national exhibi-tions, the Society’s newspaper in 1845 urged its readers to consider the

‘great advantages’ of gathering, ‘in a single place and under a certainorder, the greatest possible number of our products, so that they may beseen and examined by everyone’ (Turazzi, 1995: 118). Together with Riode Janeiro’s Agricultural Society, SAIN was eventually put in charge of









In Argentina, agricultural exhibitions were rst held in 1856 and 1857at Palermo, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, on land formerly owned bythe exiled dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. The initiative came fromRosas’s nemesis Domingo F. Sarmiento, the writer–politician, as a meansof exorcising the ‘barbarism’ of the past by commodifying (and thus ‘civi-lizing’) its principal incarnation: meat. To turn the rural cattle economy– described in Romantic poet Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero (TheSlaughterhouse, 1839) as a savage bacchanal of blood and esh, humansand animals, in a state of confusion and intermingling – into a site of visual order, governed by abstract exchange value, was a baptism of refor the ‘Unitarian Government’ Sarmiento had proclaimed years earlierin his Facundo (1845). Interrupted for almost two decades (due to the re-emergence, almost immediately after Rosas’s downfall, of internal strifebetween Buenos Aires and the provinces of the interior), regular exhibi-tions of agriculture and cattle were only reinstated in 1875, following thefoundation of the inuential ‘Sociedad Rural Argentina’ (1866), and in the

wake of new meat-freezing technology (rst patented in 1876) that wouldconvert beef into Argentina’s primary export commodity for the comingdecades (Lanuza, 1966). Listings from Buenos Aires’s rural exhibition of 1875 record the participation, on lands situated in what was then startingto become the elegant north of the city, of 85 cattle raisers – includingsubsections for horses, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, birds and rabbits – againstonly six entries for ‘agriculture and gardening’ (Figure 8).Five years earlier – Sarmiento occupying the presidency – the rstnational industrial exhibition had been held at Córdoba, in celebration of the inauguration of the Central Railway connecting the city to the Rosarioriver port. A sequel, organized by the newly founded Club Industrial, took

place at Buenos Aires’s Colegio Nacional in 1877, inspiring the projectof a ‘South-American exhibition of industry, agriculture and the ne arts’(Eiras, 1986: 219), to be held in 1880. A call for planning proposals fromthe organizing committee attracted a number of projects, including one

from the engineer Enrique Dalmonte proposing a large exhibition parkthat would emulate ‘the geographical shape of the Argentine Republic’, where ‘the ora of each province will serve to form little woods andshrubberies; the animal kingdom will make its representation in cages,huts and grottoes, enclosed by galvanized wire’ – a little tramway con-necting the different parts of this miniature Republic (Dalmonte, n.d.).With preparations for the event well under way, tensions within the ClubIndustrial over customs tariffs – traditionally a key demand among localindustrialists – increased in the run-up to a bitterly contested presiden-

tial election, leading to the secession of the pro-free trade ‘Centro Indus-trial Argentino’ in 1878. ‘The theory of free exchange is benecial likeno other,’ the Club’s newspaper El Industrial replied to the secessionistsin 1881, ‘but it only applies in a country that has already succeeded in









developing its industry’ (Iñigo Carrera, 1986: 311). The project of theexhibition, identied by supporters and opponents alike as a monumen-tal advertisement for industrial protectionism, quickly became the objectof contention between newspapers allied with either faction. Havingmanaged to secure government authorization in the closing months of Nicolás Avellaneda’s presidential mandate in 1879, the Club Industrialsubsequently had to postpone the show due to the War of the Pacic(involving Chile, Peru and Bolivia) and to government hostility followingthe ascension of Julio Argentino Roca. Only in May 1881 did Roca’s

government nally authorize the event, and works for an exhibition palacestarted on the site of the old fruitmarket on the city’s western out-skirts (today’s Plaza Once). Afterfurther delays following a devas-tating storm, the exhibition nallyopened on 15 March 1882, in an18,000-square-metreart deco palaceof two longitudinal galleries on

either side, connected by fourtransversal galleries (Figure 9).Entering the premises from

the entrance on Calle Rivadavia,


351

FIGURE 8 Alejandro Witcomb,The Rural Exhibition of 1875 . Buenos Aires:Archivo General de la Nación, colección Witcomb, fotografía 541.

FIGURE 9 ‘General View of thePalace of the Continental Exhibition atBuenos Aires’. Buenos Aires: El

Demócrata , 15 March 1882.








visitors could explore, to their right, the section designated for productsfrom the Argentine provinces, or venture into the exhibition of the federalcapital taking up the left wing of the longitudinal gallery. The gallery onthe opposite side, on Calle Piedad, contained at one end the exhibits repre-senting Brazil and England, as well as further stands from Buenos Airesitself; at the other end were those of Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela,Ecuador, Mexico, Germany and France. The transversal gallery towardsCalle Ecuador also featured exhibits from France and Germany, as wellas Switzerland; the one on Calle Centro América at the opposite end

was dedicated to industrial machinery from the United States, Englandand France. In the evenings, gaslight illumination was provided by theCompañía de Gas Argentino, pioneering its use in the city. Concerts,lectures, chess and fencing competitions, and a ne arts salon graced the

premises, as well as gardens, bandstands, kiosks and an aquarium. Anapplication by the entrepreneur Paúl Angulo to hold bullghts at the fair

was turned down by the organizing committee on the grounds that it was‘a bloody and undignied spectacle, with a harmful moral inuence’(Eiras, 1986: 227).

As if in a fairy tale, the chronicler Blasco de Garay told readers of the daily La Libertad , the exhibition had almost overnight transformedthe miserable outskirts of Buenos Aires into a sumptuous dream world.Suddenly, out of nowhere, a fantasy palace had arisen, where luxuriousmarvels and the beauties of haute société mirrored each other in aluminous haze:

Twenty-four hours went by, and there were carpets on the oor, and theshowcases were full of dresses, caps, books, asks, wools, wines, and all kindsof objects and products, and curtains draping the entrances and covering theceilings, and the workers, craftsmen and other folk had been substituted bybeautiful and gracious women, chaperoned by gentlemen in large numbers.(Garay, 1882a: 1)

Although the magic of commodities invoked here essentially reliedon the old trick of removing from them all traces of their production(‘workers, craftsmen and other folk’), this space being subsequentlyoccupied by the surrogate labour of consumption (‘substituted by beauti-ful and gracious women, etc.’), the fact that this magic was being workedhere on local as well as foreign merchandise, and offered to the gazes of a vernacular audience invited to take part in the cultural performanceof an emergent ‘world bourgeoisie’ (Bauer, 2001: 162), also inscribed thismagic with a difference. The Brazilian section in particular, according

to Garay (1882b), revealed the extent to which this difference in theaesthetics of display pointed to a novel relationship between producersand consumers of industrial commodities. In this incipient vision of anational industrialization – ‘a great book that has opened itself before









our eyes’ – the workers and craftsmen erased from the opening ceremonyin the previous chronicle are suddenly recalled to the scene, not merelyas a labour force but as potential spectators and customers, witnessingthe unveiling of a new image of the nation as a great workshop:

Because this curtain did not cover forests of palms and banana trees, norswarming parrots, nightingales and tití birds, nor articial mountains withdark jungles where waterfalls and wild beasts would engage in a roaringcontest, but merely hats of the most common shape and use, and humblecotton and wool fabrics – sheets, blankets, cloths, socks, shirts, simplefabrics for trousers and other garments, medicines produced in the country,impeccable photographs, in one word, things made for general consump-tion, affordable to the great majority rather than satisfying the whimsy tastesof a minority. That’s what we call industry; in countries such as ours it isnot to produce objects of great luxury and exaggerated cost. (p. 1)

Palm trees and parrots, of course, were precisely what usually aboundedat the Brazilian pavilions designed for the world fairs, a fact that doesnot escape De Garay:

Until today Brazil has appeared at all the exhibitions with its natural richeson display; today it’s the Brazilian industry that submits its humble productsto the judgment of its American sisters. (p. 1)

For all their modesty, however, ‘the sight of all these products teachesus things many of us had ignored’, namely that, ‘if we could unite [Brazil,Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay] in an industrial and commercialleague, which would attempt to facilitate their emancipation, as soon as possible, from the European industry of which today they are largelytributaries’, it would be possible to substitute with vernacular produce‘the enormous quantities imported every year’ of ‘all classes and forms’of goods, ‘both of raw materials and of those manufactured at variouslevels of machinery, cotton fabrics, wools and bres, and other kinds of

industrial products’ (p. 1).

MACHINERY GARDEN

The vision, on a single stage, of primary and manufactured goods and of industrial machinery, rather than merely transposing onto a national stagethe speculary arrangement of the world fairs, inaugurated new spaces of seeing that prompted alternative projects for a ‘national modernity’. Forinstance, even a cursory overview of photographer C. Rocca’s Album de

la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba (1871), documenting Argentina’s rstnational fair, reveals a space of visual consumption and performance thatdiffered considerably from the ‘white cities’ andcités féériques of theindustrial north. The album starts with pictures of the vast, landscaped









park created at the exhibition grounds on the outskirts of Córdoba, the work of French botanist M. Berthault (Figure 10).

Taking advantage of the softly undulating terrain, viewing platformsoffered visitors a panoramic overview of this articial landscape, partsof which, the exhibition Guide explained, ‘imitate the purest kind of English garden’, thus revealing ‘the magnicent Cordobese lawn to be amatch for the Englishman’s’ (‘Descripción’, 1871: 410, 412). Distributedthroughout the grounds were an open-air coffee house, an articial grotto,largevolières with falcons and other local birds of prey, and greenhousesaccommodating regional and tropical plants (Figure 11). The greatestattraction was the irrigation system powered by ‘a locomotive with thestrength of six English horses, from the Clayton Shuttleworth & Co.factory at Lincoln’ and ‘a triple pump from Easton Amos & Andersonof London’ (‘Descripción’, 1871: 406), circulating water from a depositlocated on the park’s edge through articial creeks and springs into a‘great lake’ surrounded by alleys and benches (Figure 12).

Having made their ‘light stroll across the Exhibition gardens’, andtaken notice ‘of all the beautiful plants in it, which until yesterday wereonly growing wildly in the surroundings of Córdoba’, the Guide con-cludes, visitors would be left wondering ‘how many marvels abound inother regions of Argentina, which science has already classied but which

we still regard with contempt?’ And its authors go on to recommend:

Lessons of agriculture, schools of botany, that’s what we really need . . . forlack of science, which would put us in contact with the produce of our soil, we live next to an immense wealth we ignore. We get our drugs from Europe,at great cost, when we have them here in our mountains in a fresh and perfect state . . . The exhibition has revealed the latest inventions to us, and we have seen them at work, saving time and force. At the same time theexhibition is revealing that an innite number of wild owers, destined toembellish our gardens, grow in our countryside. (‘Descripción’, 1871: 415)


354

FIGURE 10 C. Rocca, Album de la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba , ‘The park’. Córdoba: C. Rocca, 1871.

FIGURE 11 C. Rocca, Album de la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba ,‘Greenhouses’. Córdoba: C. Rocca,1871.








The exhibition palace itself (Figure 13), a light metal, wood and adobeconstruction, illuminated by natural light entering through its centralglass dome, was divided into two parallel arched galleries, one of whichcontained the displays of the province of Buenos Aires and of overseasexhibitors, the other those of the province of Córdoba and the Argentineinterior (Figure 14).


355

FIGURE 12 C. Rocca, Album de la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba , ‘The greatlake’. Córdoba: C. Rocca, 1871.

FIGURE 13 C. Rocca, Album de la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba , ‘The palace seen from the café’. Córdoba:C. Rocca, 1871.

FIGURE 14 C. Rocca, Album de la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba ,‘Interior of the palace’. Córdoba:C. Rocca, 1871.








Manufactured and light industrial goods were thus facing agricultural produce, local crafts and raw material displays, not so much in terms of a progressive ‘evolution’ from the latter to the former as of their mutualcomplementarity. The exhibition Guide describes the effect of this displayin a language of ‘revelation’, pointing out ways in which materials fromone region of the country could benet the craftsmanship and industrialeffort of another, thus making redundant expensive imports and bringingmodern commodities within reach of the entire population:

Córdoba could provide the entire Republic with blankets, leaving the Englishones without a market . . . What is needed for a factory of blankets to beestablished at Tulumba? Nothing but capitals, which will arrive from themoment the Exhibition has revealed what everyone ignored apart from here

. . . What is needed, for this [country] to turn into a workshop of riches?Arms and capitals, which will arrive if, as we expect, the Exhibition is asuccess . . . What the Palace contains is a great revelation. (‘Descripción’,1871: 430–1)

Separate outbuildings provided stables and sheds for cattle and agricul-tural machinery, the latter of which could also be observed in action atQuinta de Santa Ana farm, adjacent to the exhibition park, where cropsfrom different regions had been planted using a variety of irrigation andfertilization techniques, allowing for on-site comparison (Figure 15).

Thus, the exhibition of commodities at the pavilion, both in the guide-book and in Rocca’s photographic album, appears as just one element ina more comprehensive model environment for agro-industrial improve-ment. In fact, what seems to matter most here are not so much the objectsin and for themselves but rather the novelway of seeing they evoke asexhibits. Everyday things, such as the blankets from Córdoba, and eventhe native wild plants, suddenly take on new meanings as they appearin the exhibition’s showcases and owerbeds, an epiphanic ‘seeing-

anew’ that provokes a ‘revelation’.

This revelation was the result of anact of framing that, by endowing theinconspicuous object of local everydayconsumption with the modernist magicof commodities through its displayside by side with other objects fromadjacent regions and from abroad, con-verted it into evidence of anationaldevelopment . Of course, this material

performance of an incipient nationaldevelopmentalism crucially relied onthe gaze of a vernacular audiencethat was urged to conduct itself as


356

FIGURE 15 C. Rocca, Album de la Exposición Nacional de Córdoba ,‘Park of comparative cultures’.Córdoba: C. Rocca, 1871.








consumers, certifying the commodity status of the exhibits through theirspectatorship. This is why the park, as a model space of public beha-viour, was not merely the ornamental envelope but a key element of thenational exhibition: the threshold of passage, where visitors learned toassume the role of citizen–consumers before entering the exhibition pavilion.

CONCLUSION

Against the world fairs’ monumental allegories of Brazil and Argentinaas exotic deposits of riches in a pristine state of availability, national exhi-bitions pitched a material language of profane revelation that allowed aglimpse of a different insertion into the emergent capitalist world econ-omy. Both forms of staging the national and the universal, however, reliedon a juxtaposition of material objects that provided a seeing-together of different places and times in an increasingly global production chain.The exoticizing representations of Latin America at the world fairs, as Ihave argued in this article, provide a case study of modernity’s produc-tion of the archaic, as both the condition for, and the effect of, expandingcapitalist relations of production and exchange (David Harvey’s [2001]‘spatio-temporal x’). Whereas this modern archaic relied on the mutualestrangement, or making-exotic, of the socio-cultural locales of produc-tion and consumption, the ‘revelation’ referred to in the guidebooks andspeeches of national exhibitions was, on the contrary, the effect of theirre-joining in a single space of seeing, exposing the profane, everydaynature of modern mass production and, thus, the possibility of its repli-cation on a national scale. This visualrapprochement of production andconsumption knowledges, in turn, induced the reformist utopia of thenation as a great workshop. In fact, world fairs and national exhibitions were just two forms of ‘seeing-together’ the disjointed spatio-temporalitiesof capitalist modernity. The rst of these, in evidence at the world fairs’

pavilions, parks and palaces, looks forward to a process ofmodernizationas permanent accumulation-through-dispossession , as well as to a radicallanguage of its aesthetic symptomatization and critique, best known as‘magical realism’, based on a creative working-through of the ‘real marvel-lous’ forms of a self-estranged modernity, turning them from agents of alienation into instruments of critique. It is no mere coincidence thatmany of the latter’s artistic practitioners actively supported political projects of national developmentalism, from Arbenz’s Guatemala to Goulart’sBrazil and Allende’s Chile, projects which, as cultural–political forms,

emerged from a different mode of mutual investment of exhibits andspectators. National exhibitions, as instances of visual education thatturned local audiences into consumers, were a rst step towards makingviable a ‘national industrialization’. Thus, they establisheda mutually









denuded spatial form in itself (distance; the degree of openness; the numbersof interconnections; proximity; etc. etc.), but the relational content of thatspatial form and in particular the nature of the embedded power-relations. . . What is at issue is the articulation of forms of power within spatialcongurations’ (Massey, 2005: 82–93). This ‘relational content of spatialforms’, as a constellation of power–knowledge producing asymmetric assign-ments of value, is precisely the subject of this article.

4. European mass immigration and capital exports in the final third of the19th century, an effect of the Second Industrial Revolution, according toFurtado’s classic study of Latin American economic history, remained largelycentred on the River Plate and Brazil, followed by Mexico, the Caribbeanand the Andean regions. In Argentina, the country most heavily affected,the percentage of foreigners in relation to the native population, accordingto contemporary census estimates, rose from 13.8 per cent in 1869 to 24 percent in 1895, and to 42.7 per cent in 1914. A similar wave of immigration –

made up mainly of Italians, Portuguese, Germans and Japanese – reachedthe Brazilian South, in particular the states of São Paulo, Paraná and SantaCatarina, during the same period (Furtado, 1969; Vázquez Rial, 1996).

5. Although they still remain conspicuously absent from academic bibliographyon the subject, Latin Americans participated at universal exhibitions fromthe very outset (Andermann, 2007: 21). Exhibitors from the ArgentineConfederation, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala,Mexico, Uruguay and Nueva Granada were present at the Crystal PalaceExhibition of 1851 and at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. The Empireof Brazil, which had sent inspectors to the exhibitions of 1851 and 1855,entrusted with the task of reporting on the marvels of industrial progress,

started to make national displays to be sent abroad a matter of state from asearly as 1862, on the occasion of London’s Universal Exhibition. Thanks toan elaborate system of regular provincial and national fairs where exhibits

would be selected for overseas display, the Brazilian Empire quickly becamethe region’s major and most regular exhibitor at international events. Until1876, Brazil consequently held the advantage over its neighbours in termsof medals and prizes won; after that, it began to be eclipsed by Argentina,

whose budget of 3,500,000 francs for the 1889 exhibition of Paris almosttripled that of the United States. Arguably, then, the tally of awards harvestedby a particular country, rather than the quality of its products or the stateof advance of its industry, indicated the degree of convergence between the

aims, strategies and budgets of Latin American exhibitors and those investedin the gazes of overseas audiences – that is, between constructions of valueat different ends of the commodity process (Fey, 1999; Tenorio-Trillo, 1996;Turazzi, 1995; Villechenon, 1993).

6. As Buck-Morss (1999) puts it:By attaching themselves as surface ornamentation to the industrial and techno-logical forms which have just come into existence, collective wish images imbuethe merely new with radical political meaning, inscribing visibly on the productsof the new means of production an ur-image of the desired socialends of theirdevelopment. In short, even as they mask the new, these archaic images providea symbolic representation of what the human, social meaning of technologicalchange is all about. (p. 117, emphasis in original)

7. Both Argentina and Brazil had attempted, unsuccessfully, to resist the exhi-bition organizers’ allocation of display space adjacent to other Latin Americancountries, in a section bordering the ‘colonial city’ of African, Asian, Oceanic









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◆ J ENS ANDE RMANN is Professor of Latin American and Luso-BrazilianStudies at Birkbeck College. His areas of interest are cultural and literary theoryand history, and their relation to political processes, in particular in Argentina,Brazil and the Southern Cone. His current research focuses on landscape as anobject and expression of the tensions running through Latin American modernity.He also directs a research network on questions of realism in contemporaryBrazilian and Argentinian cinema and is an editor of the Journal of Latin AmericanCultural Studies . Address : School of Languages, Linguistics & Culture, BirkbeckCollege, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, UK. [email: [email protected]]


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