Native subjects on display: reviving the colonial exposition in Marcos' Philippines

Abstract

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, 1100 Filipino ‘natives’ were used as human displays to argue for the colonial enterprise in the Philippines. Seventy years later, the Marcos regime staged Kasaysayan ng Lahi (History of the Race), a mass ceremony that reworked the visual, performative and commercial dynamics of the 1904 colonial exposition to promote heritage tourism in the Philippines. While the use of human displays in colonial expositions has been well documented and analyzed as a constitutive element of a Eurocentric ‘exhibitionary complex’, its uptake in developing nations seeking entry into an emergent cultural economy has yet to be explored. This article places critical analyses of colonial expositions, human displays and heritage tourism in productive dialogue, and examines the continuities and discontinuities between the Philippine exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the 1974 staging of Kasaysayan ng Lahi by the Marcos regime. Against established views of ‘staged authenticities’ as either exploitative or socially empowering, this case study advances a more complex framework for critical histories of the exhibitionary complex, and foregrounds the internal contradictions that inhere within the staging of indigenous heritage for purposes of cultural revitalization and economic development.