TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 773 on the nickelodeon era of the Northeast industrial and urban area; it focuses attention on the cultural history ofAmerican film as influ enced by issues ofrace and class and shows blacks as actively engaged on a daily basis in the resistance to Jim Crow laws (despite the lack ofblack-articulated primary sources); it stresses the importance (per haps as no other study has attempted before) of race, region, and locality to the study ofthe history ofentertainment and its reception; and it examines “the public dimension of cinematic reception” (p. 259) as a resource, including factors of audience representation, at tempts to regulate and reform entertainment, censorship, and the impact of marketing on local consumers’ reception. Waller has cre ated a new and provocative framework upon which future entertain ment and cultural studies scholars can build and reassess the impact of national marketing on local consumers’ reception as well as the dynamics of that interaction. Joyce L. Broussard Dr. Broussard, a specialist in American history, is the college archivist and head of special collections at Dickinson College, and a professional film editor with many years of experience in the film industry. World ofFairs: The Century-ofProgressExpositions. By Robert W. Rydell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Pp. x+269; illustra tions, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $49.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). With World ofFairs, Robert W. Rydell provides a sequel to, and expands upon ideas he first explored in All the World’s a Fair: Visions ofEmpire at America’s International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). World ofFairs carries the story from the 1920s through the 1950s, though Rydell devotes most atten tion to the expositions that took place during the Great Depression. Together these books offer the fullest treatment available ofAmeri can 19th- and 20th-century international expositions. Rydell’s approach is thematic rather than strictly chronological. His chapters treat the various influences that informed the work of those who organized and developed American expositions. These included the eugenics movement and efforts to promote “racial bet terment”; the “colonial moderne” sensibility that provided a raison d’être for the imperialistic European expositions of the interwar pe riod; the drive for modernity through the agencies of “scientific ide alism,” corporatism, and mass consumerism; and Cold War-era vi sions of the superiority of American free enterprise over Soviet totalitarianism. Terming century-of-progress expositions “theaters ofpower” (p. 11), Rydell also addresses issues ofcultural hegemony, racial discrimination, and sexual exploitation to suggest how the 774 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE fairs became battlegrounds between dominant and subordinate groups. As these themes indicate, Rydell’s concern in World ofFairs is less with the history of American efforts to develop and stage interna tional expositions per se than with the exposition as an ideological construct. “American depression-era fairs represented a drive to modernize America,” Rydell asserts, “by making it an ever more perfect realization of an imperial dream world of abundance, con sumption, and social hierarchy based on the reproduction of ex isting power relations premised on categories of race and gender” (p. 9). The rhetoric he employs to underscore his conception of the international exposition as a construct is laden with technological metaphors or architectural allusions. He refers several times, for ex ample, to the “ideological” or “intellectual scaffolding” ofcenturyof -progress expositions (e.g., pp. 39, 114, 196, 216). He variously characterizes expositions as “exercises in cultural and ideological repair and renewal” (p. 10), as “engines of change” (p. 157), as “footings for the modernistic designs of the world of tomorrow . . . sunk deeply in an ideological cement” (p. 9), and as “blueprints for modernizing the United States” (p. 225). The apotheosis of American exposition planners’ efforts, the U.S. Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium, “was a veritable cultural cyclotron that was constantly bombarding ... audiences with images” (p. 214). Drawing upon an enormous array of sources that range from ar chival materials to photo albums and scrapbooks, Rydell’s study pro vides a number of insights. Among others, his discussions of the de velopment of exhibits on eugenics, of the involvement of scientists in planning exhibitions for the...
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Jan 1, 2010
Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle 
Open Access
