Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Throughout this book, I use the United States when referring to the post-Civil War national climate and America when discussing the antebellum period or nationalist projections. 2. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855; reprint. New York: Dover, 2007), 4. 3. A select overview includes, Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978); Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-Embracing” View (London: Trefoil, 1988); Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion, 1999); Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Ivan Karp and Steven Levine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Culture ((Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sadiah Qureshi, People’s on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds, Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, 2008); Edward Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, Second edition (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008); Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 4. Among studies of panoramas, site-specific performance considered in reenactments or “living histories,” exhibitions, and museums are John Francis McDermott, The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); John Bell, “The Sioux War Panorama and American Mythic History.” Theatre Journal 48:3 (October 1996): 279–299; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at 206 Notes American International Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Exhibitions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Linda P. Gross and Theresa R. Snyder. Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (Arcadia Publishing, 2005); David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Rosemarie K. Bank, Antebellum Stagings: Theatre Culture in the United States, 1825–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 2001); Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850– 1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007); Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011). 5. Historical accounts of immersive and virtual spaces lean toward further understanding media lineages in cinema, gaming, and special effects. Landscape theory addresses the interpretive frames of perception to understand the discourse of social formation. The Panorama Phenomenon: Mesdag Panorama 1881–1981, eds. Evelyn J. Fruitema and Paul A. Zoetmulder (The Hague: Foundation for the Preservation of the Centenarian Mesdag Panorama, 1981); Jay Appleton. The Symbolism of Habitat: An Interpretation of Landscape in Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990); Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room 9 (Autumn, 2002): 5–25; Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Angela Ndalianis, Neo- Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Rachael Ziady DeLuxe and James Elkins, eds, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008). 6. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 68. 7. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 8–9. 8. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 3-31. 9. Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 5. 10. Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 13–22,108–112. 11. Ibid., 107. Notes 207 12. Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 56. Clark considers Breughel’s naturalism a fantasy technique that bridges Northern style with Italian mannerism. 13. “Panorama of Versailles,” Zion’s Herald, August 8, 1827, 2. 14. “Panorama, The Time Piece and Literary Companion, November 29, 1797, 3; see also Comment, The Panorama, 23, Figure 7, 23–24. 15. Grau, Virtual Art, 57, 58. 16. Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine, 3. 17. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, 5–6. 18. Grau, Virtual Art, 13. 19. In aesthetic philosophy, Western tradition of cognitive (rational) philo- sophical thought and perception form the two parts of the higher and lower faculties. The classical division of mind and body divorces the physical sense from knowledge of the world (consciousness). The transfer of aesthetics into an autonomous philosophy of beauty or art begins in the eighteenth century. With the study of aesthetic experience as a separate realm of understanding, the body once again becomes a source of inquiry. The initial step is taken by Alexander Baumgarten, who unfurls a theory of perceptional cognition that translates the precepts of rational philosophy into the attributes that contribute to poetic perfection—the aesthetic. In his Reflections on Poetry (1735), Baumgarten cuts a path from perception to beauty, and restores aesthetic experience to the body. Baumgarten’s dis- tinction that aesthetic experience is distinct from moral value departs from eighteenth-century theories of sensibility, particularly moral philosophy in England, which reached into the public sphere through the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson at the beginning of the century. Immanuel Kant develops the discussion of aesthetic experience further. He moves from the perception of the thing to the effects on the individual. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant proposes that knowledge of the world (consciousness) is indiscern- ible as external phenomena. Consciousness is an intuitive process by which sense impressions are measured and judged. Thus, perception is a faculty of the subjective instrument, a self-perpetuating reference. This philosophi- cal idealism lies behind aesthetic judgments, giving rise to the troublesome issues of aesthetic standards and normative values. Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), §1, 1:41–42. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 31–89; Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 27–75, 151–232; George Dickie, The Century of Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 20. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1998), 8–11. 21. Douglas Kellner and Steven Best, “Debord, Cybersituations, and the Interactive Spectacle,” SubStance 28.3 (1999): 129–156. 208 Notes 22. Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2012), 2. 23. Aristotle, Poetics (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 13–18, 53–55; Oxford Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth ed., s.v. öψis. 24. Among treatments of cultural politics in spectacle performance history are Roy Strong, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theatre of Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry; Richard C. Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1999); Lynn Avery Hunt, Politics, Culture, Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 25. Transappearance is articulated by Paul Virilio as an optical technology of temporal acceleration or simultaneity whereby long distance transmission drives real-time perspectives. Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 2008), 36. 26. Maurya Wickstrom, Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions (New York: Routledge,

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