"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality": Spain and America at the World's Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876–1915 by M. Elizabeth Boone

Abstract

Reviewed by: "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality": Spain and America at the World's Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876–1915 by M. Elizabeth Boone Alisa Luxenberg M. Elizabeth Boone. "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality": Spain and America at the World's Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876–1915. THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UP, 2020. 272 PP. ART HISTORIAN M. ELIZABETH BOONE TAKES UP Walt Whitman's challenge from his 1883 essay to understand the "Spanish Element in Our Nationality," given that the Spanish monarchy and then the independent republic of Mexico governed significant portions of the future United States into the nineteenth century. Boone's response is a first-rate study of a complex discourse that covers multiple continents and countries, languages, and historical moments while balancing political agendas and aesthetic trends, centers and margins. It participates in a wider critical reexamination of narratives of U.S. history, particularly their pervasive diminishing of Spanish and Latinx contributions, by such scholars as Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) and Mauricio Tenorio Trillo (Historia y celebración: América y sus centenarios, Tusquets, 2010). And in a subtle yet powerful way, Boone recovers for the term "American" its original, broader significance which encompassed all countries on both continents, a reminder that the United States has no exclusive claim to it. In this handsomely produced book, Boone considers the ways in which nations in North and South America and Spain were in dialogue as they constructed their national histories through the cultural production of world's fairs and centennial expositions celebrating the host country's political independence. To that end, she investigates several large-scale expositions between 1876 and 1915 in Philadelphia, Barcelona, Paris, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, San Francisco, and San Diego, through which the hosts controlled opportunities to present a compelling national past and identity to an international public. The American lands had all been subjected to Spanish imperialism; as independent nations, they now acknowledged or suppressed that past, even as they entered into new political and economic relationships with Spain. Spain also affected American national narratives by its decisions concerning participation and representation at the [End Page 143] expositions. Boone identifies and explains how these American nations toggled between acknowledging, resisting, or reinterpreting their relationships with Spanish (and Indigenous) cultures as they constructed their origin stories. Boone's research is interdisciplinary and rich, including deep archival work, sensitive and original readings of visual art and architecture, acknowledgment and questioning of the scholarly literature, and engagement with broader methodological and theoretical concerns. The scholarship on world's fairs and other international expositions has burgeoned over the last four decades across academic disciplines, including art history. National ideologies, particularly of the host nation, have been a central theme of these studies, but what makes Boone's book unusual is its multinational discussion sustained over several fairs, decades, and geographic-cultural environments. Her introduction to the scholarly literature and her methodology makes clear that she wants "to unsettle and reconsider traditional hierarchies and ways of understanding art, identity, and the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (10). While paying close attention to the architecture and the fine art at the fairs, she also integrates into her discussions of national representation a broad variety of visual objects, from a full-scale reproduction of the Liberty Bell covered in oranges (thank you, California) to the colorful posters and commercial photographs that promoted the fairs and provided souvenirs. Drawing on sociologist Paul Connerton (How Societies Remember, Cambridge UP, 1989), who observes that our experience of the present is largely dependent on our representations of the past, which we deploy to legitimize our current social order (8), Boone investigates various spectacles and ritual performances at these international and commemorative fairs well beyond their visual components. She also considers these attempts to manufacture a past through their somatic experiences of consuming foods, listening to music, moving through buildings or along the midway, and interacting with living persons, if only impersonators of other cultures and times. Over five chapters focused on discrete expositions, Boone crafts highly interdisciplinary interpretations of the...