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MICHELE WALLACE 14 The Imperial Gaze Venus Hottentot, Human Display, and World’s Fairs Few pastimes are more amusing than looking at other people. A study of visitor behavior in public parks shows that people spend more time looking at each other than at the beauties of nature. If the people observed differ in some striking fashion from the observer, interest is further stimulated. For centuries, entrepreneurs and showmen have been charging admission to see human oddities. —Burton Benedict, “Rituals of Representation” In his important article, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity ,” Stuart Hall makes some significant points regarding the usefulness of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to any discussion of popular culture. Gramsci defined cultural hegemony, as opposed to the coercive forces of outright domination, as “a very particular, historically specific, and temporary ‘moment’ in the life of a society. It is rare for this degree of unity to be achieved. . . . Such periods of ‘settlement’ are unlikely to persist forever. There is nothing automatic about them. They have to be actively constructed and positively maintained.”1 From his prison cell in Italy in the thirties, Gramsci noted the difficulty of translating a revolutionary strategy that produced success in pre-industrial Russia to the more complicated and variegated conditions of post–World War I Europe. Pre-revolutionary Russia, with its long-delayed modernization, its swollen state apparatus and bureaucracy , its relatively undeveloped civil society and low level of capitalist development, was a much more conducive environment for sparking a government-toppling insurrection than was the industrialized West, with its mass democratic forms and its complex civil societies. In the West, the hegemony of the state is consolidated on a more consensual basis through political democracy. As Hall writes, in such cases “the State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks, more or less numerous from one state to another. . . .” In other words, in a non-coercive society, cultural hegemony by the dominant group is not so much an imposition of the values of the ruling class on distinctly different and oppositional values, but rather a fragile and symbiotic process of consensus building. Ironically, these more fragile conditions make the state more resilient and cultural hegemony much more difficult to subvert. In this situation, hegemony becomes “multi-dimensional”—sustained on multiple fronts simultaneously. “Mastery is not simply imposed or dominative in character, and results from winning a great deal of popular consent. Thus it has substantial moral and political authority.”2 150 Michele Wallace In the context of tracking a genealogy of a race/gender visual at the turn of the century , we need to understand hegemony as a subtle and flexible construction, composed of multiple dialogical currents. Those currents might be viewed concretely as specific pragmatic positions, such as pro- and anti-women’s suffrage, anti- and pro-imperialism, pro-nativism and anti-immigration, anti-segregation and lynching versus pro-white supremacy. Or, these currents may be viewed more abstractly, in Foucauldian terms of modern modalities of power/knowledge. Turn of the (twentieth) century racialism is better understood in the terms of its own time than in our context—though such an understanding is, of course, nearly impossible to achieve. One way to go about our efforts to achieve this understanding of turn of the century racialism’s particular hegemony is through a closer examination of its popular forms. One of the most significant of these popular forms, now all but lost, was human display. Instances of human display ranged from world’s fairs and expositions, which were the rage all over the world around the turn of the century, to circuses and freak shows, to ethnographic expositions and life groups in natural history museums, to the staged events of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and other such ventures in performance and entertainment. Human display is a crucial feature of the particular discursive regime of black visual culture herein described. Its race/gender visual circulated internationally, in significant part through the circuitry of world’s fairs. The world’s fair appears to have been the primary mediator of Western modernity’s confrontation with the non-Western world at the turn of the century. To consider world’s fairs solely within an American context is to distort the ultimately international and global aspirations of the form. A parallel and overlapping occurrence to Orientalism, such mechanisms of racial hierarchy were an intrinsically international discursive regime, a discourse...

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