An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (review)

The rise of cultural studies generally and the study of visual culture in particular has renewed interest in institutions of display, particularly museums and exhibitions. Current studies of exhibitions generally note their role in naturalizing imperial ideology and focus on events in the metropolitan center such as the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, the series of Universal Expositions in Paris, or the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in South Kensington. But as with so many things, exhibition culture was not simply a feature of the colonizing country. It was itself an imperial export. The distinguishing feature of An Empire on Display is that Peter Hoffenberg not only sets English expositions and their colonial displays in a western, international context with a particular eye to events in France and the United States, but gives an account of expositions and their audiences in the colonies themselves.

An Empire on Display has a semi-recursive structure. The stage is set by introductory chapters on "Exhibitions and the New Imperialism," and "The Exhibition Wallahs" (the commissioners and other exhibition bureaucrats). These are followed by chapters that recontextualize major expositions in relation to various topics: the economy of empire, how objects from Australia (the typical settler colony) and India (the typical subject colony) were displayed in English and other western exhibitions; then essays on machinery and technology exhibits in England and the colonies, the experience of visiting exhibitions, and the role of exhibition ceremonies and the presence of royalty and high officials in sustaining the majesty of empire, as in Lord Curzon's Delhi Durbar extravaganza in 1903. These chapters are themselves broken down into subdivisions of varying length, some as short as seven paragraphs. Consequently, the experience of reading the book and examining what Hoffenberg refers to as "case studies" (xxi) is itself a bit like viewing a long series of exhibits.

Given Hoffenberg's intention to interpret exhibitions as social texts that were created to be read by visitors, one might expect an application of contemporary theories of ideology, notions of interpellation and the like, but Hoffenberg has taken a different tack. Invoking reader response and the work of Wolfgang Iser, he argues that the combined experience of the creators and visitors to exhibitions created an interpretive community, with the commissioners in the role of authors and the public as readers creating together the exhibitionary equivalent of a literary tradition. Of the Constance critics, this approach would seem to resonate more with the work of Hans Robert Jauss than of Iser, suggesting as it does the creation of a "horizon of expectations." Jauss's Gadamerian hermeneutics would likewise have insisted on the historicity of both the constructed historical horizon and the contemporary horizon with which it is in implicit dialogue. In practice, however, Hoffenberg assumes the centrality of contemporary postcolonial scholarship and writes a positive history from that perspective. Consequently, the disappearance of Iser, who does not make it out of the preface and is not even indexed, does not really matter.

Because An Empire on Display covers such a range in both time and place, the narrative operates at a rather abstract level supported by instances and a tissue of brief quotations woven into the text. Hoffenberg's generalizations are persuasive, but there are occasional problems when the reader's focus shifts from the macro to the micro level. For example, the synergy Hoffenberg posits between the encouragement and display of traditional crafts in colonial exhibitions, preservation efforts in India, and British preservation movements influenced by advocates of the Gothic like A. N. W. Pugin is persuasive, but reference to "Pugin and his neo-Gothic journal, the Ecclesiologist" assigns the organ of the strictly Anglican Camden Society to a Catholic convert (162). John...