6 research outputs found
Laboratories for global space-time: science-fictionality and the Worldâs Fairs, 1851-1939
This article examines the worldâs fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York Worldâs Fair of 1939, suggesting that these sites are science-fictional spaces that expose their mass audiences to forms of space-time compression that enable early figurations of globalization. Fair sites embody specific forms of economic transfer and exchange that anticipate dreams of the borderless flows of capital in some current versions of globalization theory. This âsfnalâ condition of the worldâs-fair site is not just in the futuristic displays of techno-scientific âprogress,â which became an insistent form of spectacle in the worldâs fair, but also in the spatialization of developmental histories, reading conceptions of modernity remorselessly through hierarchies of racial âprogressâ or spectacles of anachronistic âarrestâ or degenerative âdecline.â Long before the famous Futurama of 1939 New York, worldâs fairs were one of the first spaces in which large populations experienced deliberate and sustained disadjustment in time within a bounded zone, an early sense of immersion in the âscience-fictional.