Decolonizing the Color-Line: A Topological Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois's Infographics for the 1900 Paris Exposition

As infographics are implicated in racist policies like redlining, we need to decolonize the genre. But previous studies have found that infographics’ panopticism—their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues—makes them tend to support hegemonic power structures in spite of their designers’ intentions. A way out of this dilemma can be located in the first attempt to decolonize the infographic: W.E.B. Du Bois's series depicting Black life in the United States, created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This topological analysis of Du Bois's decolonial project reveals both problematic and promising avenues for our own attempts to decolonize the infographic.

‘Un'arte ancora in embrione’: international expositions, empire, and the evolution of Fascist architectural design

This article reconsiders the development of Fascist architecture throughout the late interwar period. It pays especial attention to the structures erected for the most significant international expositions held, or planned to be held, between 1933 and 1942, in order to identify significant trends in Party-sponsored design. It argues that the ‘dynamism’ of Fascist design was a consequence of the regime's preference for an increasingly imperial tone which developed in direct proportion to its increasingly imperial identity. It points to Piacentini and Pagano's Italian Pavilion built for the 1937 Paris Exposition, the first national pavilion constructed following the May 1936 proclamation of empire, as a significant flashpoint in the tension between Fascist interpretations of modern and classical design. This article concludes that the often-overlooked world's fair buildings can be viewed as crystalline distillations of the stylistic experimentation which defined the broader Fascist building programme both in Italy and abroad.

Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

Animating Antiquity in the Vision animée

In 1900, the soprano Jeanne Hatto recorded a scene from Gluck's 1779 opera Iphigénie en Tauride for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, an exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle that screened silent films manually synchronised with cylinder recordings. Recently restored and digitised by the Cinémathèque Française and the Gaumont Pathé Archives, Hatto's film affords us a glimpse into the revitalising force ascribed to female performers around the turn of the century: the ability to bring ancient statues – and antiquity itself – to life through physical movement. Through their embodiment of ancient Greek figures on stage and in visions animées, prima donnas laid claim to a form of corporeal authority that had all but disappeared from the French stage over the preceding century.

Hamlet

This chapter examines Sarah Bernhardt's appearance in the 1900 short film Hamlet. Part of Paul Decauville's program for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre at the Paris Exposition, Bernhardt's film featured the fencing scene of Hamlet. She had played (and toured) Hamlet successfully on the live stage the previous year. In this way, the film pointed backward just as it pointed forward, to a known theatrical show and to invention, to mechanical mediations that brought with them new ways of presenting and promoting theater. This chapter considers how live musicians, the phonograph, and hand-colored film contributed to Decauville's initiative and hence to Hamlet. It argues that Bernhardt's short film was a calculated response to the new media and to its possible future. Bernhardt did not just adapt her stage work for the screen; she was a savvy businesswoman aware that cinematized theater could attract new audiences to her.

Powderly Will Go to Paris: The Paris Exposition 1889 and the Knights of Labor

This article deals with one of the many neglected chapters of the global history of the Knights of Labor: the events that led the Knights to participate in one of the great international events of the age, the Paris Exposition of 1889, and their attempts to found their assemblies, as they called their branches, on French soil. Drawing on voluminous correspondence between the leaders of the Knights of Labor and their enthusiasts in France, and on the Order's own journal and the proceedings of its conventions, this article analyzes the reasons why the Knights failed to capitalize on their participation in the Exposition, illustrates many of the failings of leadership and organization that afflicted the Order both at home and abroad, and demonstrates some of the problems and potential solutions that faced French labor activists at the end of the nineteenth century.