Published in late 2023, the volume Mapamundis culturales. América Latina y las Exposiciones Universales, 1867-1939 brings together contributions on a wide range of mainly historical and cultural studies on the role of Latin America in the international exhibitions of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. None of these world's fairs (exposiciones universales, Expositions Universelles, Weltausstellungen), which are also classified as such (by the Bureau International des Expositions, BIE [1]), took place in Latin America. Nevertheless, the presentations of Latin American states at such exhibitions in Europe and the USA, transnational and transcultural connections, and pan-American localizations play an important role both for the national-historical self-understanding of these states at the time and for the understanding of transcultural global entanglements that promoted the "culture of world's fairs".

These perspectives represent a desideratum: the analysis of the phenomenon of the World's Fair as a cultural-historical practice has long focused on the metropolitan sites that hosted the events and the aesthetics they strongly influenced. The "peripheral" actors of these exhibition formats, which always wanted to accumulate "the whole world" in one place, had their own agenda of presenting and representing "the national" within the structure of competing colonial powers. In particular, the nation-states of Latin America, which had gained independence from the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal in the first quarter of the 19th century, combined the colonized with the postcolonial perspective. The authors focus on a comprehensive cultural studies perspective on the exhibitions and a very broad understanding of culture appropriate to the subject matter. Thus, they see the aesthetics of the exhibitions with universal aspirations represented in a variety of media: in the architecture of the pavilions, in the exhibited photographs, sculptures, educational materials, display boards, caricatures, and the accompanying press.

For the Spanish-speaking world, the volume summarizes many current approaches, while English-speaking research has focused little on the topic of Latin America. The essays are written by experts, some of whom have already published monographs on the subject and have given important impulses to the research of Latin American perspectives in the "exhibitionary complex" [2] of large international exhibition formats - among them the editors of the volume, Paula Bruno and Sven Schuster.

Thus, Paula Bruno begins with an overview of the current state of research, mostly historical, on Latin American contributions to world expositions as guests and hosts of national expositions, as well as the numerous Centenario celebrations in Latin America (held to mark the centenaries of independence). While this introduction is somewhat general and does not address the specific role of Latin America in the globalized, comparative competition among nations, it is followed by a series of case studies that provide precisely this perspective on the topic in and from Latin America.

These case studies come, for example, from Elisabeth Boone, who has published extensively on the relationship between the former colonial power Spain and the new nation-states of Latin America in the context of world expositions; from Juan David Murillo Sandoval, who shows the exhibition of Latin American printed matter, catalogs, books, magazines, educational materials, maps, and even entire display libraries as part of a Latin American history of the intellect; or from María José Jarrín, who uses the dialogical relationships between France and Ecuador generated by world expositions to show how the exhibitions functioned as "contact zones" (Mary Louise Pratt). [3]

Co-editor Sven Schuster takes a comparative approach to the analysis of Latin American pavilion architecture. Schuster chooses an empirical approach, following the typological classification proposed by Eric Storm in 2021. [4] Unfortunately, neither Storm nor Schuster have undertaken an architectural-historical investigation, nor have they provided clear criteria for assigning certain buildings to only four architectural types.

His co-editor Paula Bruno examines the specific reception of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by Spanish-speaking visitors. The perspective of "figuras de la vida letrada hispanohablante" once again shifts the focus from the exhibition of Latin American artifacts and folkloric performances to the visitor's perspective and a level of reflection.

Alejandra Uslenghi follows this up with a look at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the reflections of Latin American modernist writers. She also considers the changing culture of perception promoted by the exhibitions, which followed technological developments such as the trottoir roulant (1900) or early cinema.

Georgina G. Gluzman details the ways in which Argentine women were protagonists at the 1929 Exposición Iberoamericana in Seville. Carla Lois, who works in the fields of cultural studies and geography, examines the presentation strategies and spatial organization of world expositions through the examples of Chicago (1893), Paris (1900), and New York (1939). She emphasizes the importance of the spatial configuration of pavilions, exhibition buildings, monuments, and infrastructures - which often persisted in the cityscape of the host cities beyond the temporary exhibition. Thus, she understands exhibitions not only as a collection of various exhibits, but rather the exhibition itself as a classification and ordering system for objects, things, and imaginaries.

Finally, Sven Schuster summarizes the specifically Latin American perspective on the research of world expositions and provides a detailed overview of the current state of research. When he states that the great research interest of the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the analysis of individual exhibitions, shows "signos de desgaste" (signs of fatigue, 287) and that exhibition studies have also declined sharply with the loss of relevance of the exhibition format itself, this book is the telling proof to the contrary. It is precisely the analysis of the larger contexts of the exhibitions, their perspective from the postcolonial states of Latin America, as well as their careful positioning in spatial and temporal contexts that is the great merit of the volume.

For the majority of the contributions, it should be noted that they are largely empirical and quantitative; the overview of aspects of Latin America's role in the phenomenon and "medium" (Alexander Geppert) [5] of the World's Fair provides important basic research. The specific historical-political-social contextualization is also fundamental and offers starting points for many further analyses of specific case studies. The volume does not offer a perspective oriented toward aesthetics and visual cultures or the World's Fair principle of synaesthetic appeal. Although some contributions come from art and visual history, it is unfortunate that most of the contributions use historical visual material only for illustration, but not for image analysis and the resulting aesthetic and artistic discourses on self-representations and representations of others.

The volume brings together Latin American and Spanish-speaking research with research from North America and Europe, most of which is conducted and published in English and French. It is a great achievement of this publication to merge the different strands of research and academic cultures and make them mutually accessible. The publication in Spanish is also essential for a decentralization of research on world expositions towards the "peripheries" of historical expositions, and thus also for a shift of reading and interpretive sovereignty from the metropolises to the sites of diverse processes of modernization outside these metropolises which define what is to be seen.

It is precisely the emphasis on reciprocal, interwoven, and transversal histories of exchange through the world's fairs and the case studies focused on in this volume that multiply the discourse on exhibiting "the whole world".

Notes:

[1] https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/expo-index

[2] Tony Bennett: The Exhibitionary Complex, in: new formations 4 (spring 1988).

[3] Mary Louise Pratt: Imperial Eyes - Travel Writing ans Transculturation, London 1992.

[4] Eric Storm: The Transnational Construction of National Identities: A Classification of National Pavilions at World Fairs, in: World Fairs and International Exhibitions: National Self-profiling in an Internationalist Context, 1851-1940, ed. by Joep Leerssen / Eric Storm, Leiden 2021, 53-83.

[5] Alexander Geppert: Welttheater. Die Geschichte des europäischen Ausstellungswesens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ein Forschungsbericht, in: NPL (2002), 10-61, 10.

Miriam Oesterreich