Telling a Spatial History of the Columbian Exposition of 1893

Telling a Spatial History of the Columbian Exposition of 18931 ROSEMARI E K. BANK In its scope and magnificence the Expositionstands a/one. T.here is nothing like it in all history. Congressional Committee Report, 20 May 1892 (qld. in Burg 75) The heterotopia is capable ofjuxtaposing ;11 a single real place several spaces, several sites ,hal are in themselves incompatible. Foucault, "orOther Spaces"(25) Although there are as many ways to write spatial discourse as there are scholars to do the writing, spatial historiography (as I understand it) involves a spatial critique of epistemology and ideology. The ideological critique centers on enfranchisement, chiefly opening the record in teffils of race, class, and gender , but also opening it to other areas of history (to include popular theatre, museum studies, or anthropology in a theatre history, for example). The ideological move is sometimes made, however, without mounting an epistemological critique of the temporal (by which is meant linear, causal, and progressive) arrangement of the historical record, an ideological change of the players, as it were, without an accompanying epistemological change in the rules of the game. Theatre historical studies adds the further problems of real versus simulated, of present and represented, of true and false, of. aesthetic timespace and actual timespace, and a host of other issues arising from the nature of perfonnance.2 Historiographies centering on space as an activity, practice, process, or product usefully address the mUltiple spaces theatre culture occupies, but no historiographer has done so more profoundly than Michel Foucault. At stake in his work is not just an argument against what Joseph Roach has identified as the vulgar positivism that insists "that facts can remain neutral" (294) or Modern Drama, 47:3 (Fall 2004) 349 350 ROSEMARIE K. BANK what Giorgio Agamben scorns in understanding time as a "precise and homogeneous continuum" of instants (91) but the displacement of a thing or eventoriented history in favor of Foucault's view that "we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. [...] [W]e live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one anolher and absolutely not superimposable on one another" ("Of Other Spaces" 23). It is a view that reflects the quantum-relative take on simultaneous universes, captured in Einstein's observation that "time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live" (qtd. in Forsee 81), a simultaneity capable of revealing (theatre) historical relationships in a spatial way, since, as Stanley Aronowitz has observed, "relations, not things, [are] the true object of inquiry" (250; emphasis in original).3 Rather than pursue a history of spatial historiography, this essay seeks to demonstrate a spatial approach at work in an historic matrix - specifically, the siting of performances by American Indians at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago from I May to 30 October 1893. This matrix should be understood as three relaied sites. The first two are the Midway and the Columbian fairgrounds on Chicago's south side, between 56th Street on the north and 67th Street on the south, Stony Island Avenue on the west and Lake Michigan on the east; in all, about 633 acres. Those acres included the eighty-acre Midway Plaisance, which abutted Stony Island between 59th and 60th Streets and extended westward some twelve blocks to ·Cottage Grove Avenue. The third site in this matrix, stapled to the western border of the fairgrounds along Stony Island Avenue between 62nd and 63rd Streets and west to the JIlinois Central Railroad tracks, consisted of the fourteen acres leased by Buffalo Bill's Wild West, comprising a seven-and-a-half acre horseshoe-shaped arena, with covered grandstand and an encircling campground, that was horne to most of William F. Cody's four-hundred-some performers and two-hundred support personnel.4 I have discussed elsewhere the larger spatial issues associated with Indians and these sites - race hierarchies, nationalism, and the museumization of cultures (see Bank, "Representing History"). Though these matters support the present discussion, this essay focuses upon examining the historical relationships among the Columbian sites in a spatial way, using Foucault's idea...