| This dissertation examines performers and fairgoers at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, the first World's Exposition in the U.S. with a Midway and live performers. Midway displays housed two performer types analyzed: Dahomey and Irish Villagers. Another group scrutinized, German-American Turners, were free to roam the fairgrounds. I also investigate ambulatory experiences of fairgoers. I analyze inscriptions and receptions of these four groups, drawing on Elizabeth Grosz, to address bodies and actions as potent aspects of meaning making. I gathered data about inscriptions, including appearances and movements, from guidebooks, picture books, period newspapers, and concession agreements. Movement staged in and locomotion through the fairgrounds produced bodies and cultural meanings linked to issues of imperial expansion, cultural ranking, identity politics, city planning, and consumer society. Scholars have acknowledged the Fair produced meanings in these registers; I differ from most writers by also focusing on how bodies contributed to meaning production.;Chapters one through three focus on Dahomey Villagers, Irish Villagers, and German-American Turners. I analyze inscriptions and possible meanings communicated, clarifying ways they intersected, conflicted, and signaled stereotypes connected to period debates, including Social Darwinism. For example, one interpretation of Dahomey Villagers cast them as inferior to the French and as requiring colonization. Irish Villagers could be understood as declaring a desire and readiness for national independence. In one reading, German-American Turners demonstrated a version of physical perfection attainable for Western bodies.;In chapter four, I adopt a strategy from Lena Hammergren to take a fictive 'stroll' through the fairgrounds. I try to comprehend, through a kind of re/embodied experience, how planners sought to produce fairgoers. I do not attempt to speak for all fairgoers or to present a universal view of the Fair. I argue planners aimed to train fairgoers for a consumerist, urban future that they signaled with buildings, their internal organization, and the fairground layout. However, I echo Michel de Certeau to emphasize performers and fairgoers could temporarily circumvent the participatory recommendations presented. I argue a power struggle existed at the Fair, and bodies and movement were focal points of and nodes for cultural and political contentions. |
