AtD and Chicago #3

[Paul Nightingale]

Allen's description in Horrible Prettiness highlights the way the Chicago
Fair/Columbian Exposition performed American Exceptionalism by means of
"ethnological exhibits ... neatly ordered along what was presumed to be an
evolutionary hierarchy of racial progress" (226).

Allen also, in his account of the cooch dance, draws attention to the way
such "racial progress" is, implicitly, gendered, hence the "reminder of the
atavistic nature of women in a 'semi-civilized' state" (228).

Another good account ... Gail Bederman (1993) "Civilisation, The Decline of
Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Anti-Lynching Campaign (1892-94)"
in Barbara Melosh ed Gender and American History since 1890.

Wells and Frederick Douglass (representing Haiti) co-authored a pamphlet
called: "The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian
Exposition".

And ... Laura L. Behling (2002) "Reification and Resistance: The Rhetoric of
Black Womanhood at the Columbian Exposition, 1893" in Women's Studies in
Communication, Vol. 25

Behling's paper focuses on three black women allowed to speak at the Fair
because they were able to 'represent' progress through opportunity and
education, as available in the US.