World’s Fairs Are Worth Remembering

On May 1, 2015, the Milan World Expo threw open its gates. On the same day, in the streets of Milan, anti-globalization protestors engaged in violent clashes with police to protest this most recent iteration of the world’s fair medium. On the basis of this information, two points should be immediately clear. First, world’s fairs, now officially called world expos, still exist; indeed, they are being planned into the next decade.Second, as the protests in Milan indicate, world’s fairs still matter in the twenty-first century, not only to their organizers, but for people who disagree with their political, economic, and cultural agendas.

From their advent in 1851 with London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (better known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition), world’s fairs, through their spectacular exhibits of technology and the arts, not to mention their innovations in entertainment, have attracted mass audiences and also occasioned protests – and in at least one instance, in the case of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition – a counter fair dedicated to opposing imperialism. All of this is simply to say that it is important to understand that world’s fairs have taken place in particular historical contexts that have both shaped these events and been shaped by them. This is what makes world’s fairs so valuable for thinking about the past, present, and future. They are mirrors of society as well as blueprints for the future, sometimes best described with mixed metaphors (like the ones I have just used) and the language of paradox. Pope Francis, for instance, when he delivered an address opening the Milan Expo, described it as a “paradox of abundance” and worried aloud about its emphasis on global consumerism. Yet, the Vatican established a pavilion at the fair. Always filled with paradoxes and contradictions, fairs have nonetheless been centers of political, cultural, and economic gravity. They have been key institutions that have given form (think, for instance, of architecture and building materials) and substance (think, for instance, of museums and zippers) to the modern world. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to claim to that, since the first world’s fair in London, these spectacles have fashioned the way hundreds of people have seen the world and thought of themselves as actors in it.

This assertion about the importance of world’s fairs is not universally shared. Indeed, especially in the United States, world’s fairs seem like a dim memory. The last such event took place in New Orleans in 1984 and was, to be charitable, less than successful. Chicago tried, but failed, to organize a fair in 1992 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the New World (as well the centenary of the World’s Columbian Exposition). Then, in 2001, citing costs and declining interest in world’s fairs, the US withdrew from the international protocols that regulate these events. World’s fairs, from an American perspective, seemed “like totally yesterday” – to quote one of my students after hearing me wax eloquent about these events and their significance.