book: Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris

book: Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris | Patricia A. Morton ...

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	• Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris Patricia A. Morton The MIT Press, 2000 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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High Point of the French Colonial Project

The French reconciled the ideals of "Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite" with the harsh reality of colonialism by cloaking their endeavor in the terms of the "Mission Civilisatrice". They believed that through conquest, they were assisting less developed people by exposing them to French Civilization, the highest manefestation of Western Civilization. For this mission to be sucessful, the Governement understood the importance of selling this "noble" idea to the French people. In 1931, the Governement held the International Colonial Exposition in Paris. The Exposition was to be a demonstration of superior French ability in the areas of administration, architecture, urban planning and scientific knowledge. The Exposition was a complete success. During its six month run, over 30 million tickets were sold to the Exposition. This Exposition was the high point of French Colonialism. At the time, nobody knew that within thirty years, the French Colonial Empire would come crashing down.

"Hybrid Modernities" is a well written and lavishly illustrated study of the 1931 Exposition. Patricia Morton masterfully deconstructs the political purpose of the Exposition. With an art historian's careful eye, she shows how the architecture of the individual country pavillions was harnassed to serve the political and economic agenda of the French Government.

There are several target audiences for this book. "Hybrid Modernities" is a must for anyone interested in understanding France's troubled relationship with its colonies. The book will also be of interest to those studying the social history of Paris in the 1930's. Finally, this book will be enjoyed by students of French Art Deco Architecture. "Hybrid Modernities" is a thought provoking and throughly enjoyable read.

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The 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris was a demonstration of French colonial policy, colonial architecture and urban planning, and the scientific and philosophical theories that justified colonialism. The Exposition displayed the people, material culture, raw materials, manufactured goods, and arts of the global colonial empires. Yet the event gave a contradictory message of the colonies as the "Orient"?the site of rampant sensuality, decadence, and irrationality?and as the laboratory of Western rationality. In Hybrid Modernities, Patricia Morton shows how the Exposition failed to keep colonialism's two spheres separate, instead creating hybrids of French and native culture.

At the Exposition, French pavilions demonstrated Europe's sophistication in art deco style, while the colonial pavilions were "authentic" native environments for displaying indigenous peoples and artifacts from the colonies. The authenticity of these pavilions' exteriors was contradicted by vaguely exotic interiors filled with didactic exhibition stands and dioramas. Intended to maintain a segregation of colonized and colonizer, the colonial pavilions instead were mixtures of European and native architecture.

Anticolonial resistance erupted around the Exposition in the form of protests, anticolonial tracts, and a countercolonial exposition produced by the Surrealists. Thus the Exposition occupied a "middle region" of experience where the norms, rules, and systems of French colonialism both emerged and broke down, unsustainable because of their internal contradictions. As Morton shows, the effort to segregate France and her colonies failed, both at the Colonial Exposition and in greater France, because it was constantly undermined by the hybrids that modern colonialism itself produced.

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