Article ID: CBB001320024

Laboratories for Global Space-Time: Science-Fictionality and the World's Fairs, 1851--1939 (2012)

unapi

This article examines the world's fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York World's 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 sfnal condition of the world's-fair site is not just in the futuristic displays of techno-scientific progress, which became an insistent form of spectacle in the world's fair, but also in the spatialization of developmental histories, reading conceptions of modernity remorselessly through hierarchies of racial progress or spectacles of anachronistic arrest or degenerative decline. Long before the famous Futurama of 1939 New York, world's 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 science-fictional.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001320024/

Similar Citations

Chapter Syon, Guillaume de; (2014)
Meeting Artificial Cold: Expositions and Refrigeration, 1896--1937

Book Joshua Nall; (2019)
News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910

Chapter Männistö-Funk, Tiina; (2008)
The Body of a Real Woman: Medicine in the Young Women's Guidebooks Published in Finland, 1890--1923

Article Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette; (2013)
Popular Science and Politics in Interwar France

Book Ganz, Cheryl; (2008)
The 1933 Chicago World's Fair: A Century of Progress

Article Projit Bihari Mukharji; (2019)
Hylozoic Anticolonialism: Archaic Modernity, Internationalism, and Electromagnetism in British Bengal, 1909–1940

Book Young, Paul; (2009)
Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order

Book Krome, Frederic James; (2012)
Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914--1945

Article Schwartz, Matthias; (2013)
How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism

Book Colavito, Jason; (2005)
The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture

Article Drown, Eric; (2006)
“A Finer and Fairer Future”: Commodifying Wage Earners in American Pulp Science Fiction

Book Cheng, John; (2012)
Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

Thesis Drown, Eric Miles; (2001)
Usable Futures, Disposable Paper: Popular Science, Pulp Science Fiction and Modernizaton in America, 1908--1937

Book Curtis M. Hinsley; David R. Wilcox; (2016)
Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World's Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology

Article Nieto-Galan, Agustí; (2012)
Scientific “Marvels” in the Public Sphere: Barcelona and Its 1888 International Exhibition

Article Ott, Daniel; (2014)
Producing a Past: McCormick Harvester and Producer Populists in the 1890s

Book Giberti, Bruno; (2002)
Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia

Book Kember, Joe; Plunkett, John; Sullivan, Jill A.; (2012)
Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840--1910

Article Fisher, Nick; (2012)
The Great Exhibition of 1851: The Struggle to Describe the Indescribable

Article Bowler, Peter J.; (2013)
Popular Science Magazines in Interwar Britain: Authors and Readerships

Authors & Contributors
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette
Bowler, Peter J.
Cheng, John
Colavito, Jason
Drown, Eric
Drown, Eric Miles
Journals
Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
Science in Context
Agricultural History
HOST: Journal of History of Science and Technology
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Slavic Review
Publishers
University of Minnesota
Palgrave Macmillan
Pickering & Chatto
Prometheus Books
Routledge
University of Illinois Press
Concepts
Popular culture
Exhibitions and fairs
Science fiction
Science and literature
Science and society
Science and culture
People
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George
Gernsback, Hugo
Goddard, Robert Hutchings
Schiaparelli, Giovanni Virginio
Wells, Herbert George
Ghose, Aurobindo
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century, late
Places
Great Britain
United States
Bengal (India)
Soviet Union
Chicago (Illinois, U.S.)
Finland
Institutions
Chicago World's Fair
Centennial Exhibition (1876: Philadelphia, Pa.)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment