Table of Contents

Fleeting Cities undertakes a transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed within the European fin-de-siècle metropolis. Focusing on five imperial expositions – the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung (1896), the fifth Parisian Exposition universelle (1900), the Franco-British Exhibition in London (1908), the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924/25) and the Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris (1931) – this book examines their specific aims and aspirations, evolving forms and execution, and the public debates they engendered. Who was responsible for collecting items, assembling displays and orchestrating vistas? How were exhibits perceived and consumed by various audiences, communities and individuals on the local, national and global levels? How were exposition venues inscribed into the urban fabric and what legacies did these mega-events bequeath? Conceptualizing exhibitions as 'meta-media', as specific means of communication that encompass and incorporate other communicative technologies, particular attention is paid to questions of medialization, visualization and virtualization. Taken as dense textures stretched over time, these expositions undergo both a close hermeneutic reading and broad spatial analysis.

Local, national and international expositions were knots in what together constituted a world wide web; contemporary observers termed them 'nodes in the course of history'. By the late nineteenth century, the central conundrum of the so-called exhibitionary complex was no longer why expositions of ever greater scope were repeatedly held in almost all European metropolises, but rather what made them so similar. Why were these ephemeral urban spaces furnished with analogues, intertextual accessoires? A glacial pace of change and striking resemblances between different exhibitionary sites are the most marked feature of the entire medium, which was, from the beginning, dominated by far-reaching internal references and formative transnational and interurban connections. As a consequence, the — historical — notion of an 'exhibitionary system' or the — contemporaneous — concept of an 'exhibitionary complex' must be replaced with that of 'exhibitionary networks' in order to allow for adequate historicization. Uncovering why expositions were sustained after their capacity to express the latest version of 'the modern' had waned following the turn of the century requires an analysis of that peculiarly Victorian emotion: 'exhibition fatigue'.

The book introduces individual agency into the historiography by describing the expositions not merely as hyper-representations of overarching cultural constellations, but also as the result of the personal strategies of planning, building and financing of the particular individuals responsible for their organization. Both the medium's longevity and expositions' increasing resemblance to one another must be explained by the impact of a well-organized and very mobile class of cultural bureaucrats, exhibition experts, and entertainment entrepreneurs. Their intermingling led to transnational adjustments in consecutive expositions. Once successfully introduced, new elements were quickly transferred across borders and integrated into later exhibitions, largely regardless of their respective national contexts. Ephemeral exposition spaces were usually furnished with analogues – ethnographic ensembles, so-called native villages, or exclusively domestic assemblages such as Old London, Vieux Paris and Alt-Berlin – because originators, commissioners and organizers copied from each other, transferring not only specific features, but entire sections, from one national and sociocultural context to another. Thus, Fleeting Cities weaves extensive empirical research with underlying theoretical concerns, investigating these expositions' individual meanings in a new form of transnational network analysis.