Power and identity: the exhibition of human beings in the Portuguese great exhibitions

Abstract

This article reflects on the inclusion of human beings in the colonial representations of the great exhibitions that Portugal organised or took part in during the first half of the twentieth century. It analyses the role played by the natives (from the Portuguese colonies), as well as the way they were represented and treated, based on various documents and interviews and on the study of the exhibition creation process. These exhibitions revealed some underlying tensions. On the one hand, they provided evidence of the differences between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘uncivilised’, of the diversity of ‘races’ and of their places in a hierarchy of civilisation. On the other, they extolled the way colonised peoples adopted Portuguese models. The ways those human beings have asserted their existence, under the power of the exhibition’s organisers, provides a means to understand how they forged and assumed their identities in a context of rules.

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