America the Exotic

Abstract

Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. By Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 326 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. By Micaela di Leonardo. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 445 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Observers of American culture have long relished the bizarre, the offbeat, the strange. In the popular and academic imaginations, both people and places may take on the character of the exotic--and no locale has offered both more irresistibly than at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. America's "Cultural Frankenstein," as Robert Rydell has characterized the spectacle, displayed the sorts of attractions that could attract 21 million tourists, and, one hundred years later, the kinds of ironies and tensions that captivate scholars. 1 As the fair's heavily planned and glimmering showpiece, the White City stood in didactic counterdistinction to the "disorganized" chaos of the city surrounding it. If the technological marvels and neoclassical buildings of the White City did not stand apart enough from "ordinary life," then surely the Midway Plaisance achieved that distance. The Midway, whether viewed from atop the Ferris wheel or from the ground next to sideshow barkers and hootchy-cootchy dancers, was designed to both entertain and reinforce Victorian notions of a racial (and gender) hierarchy. Africans, Native Americans, Middle Easterners, Southeast [End Page 168] Asians, Pacific Islanders were placed on display in this exotic space as ethnographic "foreign villages." The Midway's design came via courtesy of Harvard's Peabody Museum, but its commercial success owed more to a San Francisco entrepreneur who became its manager. Even the Women's Building, strategically placed at the very gateway to the Midway, became a liminal space, set apart from the everyday. Rydell puts it this way: "Women, in the eyes of the exposition's male sponsors, came close to slipping into the category of 'otherness' reserved for 'savages' and 'exotics.'" 2 The much-dissected Columbian Exposition holds a unique place in recent Americanist scholarship. 3 In one setting so many issues critical to the politics of culture come to the fore: the relationship between popular culture and the academic community; the means by which heavily classed and gendered notions of race are legitimated in the public sphere; the two-way interaction between representation and its subject, between cultural display and power; and the way in which self is constructed by reflecting an imagined Otherness. It is no wonder, then, that two recent books that are destined to become landmarks in American cultural studies find anchor points in Chicago's great fair of 1893. For Micaela di Leonardo, the tensions between the White City and the Midway serve as a thread that ties together an ambitious and wide-ranging book. Exotics at Home is fundamentally about the "hidden trafficking" between both poles of the fair, between the "often unacknowledged relationship between vulgar popular culture and high scholarship" (21). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is less insistent on the ubiquitous presence of the fair, restricting her discussion largely to one chapter. But, Destination Culture, too, is a deep meditation on the problematic of representation and exoticism that is such a part of the World's Fair--and of modernity at large. Both books demonstrate in vivid detail, and through provocative narrative, the political, economic, and historical grounding of Americans' fascination with the exotic. Those familiar with the recent work of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will recognize several of the essays that comprise Destination Culture. The book's eight chapters each derive from previously published work, a fact that explains some of its heterogeneity: some chapters are long, some short, and at least one found its earlier life as a forward to a colleague's book, while some are rewritten presentations delivered at various symposia. Likewise, some chapters are historical, digging back [End Page 169] into the early nineteenth century, while others are ethnographies and textual analyzes of contemporary cultural productions. Finally, those cultural productions themselves vary tremendously from World's Fairs and Folklife Festivals, to...