The Prison House of Modernism: Colonial Spaces and the Construction of the Primitive at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition

The Coloniale Moderne

I am the Empire in its décadence
watching the tall blond Norsemen march, meanwhile
writing indolently, with a golden style,
acrostics where the sunlight's languors dance.¹

1931 was a fateful year, for it marked the inauguration of Negritude and the grand opening of l'exposition coloniale, France's spectacular display of imperial might and demonstration of the success of its global mission civilisatrice. In the suburb of Vincennes, the French could encounter a grand and detailed simulation of the nation's vast imperial possessions. Full-scale reproductions of African villages, medina marketplaces of the Maghreb, and the ruins of Cambodia's Angor Wat were all erected and placed along the Parisian city limits.² The exhibition was composed of hundreds of ornate pavilions, which were to represent European colonial outposts the world over, featuring the French possessions with monuments to great colonial battles and exotic architecture from the colonies.

In 1931 the French Empire was at its zenith. Next to Great Britain, France was the second largest imperial power at the time with a significant presence on virtually every continent. In Africa, France held the Maghreb, most of west and central Africa, and had a strategic post in the continent's eastern coastal region with Djibouti and French Somalia. France was second to Great Britain in the Middle East and the Caribbean, and rivaled Great Britain in Asia with its possession of Indochina and much of the Pacific Islands. Colonialism appeared universal at this point in history, the vast territories of the world had been divided and apportioned among "the lords of human kind."³

Although the primary purpose of the exhibition of 1931 was to demonstrate for the world the extent of French imperialism, the fair also advanced the goals of European expansion and the ideals of colonialism in general. Thus, the planners felt it essential that each European nation that had ever held colonies, no matter how minor, participated in the exhibition by constructing a pavilion. The Portuguese designed an immense pavilion to reflect the architecture of Angola's expired Kongo kingdom; the Belgians erected a mock central African village as their entry; and the Dutch modeled theirs on ornate Javanese stilt houses. The United States also fitted comfortably among the imperial powers and offered exhibitions on Alaska, Hawaii, the Panama Canal, and the Philippines. Denmark placed the igloos and, perversely enough, the Inuit of Greenland themselves on display and Italy reconstructed a Roman basilica from Libya. Only Britain, the one nation that surpassed the French in colonial domination, did not participate in the exhibition.⁴ Although Britain's absence was a noticeable loss, the exhibition was determined, nonetheless, toward a show of completion through the reconstruction of what may be perhaps one of the first ideological attempts to advance the notion of a "global village." Colonialism, the propaganda boasted, had united the world, spreading the modern advances of the metropolis in its path. The 1931 exposition was thus the realization of both the colonial ideal and the idealization of modernity, representing at once the culmination of imperialist expansion at its apogee and its moment of impending decline.

It comes as little surprise then that France's final display of colonial omnipotence would implement architectural aesthetics that simultaneously conveyed the imperialist triumphalism of the civilizing mission and the pessimistic self-reflexivity of modernism. Unlike earlier exhibitions which had amplified the cultural and material differences between the colonized and Europe through spectacular displays of "acts of savagery," the planners of the 1931 colonial exhibition, although no less exoticist, made use of the principle of "synthesis." Gone were the collections of crude huts and lean-tos that had comprised the "native" sections of previous fairs; in their place were towering modern primitivist pavilions. Organizers proclaimed: "[The pavilions] are the architectural resume of the exotic world."⁵ In designing these constructions, exhibition architects were to incorporate somehow the union of opposites in their final structures: the primitive and the modern, the material and the cultural, the past and the...