When
Frontier of Modernity: Exhibiting Latin American Nature at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs
Join CAPLA for Visions of Latin America at 19th Century World's Fairs presented by Sven Schuster, part of a lecture series by ISIE. All Speaker Series events are free, open to the public, and held on Zoom!
This talk examines how Latin American republics used nineteenth-century world's fairs (1851-1900) to transform nature into a visual, scientific, and political language of modernity. Because their economies depended heavily on agricultural and mineral exports, countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, and Costa Rica presented forests, minerals, agricultural products, tropical plants, and livestock as evidence of national progress, scientific competence, and economic potential.
Drawing on the concepts of the nationalization of nature and naturalistic nationalism, two complementary strategies are identified. First, natural resources were commodified and exhibited as rationally ordered objects of extraction, investment, and international trade. Second, landscapes, tropical abundance, and idealized indigenous figures were mobilized as distinctive symbols of national identity and historical authenticity. Photography, cartography, scientific classification, landscape painting, and spectacular exhibition architecture played a crucial role in producing these representations. Yet the apparent harmony between nature and modernity concealed the coercive labor regimes, land dispossession, racial hierarchies, and environmental transformations underpinning export-led development. World's fairs thus functioned as laboratories of national self-fashioning, where Latin American elites negotiated their position within global capitalism by presenting nature simultaneously as resource, spectacle, scientific object, and foundation of modern nationhood.
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