Exhibitions and Empire: National Parks and the Performance of Manifest Destiny

Abstract

Introduction For some time before the national parks were established, the nineteenth-century American elite suffered an embarrassment at the lack, when compared to Europe, of national identity based on long and established artistic, architectural, and literary heritage (Runte 11 ). At the same time, however, it was obvious that what America lacked in treasures it more than made up for in wonders. The American landscape became an effective substitute for missing national tradition and repository of national pride. By the mid to late nineteenth century, nationalists saw the western environment, especially places like Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, as unparalleled and they looked to scenery as form of redemption (Runte 7-8, 18, 41 ). This redemption, however, could only be accomplished if parts of the world could be converted into heritage. How was such conversion possible? Only figuratively, of course. That is, this conversion was carried out through the use of number of rhetorical devices that were so effective that their status as rhetoric was forgotten or missed altogether. I am thinking here especially of figures of speech, painterly rhetoric, and museological techniques that allow for the world to be presented as part of national identity. Certain figures of speech turned formations into artifacts. Pictorial rhetoric naturalized historically specific events and social developments. Finally, the use of various museological techniques in the presentation of in parks conflated the spaces of museums with the spaces of parks and produced (and still produce) what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has called the effect that shapes the experience of the park visitor (410). My primary concern in this essay is with the use of various techniques borrowed from painting and museums that are used in the presentation of in the national parks. Using several national parks as examples, I want to suggest that parks are essentially museological institutions, not because they preserve and conserve, but because they employ many of the techniques of display, exhibition, and presentation that have been used by museums to organize and regulate the vision of visitors. The effect is the result of strategy that insinuates the museum into the wilderness and produces so-called vignette of America, furthering the idea that wonders are part of America's heritage (fig. 1). Also useful for the conversion of into heritage is the implicit attitude that nature, especially in the form of the landscape, is already raw material that can be shaped into artifact at will. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, landscape can be understood as symbolic form, i.e., subject matter. can be represented by painting, but at the same time landscape itself could be a physical medium in and through which cultural meanings and values are encoded, no matter if the landscape in question is garden, piece of architecture, or place we call nature (Imperial Landscape 14). Landscape, from Mitchell's view, is always already artificial even in the moment of its beholding, even before it is the subject of painting, photograph, or some other form of representation. A painting of landscape is best understood, then, as representation of something that is already representation in its own right (Mitchell, Imperial Landscape 14). The landscape itself is not only scene, but a representation of scene, trace or icon of in itself, as if were imprinting and encoding its essential structures on our perceptual apparatus (Mitchell, Imperial Landscape 15). What Mitchell calls the semiotic features of landscape are extraordinarily useful for imperialism, creating space for the expansion of civilization, while at the same time making expansion into the landscape natural event (Imperial Landscape 17). …