Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris

by Patricia A. Morton

The 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris was a demonstration of French colonial policy, colonial architecture and urban planning, and the scientific and philosophical theories that justified colonialism. The Exposition displayed the people, material culture, raw materials, manufactured goods, and arts of the global colonial empires. Yet the event gave a contradictory message of the colonies as the "Orient"—the site of rampant sensuality, decadence, and irrationality—and as the laboratory of Western rationality. In Hybrid Modernities , Patricia Morton shows how the Exposition failed to keep colonialism's two spheres separate, instead creating hybrids of French and native culture.

At the Exposition, French pavilions demonstrated Europe's sophistication in art deco style, while the colonial pavilions were "authentic" native environments for displaying indigenous peoples and artifacts from the colonies. The authenticity of these pavilions' exteriors was contradicted by vaguely exotic interiors filled with didactic exhibition stands and dioramas. Intended to maintain a segregation of colonized and colonizer, the colonial pavilions instead were mixtures of European and native architecture.

Anticolonial resistance erupted around the Exposition in the form of protests, anticolonial tracts, and a countercolonial exposition produced by the Surrealists. Thus the Exposition occupied a "middle region" of experience where the norms, rules, and systems of French colonialism both emerged and broke down, unsustainable because of their internal contradictions. As Morton shows, the effort to segregate France and her colonies failed, both at the Colonial Exposition and in greater France, because it was constantly undermined by the hybrids that modern colonialism itself produced.

Hardcover

First published April 18, 2000

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well researched and provides lots of helpful information and commentary. The author is also clearly well-versed in theory, but this is not always an asset — sometimes her theoretical constructs, such as "collection" and "collage" add little. Further, the title is a bit of a misnomer: almost none of the book discusses modernity, and though "hybrid" is repeated oft, its connection with modernity is not made explicit. I'm also not entirely convinced by her main premises about hybridity. I'm willing to believe that hybrid culture was developing between France and the colonies, but she seems to assume this is the case rather than providing any evidence of it.