473560 MCU18110.1177/1359183512473560Journal of Material CultureWinter 2012 Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE Article Auto-exoticism: Cultural display at the Shanghai Expo Journal of Material Culture 18(1) 69–90 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1359183512473560 mcu.sagepub.com Tim Winter University of Western Sydney, Australia Abstract For many postcolonial countries, articulating a sense of identity and cultural nationalism has involved negotiating those histories and identities constructed and ascribed upon them by others. Indeed, such themes have long troubled many postcolonial intellectuals and been the subject of intense debates. Shanghai Expo 2010 brought this issue into focus once again, an event where national identities were performed to an audience of 73 million. This article examines the objects and architecture of cultural nationalism in relation to questions of sovereignty and enduring colonialities for a number of Asian and African countries participating in previous world’s fairs and at Shanghai. It draws on the ideas of Partha Chatterjee to interpret why they embraced a language of tradition and heritage, reproducing the same geo-cultural hierarchies familiar to the age of European empire. The author argues that, within the cultural economies of globalization today, such countries engage in a form of auto-exoticism. Keywords architecture, auto-exoticism, display, post-colonialism, Shanghai Expo, world’s fairs Introduction In 2010, the city of Shanghai hosted the largest, most spectacular and most expensive world’s fair ever. Held just two years after the Beijing Olympics, the Shanghai Expo attracted in excess of 73 million visitors over a six-month period. With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, many of which face uncertain futures, the Expo confronted a number of key challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century through its theme ‘Better City, Better Life’. A mega-event estimated to have cost in the region of US$45 billion dollars, Shanghai Expo brought together 190 countries and more than 50 organizations and corporations involved in urban governance (Huang, 2007). A Corresponding author: Tim Winter, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Building EM, Parramatta Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC, NSW 1797, Australia. Email: t.winter@uws.edu.au Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 70 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) unique forum, the Expo was a stage for many of the world’s most important players to communicate to a huge audience their ideas about the future, about urban sustainability and about what makes for a better life. With the host city interpreting ‘Better City, Better Life’ in terms of ‘harmony’, multi-million dollar pavilions proclaimed and enticed harmonies between man and man, man and nature, past and future, and some of the ways in which these might be created or maintained. Straddling the Huangpu river, the Expo site divided the world, with all its countries, cities, institutions and corporations, into five zones: Asia; Southeast Asia and Oceania; Africa, Americas and Europe; Corporate; and Urban Best Practice. As with previous expos, the primary audience was a domestic one. Given that around 97–99 per cent of visitors were Chinese, the event took on particular significance as the vast majority of these had yet to travel overseas.1 In hosting the Expo, the Chinese government thus created a unique event of civic education. With the 2008 Olympics facilitating the world to learn about China, the Shanghai Expo enabled China to learn about the world. An architecture for colonial ideologies Shanghai 2010 was the latest event in a 160-year tradition of world’s fairs and universal expositions. Renowned for their elaborate displays of technology and culture, expos have long been unique environments within which a sense of collective identity is evoked by the coming together of nations, as they are at once held in a spirit of competition for months on end (Harvey, 1996). Such events have thus been important forums for learning about other countries, other cultures in an exhibitionary complex that has remained remarkably consistent in its format and ethos (Mattie, 1998). Expos have been celebrated for the wide array of material and non-material cultural forms they have brought together and exhibited, including architectural pieces, archaeological objects, and elaborate assemblages of arts and crafts, ranging from the so called ‘fine’ to ‘craft’. Not surprisingly, culture has also been extensively performed through ‘human showcases’, to use Greenhalgh’s (2000[1988]) term, with clothing (or absence thereof), dance forms and phenotypic features all being offered up for visual consumption. To return to the Great Exhibition of 1851, in both its scale and form, the event provided an important template for what would become a distinct genre of display, classification and symbolic codification. It was also deeply infused with the encyclopedic paradigm of the mid-19th century, such that cultural display formed part of a wider manifesto of education and enlightenment. In an interior space covering 33 million cubic feet, displays were divided into four categories: Manufactures, Machinery, Raw Materials and Fine Arts. This would prove to be a template adopted and modified by other international exhibitions held in Europe and elsewhere over the second half of the 19th century. As Greenhalgh (2000[1988]: 12–13) notes: The mix of the exhibits was extraordinary, ranging from classical sculpture to giant lumps of coal from a Nubian Court to wrought iron fire-places, from steam engines to Indian miniatures, from rubber plants to stained glass windows. But with its emphasis on industrialism and scientific prowess, in comparison to later events, the Great Exhibition’s display of cultural artifacts was modest. Moreover, those visual arts that were included, such as print media, were done so as much for their Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 71 Winter technological innovation as their artistic qualities (Greenhalgh, 2000[1988]: 13). Four years later, Paris would offer a very different balance between technology and culture, seizing the opportunity to reinforce its (self-)image as Europe’s artistic center by foregrounding the fine arts. Under the close instruction of Napoleon III, the fine arts were given particular importance in the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, such that the event could be promoted as a marker of French national character. From this point on, culture and technology would be juxtaposed in dozens of expos; they provided the spectacle and spectacular in a zeitgeist of megalomania, as rivalries between organizers in France and Britain and later between France and the US would stretch over decades. While the 43 world’s fairs and expositions held in these three countries between 1851 and 1939 would be instrumental to the formation of the genre, events held in Asia, Latin America, Oceania and elsewhere in Europe also took inspiration from the template established in the 1851 and 1855 expos. In the story of Europe’s fairs, Peter Hoffenberg’s 2001 volume An Empire on Display and Paul Greenhalgh’s Ephemeral Vistas 2000) remain canonical texts. In presenting a similar analytical voice, their shared aim is to reveal the ties between the exhibitionary complex that emerged in the mid-19th century and the prevailing ideologies of empire. Together, they point toward the subtle and complex ways exhibitions advanced the cultural–political matrices of colonialism and European nationalism. As Hoffenberg (2001: xv) states: Exhibitions were at the heart of imperial and national social and commercial enterprises during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. They were spectacles of tangible fantasy, in which participants forged nations and the Empire, both imaginary and material. Imperial, colonial, and national inventories were linked at the exhibitions by official tests and jury reports, consumption, tourism, and historical pageants. The power to organize, study, and compare this diversity strengthened the authority of commissioners and their states, often revealing tensions between and within the Empire’s political communities. In their respective accounts, both authors emphasize that the capacity for exhibitions to represent, advance and reflect the values of empire had to be learnt. Greenhalgh (2000[1988]: 53) notes that, while the planning of the Great Exhibition of 1851 involved the assemblage of ‘colonies, dominions and dependencies into a huge imperial display’, the desire to impress and enthrall visitors with the wealth of acquired possessions created confusion. The decision to display colonial territories as a ‘treasure house’ of raw materials, arts and crafts, machinery and so forth meant that countries were exhibited as quantifiable resources rather than as culturally distinct entities. Not surprisingly, apart from a French display of Algiers, the Great Exhibition only displayed items from Britain and its dominions. But with Britain taking an extensive collection to Paris in 1855, the convention of displaying the possessions of empire in rival countries quickly evolved. The Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians would all participate in this arena, both hosting expos and sending increasingly elaborate displays to their counterparts. Given such events were taking place at the height of European nation-building and state-crafting, part of the commitment to hosting a world’s fair was ensuring your own displays were more spectacular and elaborate than those of your guests. Such rivalry contributed to the introduction of architecture in the 1870s as a marker of grandeur and (possessed) wealth, with the arrival of colonial palaces and separate buildings dedicated to larger dominions. Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 72 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) Andrea Roeber (2008) argues that the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1878 provided a watershed moment in this regard. Whilst the expo is largely remembered for its distinctive Palais de Trocadéro, its most significant legacy would be the inaugural use of culturally representative architecture. It was proposed that participating nations should create entranceways to their displays in the court of the Palais d’Industrie. In an interesting parallel to Shanghai 2010, Roeber notes that the American pavilion was criticized for being too nondescript and it was considered that the inconsistent façades of China and Siam contributed to an aesthetically disagreeable pastiche (p. 61). Nonetheless, the socalled ‘Rue des Nations’ was an important innovation in the expo genre, marking an explicit transition from industry towards culture (Figure 1). As the century came to a close, the use of architecture to represent cultures and nations, both near and far, became a standard feature of the expo genre. In Paris 1889, extraordinary palaces were built for Algerian and Tunisian exhibits. Mexico was represented through an ‘Aztec Palace’ and a structure for Ecuador took its inspiration from the Incas. Swift (2008: 104) evocatively summarizes this panoply in stating that the Expo was ‘replete with an eclectic assortment of picturesque replicas of historic buildings from all over the world’. The 1889 Expo was also notable for the contrast it struck between historical ‘quaintness’ and metropolitan modernity, the Eiffel Tower specially constructed for the event exemplifying the latter category. Unlike earlier structures built for world’s fairs, the tower had no function other than to impress and entertain. In all its forms then, modern and traditional, architecture helped ensure the world’s fairs of the late 19th century were unparalleled in their spectacle. And, crucially, it is through architecture, in both its design and layout, that we begin to see how the representation of cultures and nations was mediated through distinct ideological values. The Figure 1. Rue des Nations, Paris 1878. Reproduction kindly granted by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (91.R.11). Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 73 Winter Figure 2. Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889. Rreproduction kindly granted by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (92.R.20). scene of an Eiffel Tower, in itself a powerful demonstration of modernity and industrial might, towering over an array of replica structures inspired by tradition and history provided visitors with a clear depiction of the hierarchies of empire (Figure 2). More specifically, it is in such settings that we see tangible manifestations of European imperialism; a process which, according to Said (1993), was only fully formed from around 1880 onwards. Said used the term to point towards the practices, attitudes and values at the heart of colonialism. As architectural showcases, fairs at this time drew heavily on the rhetoric of imperialism; a language ‘whose imagery of growth, fertility, and expansion, whose teleological structure of property and identity, whose ideological discrimination between “us” and “them” had already matured elsewhere – in fiction, political science, racial theory, travel writing’ (p. 128). But as Bennett (2004) reminds us, displays of culture in the 19th century should not be read as mere reflections of power, but as complicit agents in its production and circulation. In his discussion of museums, Bennett reworks Said’s Foucauldian analysis towards governmentality to argue the expertise and knowledge acquired in these cultural institutions did not just convey and reinforce existing forms of state power, but instead constituted the structures of power themselves. From this perspective we see how museums, and by extension world’s fairs, were institutions of cultural display that deployed ‘specific mechanisms, techniques and technologies for shaping thought, feelings, perceptions and behavior’ (p. 5). As Bennett points out elsewhere, as great exhibitions and fairs evolved in the late 19th century the rhetoric of progress shifted away from machinery and the stages of industrialization to a hierarchical ordering of races and nations. In architectural terms this was achieved through design and spatial segregation, and by the Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 74 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) end of the century the classification of pavilions in US fairs into racial groups was common practice. While pavilion zones might be classified along the lines of AngloSaxon, American, Latin, Oriental and Germanic, displays of aboriginal and black populations were typically subsumed into the narratives of conquered territories (Rydell, 1993). In essence then, the design, classification and layout of architectural structures formed as important rhetorical mechanisms for advancing a teleological, racist vision of human progress to mass audiences. Of course, such practices and values extended far beyond the realm of replica architecture. World’s fairs served as the ideal media for staging the ‘primitive’ via live performances and the display of the material accoutrements of ‘exotic’ peoples (Figure 3). In 1889 the Palais de Trocadéro was largely given over to ethnographic exhibits, housing an extensive collection of aboriginal, African, South Pacific and pre-Columbian artifacts. Indeed, the building would come to be synonymous with non-western art until its demolition in 1937. To lend displays an aura of authenticity ‘native villages’ were also constructed, wherein shipped-in performers would perform customary dances, make handicrafts and act out daily ‘traditions’ of rural life seemingly drawn from another age (Swift, 2008: 104). Indeed, it was in one such village that Paul Gauguin first met his Tahitian ‘noble savages’. For the more adventurous visitor, rickshaws pulled by Indochinese men could be taken around the site. Creating a mild level of scandal, the 1889 Expo also introduced belly dancing as entertainment along the ‘Rue du Caire’. For Çelik and Kinney (1990) the belly dance took on particular importance as a metonym for the orientalist, patriarchal fantasies that constituted Europe’s vision of the Islamic world. As they state, ‘the ethnographic displays at the exhibitions recontextualised an erotic fascination with Muslim women, in a spectacle that linked imperial power, legitimate edification, and libidinal motivation’ (p. 43). It also provided the theatrical centerpiece of an Islamic mise en scène incorporating replicas of mosques, markets and baths, all of which were populated with ‘natives’ dressed in costumes. Proximity, familiarity and difference were thus made to work in harmony in the geocultural ordering of the world that was the fair. In both Britain and France it was a narrative that was continually sustained through the depiction of a colonial Asia. In France the growth of the exposition genre in the late 19th century coincided with the country’s expansion into Indochina. By weaving together the accounts of missionaries, botanists, anthropologists and archaeologists, this part of Southeast Asia became a ‘phantasmatic assemblage’, to use Panivong Norindr’s (1996) term. Tracing this process through the media of architecture, film and literature, Norindr argues that France’s sense of colonial edification relied heavily upon imaginary scaffoldings on which Indochina as a fictional place, a lieu de mémoire, and a vision of an exotic utopia were erected and against which the fantasies of artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, political figures and others emerged. (p. 3) The Musée Guimet, with its displays of archaeological and temple artifacts, provided an important forum from the 1880s onwards for transmitting such ideas to the Parisian public. But it was via the extravagance of world’s fairs that France exhibited Indochina most lavishly to impress its colonial prowess on its rival powers and garner popular Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 75 Winter Figure 3. Le Village Laotien, Paris 1900. Reproduction kindly granted by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (T804.C1). support domestically. The ‘ancient kingdom’ of Angkor (801–1432 CE) – embodied through reproductions of its highly elaborate temple architecture – emerged as a metonym for the region, its people and culture. In 1889 the first replica of Angkorean architecture appeared, with a scaled-down version of a central sanctum being one of the centerpieces of the Indochina pavilion. The depiction of bas-relief carvings, inscriptions and temple dance performances all tangibly demonstrated the advances in French archaeological and ethnographic scholarship being made at the time. As this scholarship evolved, so too would the trajectories of how Angkor was treated as an object of display. The reproduction of an Angkorean grotto in Paris in 1900, together with a 1906 Bayon tower and life-size Angkorean pavilion in 1922 in Marseilles, became the centerpieces of exhibits that categorized Cambodian material culture into a linear historical narrative constructed in territorial and national terms (Figure 4). The ultimate expression of these ideas and beliefs came in 1931 with the Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris. Arguably, the most extravagant and elaborate exposition to date, the show marked the fullest expression of imperial power, with France’s colonial territories refined, admired and displayed as secular spectacle through a process Anderson (1991: 182) has described as a ‘logoisation’ of culture. Costing 12.5 million francs, the Expo’s centerpiece, a three-quarter-size replica of Angkor Wat, was adorned with detailed reproductions of sculptures and bas-relief carvings along its façades. In contrast to the faithful reproduction of Angkor’s architectural themes on the outside, the interior was remodeled into three floors, which, when seen together, provided visitors with an understanding of the close cultural and economic ties between France, as métropole, and its territory in Indochina. Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 76 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) Figure 4. Reproduction of Angkor Wat, Marseilles 1922. Reproduction kindly granted by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (ZPC 1 Box 4). Hoffenberg (2001) traces similar processes for British displays of India. Beginning with the 30,000 square foot Indian court at the Crystal Palace in 1851, monumental gateways, tents and carved screens provided the backdrop for increasingly elaborate displays containing arts and craft works, including inlaid woodwork, silks, carpets, pottery and jewelry. Seen together, along with various ethnographic models, these enabled ‘visitors to imagine and envision a timeless India of fantasy and tradition’ (p. 149). Of particular note in this regard was the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held in London in 1886 (Figure 5). India, the ‘jewel of the empire’, occupied nearly one third of the overall exhibition space, with a display five times larger than any previous exhibition (Prasch, 2008: 90). The showcase was an Indian palace featuring a Durbar Hall and a theatrical architectural entranceway, the Gwalior Gate. As Prasch explains, both the Hall and Gate were the result of concepts drawn up by Englishmen and implemented by Indian craftsman. Neither accurately reproduced any existing structures found in the subcontinent, but instead set out to showcase a range of stone-carving techniques with designs ‘typical’ of their genre. He thus concludes: ‘The “India” offered at South Kensington was an increasingly hybrid beast, the product of British imperial management over the production of “traditional” Indian arts and crafts.’ Hoffenberg (2001) offers a similar critique. He argues that although such displays essentially appealed to a glorious cultural past, they did not so much recreate as reconstruct, and in ways that naturalized a series of relationships, which, together, constituted an Anglo-India. But where India was represented through artisans and traditional craftsmen, Australia would be captured through horticulture and miners. While both might be presented and juxtaposed as ‘industries’ of sorts, the former very much conveyed the idea of a pre-modern, pre-industrial nation, with the latter being at the frontiers of an Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 77 Winter Figure 5. Drawing of the Indian Court, London 1886. Reproduction kindly granted by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (87-B9353). industrial age in need of raw materials. Hoffenberg argues that these national constructions were made to work in complementarity, advancing the core-periphery hierarchies of empire in economic, cultural and political terms. In other words, for both Britain and France, exhibitions played a vital role in delineating the peoples and nations of empire into particular ‘social categories’ and communicating such ideas to mass audiences both at home and overseas. Saloni Mathur (2007) has added to this picture through an analysis of cultural display practices in 19th-century Britain and India, and the categorization of arts from crafts. She addresses the intersections between ‘the world of art, the emerging science of anthropology, the fashionable culture of the department of store, and the professional practices of painters and museum curators’ (p. 12) in order to interpret the aesthetic qualities and socio-political values attributed to various forms of Indian culture. Particularly revealing is her discussion of how the craftsman and traditional modes of Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 78 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) cultural production were fetishized within both the consumption aesthetics of Victorian Britain and the politics of nationalism in India. The Second World War would put an end to the hosting of world’s fairs. By the time the first post-war expo, Brussels 1958, took place, an era of European colonial rule was coming to an end. And yet for Stanard (2005; Stanard et al., 2005), in spite of the collapse in the hegemony of Europe, imperialist attitudes towards colonial and former colonial territories remained evident. Accordingly, Stanard’s argument centers on the representation of the Congo, a country that would gain its independence two years after the Brussels Expo. As previously, African culture was presented as backward and primitive, in part through its juxtaposition with surrounding futuristic architecture such as the Atomium. The presentation of a village indigène, he suggests, perpetuated the expo tradition of dehumanizing and humiliating colonial subjects by putting humans at the mercy of the white gaze. Stanard (2005: 282) thus concludes that the representation of the Congo was not only ‘a shocking throwback years after the defeat of biological racism’, but also failed to address the wrongdoings of colonial rule. Perhaps most strikingly, the bust of Leopold II at the entrance to the Palais du Congo honored his reign, effacing a brutal history of millions of deaths and mutilations. Although Europe would lose its appetite for world’s fairs and expos after Brussels 1958, the genre would continue to flourish elsewhere, most notably in North America and Japan. It is a geographical departure that has been accompanied by a shift in the scholarship on world’s fairs. In the post-war, postcolonial decades of the 20th century much less attention has been given to the representation of culture, nations and peoples at these events, or how they advanced ideologies or states of hegemony. One notable exception is Penny Harvey’s (1995, 1996) analysis of Expo ’92 held in Seville. Harvey gives particular attention to the role of technology in the production of culture as national brand. Her account insightfully details the use of information technologies such as electronic displays as a pivotal factor in forging a hierarchy of nations. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, she argues that, unlike the technology displays of the 19th and early 20th centuries, these electronic technologies do not categorize or impart knowledge via object lessons; rather, they produce sensations by fragmenting and reassembling culture as a series of visual collages (Harvey, 1995: 101– 104). With the power of the nation conveyed in effective terms, this technoculture creates a whole new realm of semiotics to which only the ‘more advanced’ countries have access. Those still displaying the material culture of handicrafts, clothing and so forth, as was the case in many African and Asian pavilions, remain grounded in a world defined by literal representation and a stability of cultural production and reproduction. Shanghai: A theatre of nations Intriguingly, Harvey’s account and analysis of Expo ’92 remains remarkably informative for interpreting the cultural dynamics of Shanghai 2010. However, rather than merely rehearse her observations, I wish to incorporate them into a wider discussion; one that traces deeper historical connections and, in so doing, raises questions about enduring colonialities and the implications of cultural ‘imagineering’. In a parallel to Expo ’92, Shanghai Expo was characterized by what Harvey referred to as ‘a division of labor’ between nations, with some looking backwards to the past and others projecting Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 79 Winter themselves and their audiences into the future. Given the discussion above, the focus here is on those that were past-oriented in their national brand, and, once again, pavilion architecture offers some illuminating pointers. In the case of India, for example, the pavilion welcomed visitors with a language of harmony between man and nature, and between past and present. With a strong emphasis on the country’s cultural heritage, the Indian pavilion also took design inspiration from pre-modern religious architecture.2 The focal point was a large bamboo dome, designed to be reminiscent of the famous Sanchi Stupa, built by Ashoka Maurya (273–236 BCE). Intended to ‘showcase the wisdom of ancient Indians’, the 35-meter diameter dome was constructed from 36 bamboo ribs, with the exterior lined with grass (Figure 6). Throughout India, the dome is a recurrent motif in religious architecture and a common feature across Hindu and Jain temples, Muslim mosques and Sikh gurdwaras, as well as sacred Buddhist sites. Not surprisingly, then, in Shanghai the dome was depicted as an icon of ‘Unity in Diversity’ for a country defined by real religious and cultural diversity.3 The official pavilion guide described its symbolism accordingly: the soft curve and hemispherical shape on a circular base highlight the cycle of life, where there is no beginning or end; where the end of one cycle leads to a beginning and regeneration, symbolizing the eternal harmony of life. (ITPO, 2010: 4) (see Figure 7) The parallels to the London International Exhibitions of 1871–74 and the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition are striking. One of the centerpieces of the 1871–74 exhibitions was a reproduction of the Eastern Gateway of the Sanchi Stupa. Through photography and sketches, the original structure, located in central India as it is today, Figure 6. India Pavilion, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 80 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) Figure 7. Interior of the dome, India Pavilion, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. was recast as a full-size replica in England. Exhibited in the 1870s, the architecture of Sanchi was primarily admired as exemplary of Indian art and architecture. However, in her fascinating account of ‘the many lives of the Sanchi Stupa in colonial India’, GuhaThakurta (2010: 95) argues that, by the end of the 19th century, the profusion of modern reproductions, both photographic and plaster-cast, led to a blending of religious and artistic readings. By 2010, this semantic trajectory had reached a point where art, philosophical traditions, religious values and cultural roots all folded into each other, within a discourse of harmony: ‘the essence of the design approach at Sanchi is harmony with the environment and all living things, expounding harmonious living as a way of life and a core philosophy to happiness and enlightenment’ (http://www.indiaatexpo2010. com/site/?q=node/22). In Hoffenberg’s (2001) account of the 1886 exhibition we also hear about structures built from bamboo covered with thatch, and, as a parallel to the description of the Stupa of Shanghai, a Gwalior Gate designed to ‘represent typical structures in feudal India’ (p. 160). The continuity extends inside through the privileging of ‘traditional’, preindustrial culture, as depicted through reconstructed bazaars displaying carpets, silks, jewelry, woodcarving and so forth. Interestingly, in both the 19th and 21st centuries, specific geographies and cultural contexts lend authenticity to artisanship. In 1886, Punjab and Bengali culture were celebrated, whereas in 2010 it would be Kashmir and Jaipur in Rajasthan (Figure 8).4 The sub-theme of harmony in 2010 also meant that culture, in the form of regional dance performances and cuisines, was instrumentally coded to service a rhetoric of national unity through diversity: Unity in the rich diversity of its art and culture is a living embodiment of the wonder that is India. India’s cultural heritage has a long lineage and is the most diverse, colorful and vibrant Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 81 Winter Figure 8. ‘Arts and Culture’ display, India Pavilion, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. in the world. Its rich variety of dances, festivals, art and architecture – all harmoniously interwoven – provides a strong bond of national unity. (ITPO, 2010: 21) An analysis of Cambodia’s pavilion at Shanghai reveals similar historical parallels. The narrative of the nation is once again primarily oriented around the ancient temples of Angkor. In the hierarchy of pavilion design at Shanghai, Cambodia sat in the middle category: having its own building, but using the standard box-shaped container supplied by theme organizers. To customize this structure, the Cambodian designers lined the exterior with large-scale images of Angkorean architecture. On entering the pavilion, visitors were encouraged to ‘travel back in time’ as they passed under a plaster reproduction of a corbel arch, reminiscent of the Bayon temple, and entered into a room containing a miniature of Angkor Wat and the replica of a tree-covered gallery from the Ta Prohm temple (Figure 9). It is a combination that has particular pertinence, as these three elements – beatific faces, majestic towers and an encroaching jungle – were consistently reproduced and circulated in a French colonial imaginary of Indochine, a landscape littered with the mysterious, romantic ruins of lost civilizations, as noted earlier. The framing of Angkor as a dormant relic of a once glorious, but dead, ancient civilization solidified with the supposed ‘discovery’ of the temple complex by the traveling botanist Henri Mouhot in 1860. The romance of civilizational decline, followed by quiescence and re-awakening was retained through the decision to preserve two of Angkor’s temples, Ta Prohm and Preah Khan, as partial ruins. A conservation strategy of freezing these sites at the time of their ‘rediscovery’ – as jungle-covered ruins – effectively effaced histories of ongoing inhabitation and intra-regional pilgrimage that spanned centuries. In Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 82 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) Figure 9. Reproduction of Ta Prohm temple, Cambodia Pavilion, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. looking at the political economies of conservation at Angkor today, I have argued elsewhere that a paradigm of world heritage in combination with international tourism sustains these Eurocentric readings of the site and Cambodian history (Winter, 2007). Crucially, it is a narrative that the royal government of Cambodia is at once forced into, yet complicit in upholding. Shanghai Expo offers important insights into some of the reasons why Cambodia continues to invoke the discourses and narratives of nation, history and culture that were formed in the contexts of colonialism. At both the Expo and at home, Cambodia is highly aware of the importance of branding itself for the international tourism industry. For a number of Asian countries, particularly the least developed, inbound tourism has become a major component of their national economies. In the case of Cambodia, as peace and stability returned in the early 1990s after an era of conflict and genocide, the country witnessed a growth in tourism unparalleled anywhere else in recent history. Angkor, its premier attraction, started from a figure of 9000 visitors in 1993 and surged past the million mark less than 10 years later. In the 2000s, with this growth continuing, a distinct change in the nature of inbound tourism occurred. Where previously the country’s arrival statistics were dominated by the nations of France, the United States, UK and Australia, from 2000 onwards there was a dramatic shift towards Asia. In a few short years the key source markets would become Taiwan, China, Thailand and most dramatically Korea (Winter, 2010). From around 2007 onwards, more than 70 per cent of tourist arrivals were from within the Asia region. Its neighbor to the north, Laos, witnessed an almost identical statistical shift. Both countries expect this intra-regional mobility to remain a long-term pattern, primarily because of a rapidly rising outbound Chinese market. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), China is expected to create Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 83 Winter around 100 million outbound tourists by around 2025 (Winter et al., 2009). This figure is even more remarkable considering the Chinese were rarely granted permission to travel overseas until the late 1990s. In such a context Shanghai Expo provided a uniquely important opportunity for countries to entice a vast audience of future travelers. Consequently, tourism played an instrumental role in shaping how countries like Cambodia presented themselves and responded to the theme of ‘Better City, Better Life’. While the ‘division of labor’ Harvey identified for Seville 1992 remains a largely valid observation for Shanghai, in 2010 these categories were more porous, in large part because of the ascendance of ‘heritage’ as a global discourse. For a number of other Asian countries, most notably Japan, Korea, Singapore, Macao and Malaysia, technological achievements were celebrated alongside the ‘unique heritage’, both cultural and natural, of the nation. In the Malaysian pavilion, the central room housed a 25-ft high replica of Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, just meters away from an exhibit on Melaka and Penang, two cities that gained World Heritage status in 2007. Similarly for Singapore, a largely metallic circular pavilion spoke of modernity and future-oriented abstraction. Inside, the theme of ‘Urban Symphony’ drew directly from the Singaporean government’s vocabulary of state-crafting, that of harmony and progress through cultural diversity. More specifically, the inspiration for such a theme was ‘the harmony of unique elements in Singapore: progress and stability, urbanization and greenery, tradition and modernity in a cosmopolitan mix’ (see http://en.expo2010.cn/c/en_gj_tpl_30.htm). In contrast, however, countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam were unable to compete with the modernities of their regional counterparts and essentially oriented themselves to the past. Vietnam, for example, offered a single bamboo-lined hall, whereby visitors passed a series of artifacts, displayed as museum pieces. The centerpiece of the pavilion was a highly colorful water puppet (Figure 10). As a distinctive form of folk art, one that is particular to the north of the country, these puppets were useful in the projection of a unique Vietnamese (communist) identity (Nguyen and Tran, 1992). Troupes have traveled internationally since Doi Moi,5 and today water puppets feature prominently in Hanoi’s tourism industry. Female pavilion staff dressed in the Ao Dai, a traditional garment, widely considered to be a form of national heritage. In the case of India, beyond the central bamboo dome noted earlier, many of the static exhibits focused on the traditional, whether music and its instruments, performance arts and their costumes, or home furnishings and their technologies of manufacturing. The pavilion’s central courtyard was also dominated by a performance space and a series of shops selling handicrafts. Together, these and various other pavilions in Shanghai illustrated how a discursive framework of heritage gave vitality and validity to a wide, yet remarkably familiar range of cultural nationalisms. By embracing what is typically perceived to be a benign arena of public culture, these cultural nationalisms were able to hook onto the now globally roaming, albeit increasingly nebulous, ideas of sustainability and harmony, both of which lie at the heart of the heritage paradigm. Over in Zone C, the situation for Africa was very similar. Algeria and Tunisia were among those that hosted live artisan demonstrations in the ornamental crafts of house and body. The Joint Africa Pavilion, the largest of all the international pavilions housing 42 nations, was highly reminiscent of the African exhibits of Expo ’92. Both featured large bazaars, whereby countries set up market-style stalls. With the prevailing factors Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 84 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) Figure 10. Vietnam Pavilion interior, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. being portability and ‘hand-crafted’ authenticity, items on sale once again took the form of jewelry, wood carvings, paintings or small metal castings. As Harvey (1995: 101) notes for Seville 1992: The difference between the exhibits of the African Plaza and the high-tech displays of Spain and Fujitsu is the difference between shops and spectacle, consuming concrete goods and ephemeral images. There was no hyper-reality in the African plaza, the representational techniques were stunningly literal. It was a contrast that remained present 18 years on. The earnest, literal representations of the developing countries of Africa and Asia lay in stark contrast to the more metaphoric, playful use of heritage by countries like France, Italy, the UK, Denmark or the USA. Pavilion designs for these countries were more abstract, often seeking to communicate a particular idea or message, rather than capture a national ‘style’ of architecture. The ‘Seed Cathedral’ of the UK provided a case in point, a structure comprised of 60,000, 7.5-meter acrylic rods, 890 of which contained seeds collected from different plants (Figure 11). Themed ‘Building on the Past, Shaping our Future’, the concept drew upon a distinct British history of ‘garden squares, public parks, individual gardens, window boxes and allotments’, to encourage visitors to consider the ‘ways in which the future evolution of cities can draw on a deeper understanding of the natural world’ (see http://www.ukshanghaiexpo.com/en/uk_pavilion/pavilion_concept). Elsewhere in the Europe zone, the interiors of France, Spain and Italy selectively deployed well-known consumer brands to communicate a series of ideas and values, such that clothing, cars and other merchandise all conveyed a heritage of style, sophistication and aesthetic sensitivity. Of course, their decision to foreground commercial Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 85 Winter Figure 11. UK Pavilion, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. brands stemmed in part from their desire to penetrate a fast-growing Chinese market in luxury goods. In the case of Africa, however, the discourse of heritage stretched much further back in time. And it was here that we saw the body most explicitly deployed and exposed as a marker of traditional culture. As we know from the writings of Bhabha (1994), McClintock (1995), Spivak (1999) and others, the body was a key cultural space of ‘fixity’ for the ‘ideological construction of otherness’ of colonialism (Bhabha, 2004: 370). In the characterization of this otherness through discourses of primitivism and cannibalism, the colonized subject was placed closer to nature. Moreover, as Anderson (2007) illustrates, a belief in craniological theory in the 18th and 19th centuries enabled black and aboriginal peoples to be designated as pre-cultural, and as such non-human. The legacy of such ideas was apparent in a number of displays in the ‘Joint African Pavilion’ in Shanghai. Together with the Pacific Pavilion, this pavilion was notable as one of the only exhibits to display partially clothed or semi-naked bodies, both male and female. Most remarkable of all was the pavilion’s axial display, which featured a series of ‘African faces’, ranging from 2 to 3.5 meters high. Made from reinforced plaster, the display was designed to resemble a rock face, an effigy of Africans at one with nature. In addition, associations with pre-history were apparent in a scrolling electronic display, along which unfurled the words: ‘African smile: shining from ancient to modern times. Human civilization, radiating from Africa to the world’ (Figure 12). It was also reported that one of these faces, situated opposite the pavilion entrance to greet visitors, was of ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus), a pre-human hominid discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.6 Clearly here we once again see an imagining of a homogenous, timeless Africa, imbued with innocence and immutability; characteristics, that, as Pratt (1992) identified, took central stage in a European colonial narrative. Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 86 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) Figure 12. Joint Africa Pavilion, Shanghai 2010. © Tim Winter. It should be noted here that a number of the smaller national displays were the result of collaborations involving European designers. As Hoffenberg noted for the 19th century, the genre is characterized by a number of ‘cultural agents’ who move between expos. Shanghai drew upon an established international network of designers, architects and consultants, a network that provides world’s fairs with a vital ‘institutional memory’ as the genre moves around the world event by event. To design pavilions, experience and personal connections are critical in the securing of tenders, commissions and contracts. It is a situation that has certainly contributed to the reproduction of particular representations and narratives over the decades (see also Greenhalgh, 2011). Interpreting auto-exoticism The question thus arises of how to critically read and make sense of what was happening in Shanghai. In the broadest terms it is evident that the representational assemblage of heritage can reproduce or perpetuate the narratives and tropes characteristic to an age of European empire. Through its inherent temporalities, heritage in the 21st century creates a chronological ordering of global culture. Those nations that primarily rely on their pasts both position themselves in relation to, and are positioned by, the other of industrialized modernity. In other words, a cultural nationalism principally oriented around the notion of heritage places a country in the less ‘modern’ category in the hierarchy of nations today. More specifically, the examples of Cambodia, India and Thailand, and the Joint African pavilion all illustrate how veritable, yet reductive, re/ presentations of the nation continue to be mobilized through a language of heritage. When architecture, mascots, displays of material culture and live performances ‘that Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 87 Winter typify’ are made to stand as literal metonyms of a country, culture, people and history, absolutist essentialisms inevitably appear. The desire to claim heritage as inalienable, as seen through associations of cultural pasts as distinctly ‘Thai style’ or ‘uniquely Indian’, also serves to reproduce and (re)create reductive, culturally determinist projections of a nation and its people. While such a critique is valid, to merely read the expo in such terms would however miss the forms of agency and sovereignty in play here. In this regard, the work of Partha Chatterjee (1993) is instructive. As part of his account on the emergence of nationalism in Asia and Africa, Chatterjee argues the modern national identity that formed in India was largely based on difference with Europe and the Americas. More specifically, he argues a nationalist imagination, rooted in the domain of the spiritual and traditional, formed in response to the social and material reforms that made up the modernization ideology of colonial rule. For Indian intellectuals, the country’s spiritual and classical past became the apparatus of sovereignty, whereby language, art, literature, religion and architecture were all used to exclude Europeans. Tradition and classical antiquity thus provided the necessary political foundations for constructing a modern Indian nationalism that was distinct, and in large part autonomous, from a more rational, secular European modernity. As Chatterjee (1993: 102) states: For Indian nationalists in the late nineteenth century, the pattern of classical glory, medieval decline, and modern renaissance appeared one that was not only proclaimed by the modern historiography of Europe but also approved for India by at least some sections of European scholarship. What was needed was to claim for the Indian nation the historical agency for completing the project of modernity. To make that claim, ancient India had to become the classical source of Indian modernity. I would suggest Chatterjee’s analysis remains relevant for understanding the theatre of cultural nationalisms that was the Shanghai Expo. Tradition and antiquity, now recast politically through a language of cultural heritage provides countries like Cambodia, India, Kenya and Vietnam with sovereign identities. Indeed, auto-exoticism arises not only because of the political agency it affords, but also because of the ‘competitive advantage’ it offers in the highly lucrative industry of tourism. In the majority of cases tourism relies upon the presence of difference. Not only is the desire to travel across borders typically predicated on the possibility of experiencing difference, countries also have to persuade why they are worthy of attention over their regional counterparts. From the earliest days of leisure travel, one of the easiest ways for countries to proclaim difference has been through their cultural pasts. Tourists have been enticed not just to travel across space, but through time as well. Indeed, in the arena of international tourism the past has become a repository of uniqueness and of the aesthetically and experientially appealing. As David Lowenthal (1985) succinctly put it, we need to see ‘the past as a foreign country’. But more specifically, it has been through such space, time travel that notions of ‘the exotic’ emerge. While this has long been the case, as we have seen above in the ways India and Cambodia were framed as ‘exotic’ in the contexts of colonialism, today the centrality of tourism to the national economies of many developing countries means such cultural representations endure. In the highly competitive arena of today’s Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 88 Journal of Material Culture 18(1) global tourism industry, the most ‘valuable’ asset many developing countries have for attracting their guests is their ‘rich’ or ‘unique’ cultural pasts or sites of natural beauty. In essence, a discourse of heritage is leveraged for those seeking the economic benefits of the Chinese tourist. Crucially, however, it also provides an articulation of sustainability, whereby states suggest that responsible custodianship of the past lies at the heart of their visions for a national future. In other words, by adopting a language of heritage, developing countries fold tradition and traditional culture into a narrative of progress, in much the same way as Chatterjee suggests. But in the early 21st century, in an age of ‘sustainability’, it is a narrative that enables them to proclaim a more enlightened view of modernity and progress, where safeguarding that which is inherited from previous generations is valued as part of a better future, better urban life. Conclusion By considering the Shanghai Expo through an analytical lens of performed cultural nationalisms we see that in a time when political sovereignty is beyond question, questions of cultural sovereignty and enduring colonialities linger in the air. It is evident that traces of the past constitute the present, such that there is a postcolonial persistence of former colonial ideas and practices. The Shanghai Expo brings into sharp focus some of the ways in which, and reasons why, social and cultural continuities continue to envelop nationalisms that are more readily associated with a politics of rupture and discontinuity. In tracing an exhibitionary genealogy for Shanghai, we have also seen that the hierarchies and oppositions that were reconciled in a rhetoric of ‘international community’ or ‘family of nations’ in the 19th century remain largely intact. Today, however, cultural industries, such as heritage and tourism, with all their connotations of sustainability and nature–culture harmonies, are the arenas through which the exotic and traditional continue to be mobilized. But where the primitive and exotic were once offered as the ‘other’ of progress and modernity in the geographies of empire, today they emerge via a form of auto-exoticism. While such a situation on the one hand reproduces a hierarchical ordering of cultures and nations, it has been argued here that auto-exoticism also needs to be seen in terms of the agency and sovereignty it affords and authorizes. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute for their research resources used in preparing this article. I would also like to specially thank Anna Duer for her assistance with the archives, and the reviewers of the Journal of Material Culture, one of whom helped greatly with clarifying details of the Vietnamese Water Puppets. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Notes 1. No official visitor statistics by country were declared. But reports, and accounts in the media both print and television, placed the figure between 97–99 per cent domestic. Recorded Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013 89 Winter 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. observations of arrivals at entrance gates undertaken during onsite fieldwork conducted in June and September also confirmed a 99 per cent figure. 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In: Winter et al. (eds) Asia on Tour: Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism. London: Routledge, 1–17. Author biography Tim Winter is Associate Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. He has published widely on heritage, development, modernity, urban conservation and tourism in Asia. His recent books include Shanghai Expo: An International Forum on the Future of Cities (Routledge, 2013) and The Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia (2012). Downloaded from mcu.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on April 7, 2013