ABSTRACT
It was 1931, the year of the Colonial Exposition. Paris inaugurated l’Exposition Coloniale et Internationale in the Bois de Vincennes. With its display of colonial paraphernalia, exotic foods and perfumes, raw materials, and hand-made artifacts, and its pavilions of religious missions and the imposing reconstructions of Cambodian temples, the human zoos, and the circular train carrying visitors around, the exhibit intended to testify the grandeur of the colonial enterprise, celebrating its accomplishments and potentials and boasting of its civilizing function. The setting was designed to enhance the visitors’ privileged panoptical stance, to allow them to enjoy a kaleidoscope of exotic difference without being contaminated by it: the “authentic” experience of the colonized, his/her “real” presence, but seemingly ages behind the colonizer’s fellow citizens, constituted one of the main attractions of the exposition.1 That no such stable, fi xed, unassailably separate identities could exist has been amply demonstrated by later cultural criticism. That the exhibition’s claims hid the inherent iniquity and degenerations of colonialism was evident to few contemporary opponents.
