55

The Prison House of Modernism:

Colonial Spaces and the Construction
of the Primitive at the 1931 Paris
Colonial Exposition

Donna V. Jones
modernism

/ modernity

volume fourteen, number

one, pp

5569.

2007 the johns hopkins

The Coloniale Moderne

university press

I am the Empire in its dcadence

watching the tall blond Norsemen march, meanwhile
writing indolently, with a golden style,
acrostics where the sunlights languors dance.1

1931 was a fateful year, for it marked the inauguration of Negritude and the grand opening of lexposition coloniale, Frances
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 nations vast imperial possessions. Full-scale reproductions
of African villages, medina marketplaces of the Maghreb, and
the ruins of Cambodias 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,

Donna V. Jones is an
Assistant Professor of
English at the University
of California, Berkeley.
She is completing a
manuscript entitled
The Promise of European
Decline:Vitalism, Aesthetic
Politics and Race in the
Inter-War Years.

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France held the Maghreb, most of west and central Africa, and had a strategic post in
the continents 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 Angolas 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 Britains 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 Frances 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 future.
The two central exhibits, the reconstruction of the west African fort Djenn (Fig 1.)
and the Cambodian temple Angor Wat provide the most impressive example of the
organizers modernizing impulse. Structures were built significantly larger than their
originals in Asia and Africa, their facades were smoothed and modernized, and the
dimensions of their towers were exaggeratedly angular to imitate the formal excess of

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Fig. 1. Interior of the fort Djenn,

taken from M. Cloche, 60 Aspects

de lexposition coloniale (Paris: Studio Deberny Peignot, 1931).

the cubists. In his work on international exhibitions, Robert Rydell refers to this mode
of trompe loeil as the Coloniale Moderne. After the First World War the aura of
truimphalism which infused the idea of Empire began for the first time to appear as an
anachronism, an idea that had reached its culmination and end; he argues the Coloniale
Moderne was a way to reanimate imperialism by infusing it with the immediacy of the
modern. [The 1931 Colonial Exhibition] was a way of making imperialism seem as
fundamental to modernity as the architectural fantasies of Le Corbusier and Mies van
der Rohe. The public had to be convinced that imperialism provided the bedrock on
which modern times and progress depended (WF, 64). Indeed the modernization of
colonial architecture served to dissolve the incommensurable otherness of the primitive,
enabling the entry of the colonized into the wider human community of le plus Grand
France, a Greater France, organized around a shared aesthetic principle. Rydell
simply reads these exhibitions as somewhat transparent advertisements for the political
and technological aims of the day, in which modernism is reduced to a stylistic means
to garner public support for Western global supremacy. This was of course the explicit
aim of colonial exhibitions and world fairs, but the use of modernist aesthetics implies
more than a proleptic measure to ward against public disinterest in the colonies. The
1931 exhibition also presents us with more recondite questions concerning aesthetics,
politics, and the ideological transformation of modernism itself at the historical conjuncture when the hint of empires long anticipated decline surfaced at its peak.

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Modernism also anticipates the acknowledgment of failure within colonial discourse

and then displaces this anxiety on to the figure of the primitive. In psychoanalysis
and Marxist linguistic theory, displacement has been tied to the tropes of metaphor
and metonymy. Through, for example, the metaphoric displacement of the phobic
object, the subject is able to contain and objectify his or her anxiety. One can speak
of the Other through another more familiar object, dulling its effect and its power,
by equating it with something banal or unthreatening. Nevertheless, to express the
modality of modernism and imperialist aesthetics, it is necessary to introduce the trope
of synecdoche as well. Both France and Africa, colonized and colonial, civilized and
primitive, are demonstrably put via the Colonial Fair into synecdochial relationship
to Greater France, which, more than displaying a simple name change, designates a
totality which possesses a shared world historic, albeit ineffable, quality that suffuses
and constitutes the essential nature of the multiple parts that make it up. What positive
qualities Greater France actually imparts to its members remains opaque and even
vaporous, though the grandeur of the idea itself was meant, as Rydell is correct to underline, to impress and instill loyalty among working-class French and colonized alike.
Nonetheless, the parts of the French Empire were indeed integrated within a whole
that was imagined to be qualitatively different from the sum of the parts and of which
the parts were but microcosmic replications. The colonial exhibition materialized these
synecdochial methods in its representation of Greater France; indeed the culminating
achievement is the integration of that which differs most from the French ideal and the
infusion and domination of its primitive identity by its membership in Greater France.
Primitivism no longer then signified the radical exteriority of modernity. Primitivism
had long been standard fare for modernist art, but it had been, by and large, linked
to a pessimistic narrative of modernity; understood exclusively within the history of
the European avant-garde the primitive marked the limits and failures of modernity,
delimiting that realm of the irrational which modern consciousness could no longer
subsume. The transformative potential of the primitive was thought to inhere in its
intangibility, which bound it to Western aesthetics long held idea of the elusiveness
of the art object itself, its ability to defy both the terror of time through ephemeral
beauty, as well as the hegemony of exchange-value through the art objects uselessness.
As modernity unfolded through violent fits and upheavals, reconfiguring time through
the unreflective destruction of the old, modernism sought a countervailing force in the
timelessness of the Other.
However, by interacting with the architectural aims of imperialism, primitivism was
emptied of its critical orientation towards modernity and instead facilitated the signification of the successful assimilation of the Other. It is through the representation of
Africa as a docile and assimilated Other that modernism redefined and reanimated the
imperialist aesthetic of triumph. In earlier exhibitions Africa was the site of intractable
savagery, unassimilable to the rigors of civil society and incommensurable with the rest
of humanity. For France to laud the culmination of Empire, it had to celebrate the
assimilation of what it considered most to be disparate.

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Fin de Sicle Exhibitions: Spectacle and Violence of Objectification

Naturally, the mode of representations of subject populations was linked to the
historical aims of the imperial nations themselves. While the exhibition of 1931
represented a world unified by the spirit of modernization, earlier exhibitions were
concerned with the violent acquisition of colonies and the extraction of resources.
World Fairs and Colonial Exhibitions reflected attempts of nations to forge a popular
consensus over their priorities and their vision of progress as racial supremacy and
economic growth (WF, 10). They were immense spectacular events that took annual
inventory of the advance of modernity and Western dominance throughout the globe.
At each fair, artifacts from parts of the globe, previously unknown to Europeans, were
brought in, showcased, and exhibited in a manner which mocked and exaggerated the
presumed savagery of the newly colonized. Earlier fairs propagandized the public to
accept extreme violence as the sole and necessary means for the conquest of colonies.
Through representations of violent and dreadful native practices such as cannibalism
and human sacrifice, the exhibitions served to elevate the imperialist wars and battles
from little followed events in distant lands to feats of heroism and the sacred duties of
the civilized West. The caged native warrior, ruthless and fierce, became the metanymic figure for African and Asian peoples who dared resist the violent pacification of
the imperialists. Take for example the Dahomian exhibition at the Paris World Fair of
1889, the same year France began its military campaign to capture this west African
kingdom. The display was among the most popular with visitors, featuring a sacrificial
totemthe tower of Abomey made of roughly hewn wood, caked in blood, and covered
with ornate masks. While the threatening wood masks depicted skulls, signifying the
totems use in ritual sacrifice, what generated the most fascination and outrage were
reports that the blood on the totem, used even in the exhibition, was human. Thus,
overnight the Dahomey exhibit became the symbolic juggernaut that tested the resolve
of the French civilizing mission.
To the French public who attended the exhibition and read the popularized reports of
the nations military campaign, tales of cannibalism and human sacrifice not only marked
the boundaries of the psychic object but also cast the colonized, in this instance Africa,
as the eternally unassimilable Other. The form of exoticism used in the fin de sicle
exhibitions was imbricated with both the historical demands of imperialist primitive
accumulation and Victorian aesthetic conventions that displaced social transgressions
and taboos on to a demonized Other. These exhibitions were constructed with sharp
and clear spatial and architectural boundaries drawn between the civilized and savage.
Technology, monuments, aesthetic and formal experimentation were found exclusively
in the European pavilions which publicly displayed for the first time marvels like the
Eiffel Tower, Art Nouveau, or the Trocedero. The primitive practice, however, served
as more than a metonym for the colonized, for there was a synecdochial relationship to barbarism. By making it the only quality of the Other to be represented, thus
insinuating that it dominated and infused them, the early fairs served to consolidate
the myth of the incommensurability of the colonized. In this way, the colonized were

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cast out of the bonds of a mutual humanity that alone could have deprived the horrific
violence of primitive accumulation of its warrant. It is not my intention to suggest that
this earlier mode of representation was dissipated wholly by modernist style. That they
could coexist, as they did, speaks to the sense that what was always in question was the
human agency of the colonized.

The Pavilions of the 1931 Colonial Exposition

In addition to its use in design, synthesis was meant to embody the high ideals of
Frances overseas policy of assimilation which colonialists felt had finally been realized
in 1931 with the establishment of le plus Grand France. French belle lettres and high
culture had long been in accord with the colonial principles of assimilation. Behind
the duplicitous pronouncements of universal reason, and the universal rights of man
in the colonies, stood the very real colonial policy that sanctioned the obliteration and
suppression of native cultures and the imposition of French language, institutions, and
laws. Senghor sniped: The French wants bread for all, culture for all, liberty for all;
but this liberty, this culture, and this bread will be French. The universalism of this
people is French.6 However, despite the long acceptance for the idea of a Greater
France among the ruling class, many French colonialists felt that the ordinary citizen
was hopelessly cosmopolitan and cared little about the colonies. There was almost the
implication of an aristocratic epistemology, to borrow a concept from Georg Lukcs,
such that only the ruling class could intuit those qualities, which imparted greatness
to each part of the greater French whole. The spectacular construction of the French
empire in miniature placed strategically in the working-class suburbs of Vincennes,
would provide an object lesson to the French people of the realization of a modernist France, a France which had successfully assimilated difference and had drawn
into its rationalized and metropolitan core the enchanting periphery. The Colonial
Minister Paul Reynaud opened the exposition stating that the goal was to give the
French a consciousness of their empire. . . . Each one of us must feel himself a citizen
of the greater France. He urged the French public, from this day on, to think of the
metropole as extending far beyond the boundaries of Paris, encompassing its colonial
possessions: France is an indivisible whole. The old France of Europe and the young
France overseas have grown slowly closer . . . have mixed with each other and have
become inseparable.7 Such was the organizers vision of colonial syntheses, embedded
in the unique form of architectural mtissage each structure bore. The sharp angular
style of lart ngre, which had been condemned a decade before for having corrupted
the aesthetic purity of French modern art, was now the exemplary formal convention
used to represent the idea of the indivisible whole of greater France. Africa, because
it stood as the most distant and barbaric continent in the French imagination, became
the signifier of a successfully assimilated periphery, and its art, as I shall now argue,
became the totem of a totalized vision of modernity.
The pavilion dedicated to the colonial ideal, La Section de Synthse (Fig. 2), narrates best the historical revisions concealed within the veneer of modernist inclusion.

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Fig. 2. Full exterior of La Section de Synthse (Muse de lhomme). Taken from Illustration de lexposition coloniale (Album Hors Srie, Juillet 1931).

La Section de Synthse housed the museum of French colonial history. A long and
intricate stone fresque encases the length of the buildings classical facade, depicting
the people, flora, and fauna of the French possessions, each blending fluidly with the
other. The exhibition catalogue relates the artists intentions to render the harmonious
integration of humanity into the idea of France. The design of the fresque emphasizes
motion; the features, limbs, and details of each nation run uninterrupted into the other,
suspending both uniformity and difference. Each region maintains its distinct nature,
but this heterogeneity is unified in the fluidity and circuitous construction of the fresque. By flanking the sides of the pavilion, the fresque gives the illusion of encircling
the building. The contrasting fluidity of the fresque design encompasses the interior
display of French Imperial history, encasing it, as it were, in a stone rendition of the
Peaceable Kingdom. But the imposition of the Roman columns lining the facade
belies the modernist gesture toward the inclusion and synthesis of disruptive marginal
elements. Superimposed on the designs mutable figures is the grid, organizing the
family of man in an unambiguous racial hierarchy.
The History relayed in the exhibits interior bluntly narrates what the imperial
columns silently suggest. Maps of the globe, marking the French territories, cover the
four immense walls of the exhibit hall. The topological display of Empire in maps, rings
of flags, and statues of victorious soldiers reduce the scale of Greater France to the
level of the visitor. The exhibition catalogue entreats the visitor to enter the pavilion
and wander through the vast scope of French possessions in order to experience it in
its totality. The captions beneath the sterile monuments of colonial victory revise and
suppress the violence and terror that were a vital part of the actual synthesis of the

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colonies. The revised history of the colonial conquest is one of the benevolent encounter
between reason and the irrational.
Tels sont [les] points principaux que dveloppe la Section de Synthse . . . Ce que nous
avons apport tout dabord dans nos possessions, cest la paix. En Afrique du Nord, des
1830, notre expdition touffait ces redoutables foyers de piraterie sems sur toute la cte
algrienne, en Indochine, nous avons libr les peuples de loppression des mandarins et
des pirates, nous avons en Afrique surtout, le plus infortun des continents, on peut le
dire, littralement sauv toute une race voue lextinction.8
[Such are the principle points developed in the Section de Synthse . . . Above all, what
we have brought to our possessions abroad is peace. In Northern Africa, in 1830, our
expedition stifled the dreaded flames of piracy scattered throughout the coast of Algeria,
in Indochina we liberated the people from the oppression of the Mandarins and pirates
and for Africa, the most unfortunate of the continents, we may say that we have literally
saved a race from the verge of extinction.]

In this articulation of the aims of imperialism, synthesis is synonymous with the

task of salvation. In its infinite benevolence France is drawn to the colonies by a
divine calling to set things right. Related in the passage above is the belief that each
of these regions of the world was gripped to various degrees by chaos, disorder, and
brutal mayhem. Bringing these vast and hostile sections of the globe into the sight of
the metropolitan city was not a simple task of pacification; rather it was a managerial
effort in reorganization. The expressed aim of synthesis was to save the colonies from
the chaos that infused and guided their natures, to reform them by bringing them
under universal rule. Synthesis was thus a full-scale effort in classification and colonial
typography, a way of placing the empires possessions in the proper position in a representation of the hierarchy of man. This is illustrated in the passage above in a serial
description of each regions troubled past. Measuring the rest of the globe against
Europe, the description begins with an image of North Africa, plagued by pirates, and
ends with sub-Saharan Africa. As in the earlier exhibitions, Africa marks the limits of
French universalist resolve; it is described as a continent on the verge of extinction,
a measure of that which should be impossible to redeem or recuperate. As the text
goes on to state how the synthesis of Africathe site of what were most contrary to the
professed ideals of France: slavery, despotism, and savagerybecomes an example of
the unquestionable success of the assimilation policy. In speaking about Africa the text
deflects the gross abuse and violence of French colonial history on to native culprits.9
The history of slavery, enforced labor, daily terror and violence, atrocities the French
justified as the necessary means to civilize the savage in Victorian exhibitions, are absent in the 1931 revisions. In their place is a Hobbsian state of violence, violence that
is endemic to the region, an archaic violence that knows no French participants. The
catalogue explains that France has saved the Africans from their own despotic black
sultans, les plus froces ngriers du monde, and has ushered the continent into a state
of peace never known to them until now. The fresques figures of Africans, frozen in
harmonious interaction with the animals and fauna of their environment, speaks in the

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most fantastic image of their peaceful existence within the totality of France. From
the exhibitions emphasis on the ornamental use of the passive African, one can see
how closely colonialist synthesis resembles the structure of aesthetic sublimation; but
unlike classical aesthetics where the union of opposites engender a third, distinct, and
more beautiful form, the colonized are erased in and through sublime representation,
those representational figures signifying absence. Whatever subversive force with
which one may wish to invest these hybrid imageshow after all could one object to
such beautiful depictions?they serve ultimately to empty from these representations those who have been sacrificed for the making of a Greater France, or rather
to confine them impossibly to tyrannically beautiful forms which are emptied of their
historical presence. That which is unspeakable cannot go unsaid without ever more
unspeakable violence.
Other pavilions represented something other than the propangadist transmutation of
imperialism into a Greater France. For example, in the Belgian pavilion, we find complex processes of appropriation and mimicry: on the one hand, the Belgian colonizers
appropriate and deploy fetishized objects of the colonized to signify the omnipotence
and centrality of Belgian rule; on the other hand, the Other is synecdochically defined as
primitivethe artifacts of savage violence and fetishistic practice are used as ontological
representations of the other. Michael Taussig examines this process of appropriation
in the context of mimetic exchange between the colonized and colonizer. Mimesis, he
argues, is not only an attempt to imitate the outside of the Other, it is a method of
usurping its power, of appropriating and reconfiguring its meaning. Although Taussigs
analysis of mimetic exchange concentrates primarily on the ways in which the colonized
use mimesis to negotiate and make sense of Western norms, norms frequently violently
imposed on them, he makes clear that mimesis entails the mutual interpretation of the
images and symbols of cultural difference; for this reason his work is of great use to
the discussion here of the modernist deployment of primitivist style in the pavilions
to signify the consolidation of empire.10 Taussig maintains that both the colonized and
colonizer engage in acts of mimetic exchange in an effort to penetrate and contain the
potency of the Other by mastering the vital elements of their respective symbolic
universes. Mastery in this sense does not imply getting it right, for the mimic does not
flawlessly reproduce the customs of the Other; rather, mastery involves the seizure of
the Others cultural affects such as secret ceremonies or rituals and the redeployment of
these practices for ones own ends. Mimesis, Taussig reminds us, always circulates within
the matrix of colonial power; it is not a free and equal system of exchange, rather it is a
process enmeshed in, and distorted by, the colonial realities of terror and exploitation.
We do not have here Bhabhas hybrid displacing space, developing in free interaction
between the indigenous and colonial culture, much less the undermining of imperialist
authority or authenticity. In a recent review of Taussigs work, however, Michael Baud
mistakenly aligns Taussigs theory of mimesis with Bhabhas rather seamless conception
of hybridization, which Bhabha offers in place of the noisy command of colonialist
authority or the silent repression of native traditions.11 Far from abstracting from the
context of colonial violence, Taussigs prose is replete with experiments to induce in the

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reader the terrors of uncertainty which suffuse the native so as to enable understanding,
however partial, of the context in which the mimesis of the colonizer is carried out;
moreover, Taussig has attempted to induce awareness in Western academics of how
the mental stability with which they attempt their brilliant hermeneutics of the Other
themselves depend on counter-terror against chaos.12
We can see such an act of mimetic containment in the exhibitions Belgian Congo
pavilion (Figs. 3 and 4). As is clear in the picture of the exterior, the Belgian pavilion,
even more than the west African fortress, exhibits the modern primitivist style of the
era. The design emphasis is on the display of tribal fetishes, imposing ceremonial masks
and shields. The catalogue tells us that the pavilion was designed to be both impressive
and picturesque. Evoking the memory of indigenous customs, the villages and battles
between the many tribes, the pavilion combines the representations of the placid
pastoral life and the savage rivalry of tribal warfare.13 The structure is composed of an
immense thatched dome, supported by a ring of rustic columns adorned with masks
and fetish reliefs. We find the more modern interpretation of an African aesthetic,
however, in the pavilion courtyard. In front of the complex of thatched circular buildings, there stands opposite each other two rows of elliptical and yet sharply geometric
shields, each supporting a very tall spear that doubles as a flagpole. With such an array
of flags, spears, and shields at the entrance to the pavilion, the feeling of entering a
national palace or a consulate building is generated.
The history of the Belgians in the Congo is anything but picturesque. Joseph Conrad referred to the Berlin Congress of 1887 as the vilest scramble for loot that ever
disfigured the history of human conscience.14 It was at this congress, called to settle
Europes inter-imperial rivalries, that the gathered states granted King Leopold II
his wish to make Belgium the capital of an immense empire, for which he received
all of central Africa. Commenting on Leopolds designs, one British consul expressed
the wish that territories so immense would, at last, silence the edacious monarch by
choking him.15 But so large an empire did not silence King Leopold, and he went on
to impose a reign of terror in the colony that lasted two decades. The state was set up
as Leopolds personal financial enterprise, abandoning the political and institutional
pretenses employed in the French or British colonies. Leopold had no professed civilizing mission; the mission of the Belgians in the region was to extract as much labor
effort and raw resources as they could, regardless of human cost. Recruiting forced
labor on rubber plantation and mines, the colonizers imposed inhuman quotas on the
workers, cutting off workers hands and feet if they failed to meet their quota. In this
sense the Belgian Congo was a cruder and crueler articulation of the civilizing mission
than the British and French colonial ventures, which coupled violent exploitation with
benevolent institutions. The Congo became synonymous with the excesses and horrors of imperialism. Sartre writes in the colonies the truth stands naked.16 Indeed
the horrors of the exploitation of the industrial working class in the nineteenth century
were magnified tremendously in the colonies in the twentieth. The consumption of
human life approached genocidal proportions.
Yet in the Belgian pavilion the naked truth of the violence of primitive accumulation is concealed and displaced in the monumental reproduction of an African fetish.

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Fig. 3. Interior of Belgian Congo Pavilion taken from

Le livre dor de lexposition coloniale internationale de
Paris 1931 published by Commissariat Gnrel de
lexposition, par la federation Franaise de Anciens

Coloniaux (Paris: Librarie ancienne Honor Champion, 1931).

Fig. 4. Exterior of Belgian Congo Pavilion. Taken from Le Livre dOr de lExposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris 1931.

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Taussig is quite helpful here in understanding the aesthetic repression and deferral of
violence in the colonies. Examining the narratives of primitive accumulation in the coloniestravel reports from the Belgian Congo, the Andes, and Amazon basinTaussig
describes how mimesis functions in these spaces of terror. The colonizer, he argues,
discovers the evil they have imputed to the colonized, and mimic the savagery they have
imputed (SCW, 70). In an effort to stress their absolute difference from the idolater,
the fetishist or savage, the colonizer ascribes supernatural powers to the native, his
land, and culture, the strength of which justify savage means of repression. We find in
the pavilion representation of the artifactual significations of these powers attributed
to the primitive. This is not surprising, for within the lived economy of terror the
cultural affects of the Other take on tremendous symbolic value for the colonized.
Masks, fetishes, and other artifacts function at once as worthless trinkets, the mark of
the colonizeds absolute difference toward the West, and instruments of power, frightening objects deployed by the colonized to counter the colonizers magic. For this
reason they cannot be simply ignored or dismissed as objects that defy symbolization;
in order for the colonizer to declare themselves rulers, the objects of the colonized
must be incorporated into their system of domination. Thus the taking up of African
artifacts as synecdoche to signify the completion of the civilizing mission should not
be understood as a belated gesture of recognition towards the aesthetic worth of African
cultural production; extending Taussigs notion of mimesis here, such gestures as the
appropriation of African architecture should appear to us as controlling actions rather
than an act of belated reconciliation.
The violence of primitive accumulation sets in motion an economy of terror in
which the spirits of the dead and exploited linger in both the landscape and histories
of these frontier societies; the demands for restitution for the wrongs suffered as a
result of the Wests insatiable demand for raw resources make up the subtext of what
is understood as a primitive thematic of haunting and possession. In the hands of
the explorer, the overseer, or European technician, native artifacts become mediating instruments through which the excesses of colonial violence may be indirectly
confronted. Taussig tells the story of Roger Casement, friend of Joseph Conrad and
witness to two particularly vicious colonial campaignsthe establishment of rubber
plantations in both the Belgian Congo and Brazilwho towards the end of his career
began to collect native fetishes ostensibly for his own safety (SCW, 131). Casements
story is but one example of the manner in which native artifacts serve to protect or
shield the colonizers from the repercussions of frontier violence. One might surmise
that Casement used the fetishes to protect himself from what he had become in the
violent frontier. Like the wayward Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Casement understands
himself as having fallen prey to the corrosive effects of his environment. The fetishes
were to ward off further degeneration in spirit that his long stays in the jungle had set
in motion, as well as to protect him from the inevitable retaliation of natives for the
savage deeds of the Europeans.
Casement is an example of an imperialist gone native, mimetically appropriating and internalizing the symbolic values of the Other, but this cycle of appropriation

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signifies neither the openness of the colonizer to the ways of the colonized as some
critics assert, nor is it evidence of the inherent subversiveness of the primitive in the
face of Western efforts of totalization.17 Far from disrupting the modern, the imagined
primitive, especially its supernatural aspects, becomes the license for colonial violence
in its psychic and colonial forms. While the European traffic in things primitive is
enclosed in a peculiar and mystifying dialectic actually brought about by the initial violent encounter between the colonized and colonizer, the natural state of these regions
is one of primeval violence which infects and bewilders all who come into contact with
it. An embodiment of the surreal couplet of violence and desire, Casements story is
one of many representations of the colonial world in terms of its inherent magical real
quality to disturb all notions of unified subjecthood. There is of course the hyperbole
of Conrads Kurtz, reduced to the ambiguity of sado-masochistic horror and unable to
return to reason and by implication, Europe. The grotesque here is less in the colonial
officer or even the narrative, but the Congo itself.
In the Belgian pavilion the savagery of imperialist history is allocated to the masks,
the imposing shields, and spears. This monument which the catalogue explains is
designed in the style of a great African chief, transmits the centralized power of
Leopolds kingdom.18 The civilizing influence, by contrast, resides in the presence of
the Belgian mining societies represented in a panorama circling the pavilions interior.
A contemporary columnist Charles DYdwelle described it thus:
. . . a type of Negro palace, of such a kind that doubtless no Negro king has inhabited, but
it passably recalls, with its domes and its palisades certain sultanates of central Africa. At the
center of the dome of yellow straw matting seems to dominate an illusory city, a city of new
straw matting. The columns are loaded with rustic images of a somber barbarity . . .
We enter on the same floor. From a blue dome, a soft light falls on a blue pavement.
This is the patio around which are grouped galleries and dioramas. Dim light favorable
for study. All along the periphery we discover colossal factories. One sole mining society
employs more than four thousand white agents and thirty thousand black workers.19

Racism makes DYdwelle skeptical that the pavilion represents an actual African palace.
His comment that no Negro king has ever lived in such a structure is informed by
racialist theories of Paul Vidal, the French geographer who created a taxonomy that
equated racial characteristics with the populations respective milieu. Within this theory
reminiscent of Spenglerian morphology, architecture was the externalization of known
racial essence, and since in DYdwelles estimation Africans were at the bottom of this
hierarchy, any structure of that magnitude could not be an accurate representation of
their milieu. For DYdwelle, the pavilion is not sufficiently barbaric, and he makes the
mistake of separating the various styles into their constitutive racial components. He
comments on the Belgians neat and orderly raked white sands; juxtaposing that with
the straw matting, he remarks: this ensemble of savagery and gardening is perhaps a
good enough summary of the Belgian aesthetic in Africa.20 This is only one reason why
DYdwelle misses the point of the pavilion, which is not to render a display of African
power, or even, for that matter the regions vast cultural or aesthetic diversity.

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M O D E R N I S M / modernity

68

What is more interesting are DYdwelles comments on the interior diorama. The tone
of hasty outrage gone from his description, the columnist goes on to detail what he is
most familiar with and what most pleases him about the pavilionthe colossal factory.
Alas, DYdwelles contempt for the ensemble of savagery and gardening unwittingly
reveals to us the pavilions true fetish object, the object within which the energies of
men are transformed and concealed within the thing. For it is only as a contrast to
a fantastic and primitive world that the mining complex can be fetishized as a rational
organization of energy, regardless of who benefits from its wealth or the millions of
human lives which have been consumed in its operation. DYdwelle lapses into the
language of worship and awe. The dim lights of a church, a library, or temple are fitting
and set the mood for the visitor to behold the magnitude of one sole mining company,
the synecdoche that has distilled and now represents the diverse qualities and energies
of four thousand white agents and thirty thousand black workers. The placement
of the factory within the pavilions savage exterior as a civilizing presence actually
speaks more to the ideological fantasy of a disenchanted West than it does a wild and
primeval Africa. The fusing of these two oppositesthe totemic architecture and the
factoryunknowingly expresses an image of the enchanted modern, haunted not by
the savage and subversive culture of the native, but by the suppressed knowledge of
modernitys own fetishistic practices.

Notes
1. Languor in Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine, transl. Martin Sorrell, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13031.
2. For my discussion of the historical significance of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition I am relying
on Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (New York: St. Martin
Press, 1996); Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, LExposition coloniale (Paris: Editions Complexe
Bruxelles, 1991); and P. A Morton, Civilizing Mission of Architecture: The 1931 International Paris
Colonial Exhibition (PhD Dissertation: Princeton University, 1994).
3. Victor Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969).
4. See Aldrich, 263. Despite the many invitations from the French government and Marchal Lyautey
insisting that Britains participation was essential to the exhibitions aims the British declined the offer
citing financial difficulties incurred from their own colonial exhibition in 1924.
5. Robert Rydell, World of Fairs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64. Henceforth
abbreviated WF.
6. Cited in Janet Vaillant, Black French and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 37.
7. Both cited in Vaillaint, Black, French and African, 85.
8. Commissariat Gnral de lExposition par la Fdration Franaise des Anciens Coloniaux, Le
Livre dOr de lExposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris 1931 (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honor
Champion, 1932), 22.
9. See Patricia Leightens essay The White Peril and lart ngre: Picasso, Primitivism and Anticolonialism in Art Bulletin Vol. 72 (December 1990), 60930 on the representation of the French
atrocities in the colonies and the reaction of French avant-garde. The response of the avant-garde
was trapped within the same discursive boundaries of exoticism as the colonizers. In fact their representations of an Africa in need of redemption anticipates the late modernist representations found
in the exhibitions.
10. Micheal Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

jones /

the prison house of modernism

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10. Henceforth abbreviated SCW.

11. Homi K Bhabha, Signs taken for wonders: questions of ambivalence and authority under a
tree outside Delhi, May 1817, Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (1985), 154; see Michel Baud, Imagining the
Other: Michael Taussig on Mimesis, Colonialism, Identity, in Critique of Anthropology, 17:1 (1998),
10312.
12. Michael Taussig, Terror As Usual: Walter Benjamins Theory of History As State of Siege in
The Nervous System (New York: Routledge: 1992), 1136.
13. A. Demaison, Guide officiel de lExposition coloniale internationale (Paris: Kapp, 1931).
14. Joseph Conrad, Geography and Some Explorers in Last Essays, ed. Richard Curle (London:
Dent, 1926).
15. After a brief campaign against the Congo atrocities, in 1908 the Congo was transferred from
King Leopold to the Belgian state.
16. Jean Paul Sartre, Preface to Franz Fanons Wretched of the Earth in Nancy Scheper-Hughes
and Philippe Bourgois, Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 2004),
229.
17. See Maria Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives ( Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990).
18. Demaison, Guide Officiel.
19. In Morton, Civilizing Mission of Architecture, 153.
20. Ibid.

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