Abstract
This article proposes that Madrid’s Philippine Exhibition of 1887 should be read as a site of imperial consciousness that narrativized the waning Spanish Empire and where visitors were interpellated to perform empire. It also argues that the Exhibition was a complex cultural artefact which revealed the contradictory colonial discourses that intersected in it. The essay explores the Exhibition project as an attempt to modernize the antiquated colonial relations between Spain and her overseas colony by bringing knowledge of the colony to the metropole. The Exhibition’s celebration of knowledge about the archipelago is discussed with particular regard to the paradoxes inherent in the ethnographic display of ‘native’ peoples.
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