American Fair Expositions Revisited: Morocco’s Acrobatic Performers between the Industry of Entertainment and the Violence of Racial Display

Abstract

When and why did Moroccan acrobats intervene in the American entertainment show business? Who were these subjects and how did they negotiate their collective identities and individual agencies within the exhibition apparatus? This article discusses the early experience of Moroccan acrobats in American amusement industry and raises issues pertaining to representing cultural otherness through acrobatic performances incorporated in various American entertainment sites of the time. International expositions and various spectacle arenas associated with leisure activities developed discourses on ethnological living exhibits that were reinforced by Orientalist images, which stemmed from a history including the fascination with the exotic and sensual Other. I argue that Moroccan–American artistic encounters through acrobatic performances, which could roughly be located in the first decades of the nineteenth century, are cultural and discursive terrains about identity and difference where modes of representation about Self and Other are negotiated in dialectical ways. My major assumption is that the alternative routes of travel taken by noncanonical voices to the West, namely to America, need to be retracked, documented, translated, and circulated. These voices reorder the archives of history and fill up vacant spaces that official discourses have overlooked. I shed light on the historical context of Moroccan acrobats’ journeys to America; then I reflect on how the economy of pleasure fostered and legitimized discourses of racial violence on the displayed subjects in various performances.