Alvaro Fernández Bravo Ambivalent Argentina: Nationalism, Exoticism, and Latin Americanism at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition
Abstract: Universal Expositions played a key role in the definition of cultural patrimonies for Latin American nations. As an antecedent of globalization, world’s fairs demanded that every country present a national iconography and this accelerated the formation of cultural capital for new nations. Fernández Bravo’s essay focuses on the 1889 Paris Exposition, discussing in particular the monuments of the Argentine pavilion and documents that treat its symbolic configuration and setting. He argues that in the struggle to establish national and regional identities there was a nationalization of nature in which representation was bound to natural products, converted into commodities that soon became the most visible image of Latin America. But each national narrative built specific features to be imagined, debated, and assembled for the event. Argentina’s delegation intended to distance itself from the rest of Latin America, styling the nation as fundamentally European. Ironically, when the country had to choose commodities to represent itself it relied on raw materials, just as its Latin American neighbors did.
Alvaro Fernández Bravo is professor of literature at the Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina. He is the author of Literatura y frontera: Procesos de territorialización en las culturas argentina y chilena del siglo XIX (1999) and editor of Escritos modernistas: Antología de poesía y prosa (1999) and La invención de la nación: Lecturas de la identidad de Herder a Homi Bhabha (2000). He is currently working on a research project, "Formación de patrimonios culturales: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, 1880–1930."
History of International Exhibitions, 1851-1951:A New Web Resource


by

Alexander C.T. Geppert (European University Institute, Florence)
and
Tammy Lau (California State University, Fresno)


Alexander C.T. Geppert (European University Institute, Florence)
and
Tammy Lau (California State University, Fresno)

In recent years, both the alleged globalization avant la lettre and the anticipation of contemporary visual-virtual worlds in nuce which can be observed here, has led to increased historiographical interest in the history of international exhibitions and world’s fairs. These “spaces of modernity” are indeed now widely regarded as a central feature of Western cultural history whose popular impact was anything but ephemeral. As a consequence, the field has grown tremendously and now involves disciplines as diverse as History, Cultural Geography, Urban Studies, Art History and the History of Architecture, among others.[1] This development, however, has made it increasingly difficult to locate appropriate research sources. To aid in that process, early this February, “International Exhibitions, Expositions Universelles and World’s Fairs, 1851-1951: A Bibliography” was officially launched. It is accessible on the Internet at the “Theory of Architecture” web site of Brandenburgische Technische Universität in Cottbus, Germany as part of their journal Wolkenkuckucksheim: Internationale Zeitsch