Orientalism and the Reality Effect: Angkor at the Universal Expositions, 1867–1937

Isabelle Flour

I found this reproduction of Angkor extremely moving, and then, straight away, I told myself: “Is it accurate? Is the reality more or less grand?” — René Benjamin, 19221

In his report on the 1922 Exposition coloniale at Marseille for the French populist weekly magazine L’Illustration, the reactionary novelist René Benjamin echoed the sentiments of most visitors to universal expositions, who had, since 1867, witnessed the trend of reproducing emblematic architectural monuments through the building of ephemeral national pavilions. As has been analyzed in Saidian terms specifically by Tim Mitchell for Egypt and by Zeynep Çelik for Islamic architecture, the question of the accuracy of these architectural reconstructions was central to the representation of nations or cultures that were considered integral parts of the essentialist category “the Orient.”2 In most cases, the construction of a fantasized Orient at the universal and colonial expositions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a constituent of an imperialist narrative seeking to demonstrate the inferior, preevolutionary, and premodern condition of an exoticized “Other” in order to legitimate the Western civilizing mission. This intellec- tual construct was mediated by pavilions or urban quarters of native architecture — built in many cases by European architects — and supplemented by indigenous people whose role was to authenticate the fictional settings in which they performed. Whereas much ink has been spilled on the phantasmatic nature of the reproduction of Islamic architecture at the universal expositions, the case of Cambodia has been somewhat overlooked in recent literature despite its remarkable documentation in the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of related visual materials.3 In fact, Cambodia shared a common fate with all things “Oriental,” and the history of its representation in Europe was deeply embedded in French colonial institutions. From the signature of the protectorate in 1863 forward, explorations commissioned by French ministries made extensive surveys and brought back material evidence of the Khmer ruins. This comparatively late rediscovery of Khmer architectural heritage by Europeans had swathed Angkor, the capital city of the Khmer empire (802–1431) and present-day Cambodia’s most emblematic site, with an aura of mystery. This mood infused

63 picturesque travel accounts written by authors ranging from pioneer explorers — such as Henri Mouhot, Francis Garnier, and Louis Delaporte — to such novelists as Pierre Loti and André Malraux, through journalists writing in the popular press.4 The shroud of mystery thickened with the representation of Angkor at the French universal and colonial expositions, where successive pavilions from 1889 to 1906 interpreted original Khmer monuments with unbridled imagination. However, the so-called authenticity of these often deceptive reconstructions was paradoxically supported from 1889 to 1937 by the faithfulness usually granted to the plaster cast medium, whether taken on site or copied from the collection of the Musée Indochinois (Indochinese museum) at the Trocadero in Paris. Indeed, plaster casts dramatically contributed to the “reality effect” of these architectural reconstructions, to use the terms of Roland Barthes’s analysis of modern literature.5 Whereas in literature this reality effect was to be obtained by accumulating insignificant descriptive details that were apparently detached from the narrative’s signifying structure, in the representation of architecture it was to be reached by reproducing its ornamented surface (rather than by a synthetic emphasis on its structure), by virtue of the plaster cast’s “resemblance by contact,” as it was termed by Didi-Huberman.6 Plaster cast as a medium, therefore, acquired a status as a trace or imprint of the direct contact of the plastic material with an original referent actually existing or having existed. But this article will show that plaster casts were also subject to montage, assemblage, and alteration, which could easily go unnoticed without knowledge of the original referent. Of course, this reality effect of plaster casts can be considered as analogous to the tricks used in illusionistic devices of fin-de-siècle mass culture spectacles, such as dioramas, in which real objects were sometimes integrated to simulate seemingly immediate experience.7 Yet, it might as well be argued that this reality effect was also an integral part of the usual regime of Orientalism: as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have noted, respectively, Orientalism is “a form of radical realism,” and colonial discourse “employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism.”8 It will not be surprising, then, to learn that plaster casts were also used to enhance the reality effect of other such Orientalist representations. For example, as early as the 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris, plaster casts were part of the reconstruction of the temple of Quetzalcóatl at Xochicalco (Mexico), right after the failure of the French inter- vention in Mexico (1861–67): after the Commission Scientifique du Mexique (1864–67) aborted its display project at the exposition, one of its members, Léon Méhédin (1828– 1905), who had taken plaster casts on site, initiated the monument’s reconstruction, which significantly diverged from its referent.9 Likewise, plaster casts of various monuments from Java (some of which were afterward offered to the Musée Indochinois by the minister of the colonies of the Netherlands) were used to assemble and authenticate the composite pavilion of the Dutch East Indies built for the 1900 Exposition universelle in Paris by E. von Saher, director of the museum and school of decorative arts at Haarlem, who had led a casting expedition for that purpose.10

64 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) Furthermore, despite the abundant literature on the famous Street of Cairo set up by Baron Alphonse Delort de Gléon (1843–99) for the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris, it is little stressed that plaster casts were used in its making, as is highlighted by heretofore unnoticed archive material documenting the later offer of such casts to the Musée de Sculpture Comparée (Museum of Comparative Sculpture).11 Most likely, the plaster casts’ authenticating power was exceeded by that of the fragments of actual buildings inserted in the facades as well as the display of indigenous donkey-drivers.12 In the case of Cambodia, as in that of the 1889 Street of Cairo, illusionistic displays were further enhanced from 1906 to 1931 by the presence of the royal Cambodian dancers, who served to further authenticate the setting, which by 1922 reflected unprecedented accuracy. The reality effect resulting from the combined “authenticity” of plaster casts and native people was only to be disrupted when the modernity achieved by the colonies broke through the Orientalist prism of primitivism at the climax of the French colonial empire, embodied by the 1931 Exposition coloniale in Paris. Highlighting the use of plaster casts and their reality effect to represent Cambodia in France through the colonial period hopefully sheds more light on the political implications of Orientalist discourses while also taking stock of the visual turn to unravel the paradoxes of representation at work within the visual regime of Orientalism.13 Unlike the world-famous reproduction of the Angkor Wat temple of 1931, the first appearance in Paris of artifacts from Angkor — at the 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris — went completely unnoticed. True, these objects were of limited scale and scope: they consisted only of a bunch of fragments and of casts of sulfur, cement, or clay taken on the temples most accessible to contemporary pioneer explorers. These makeshift casts were made in March 1866 during a one-month mission at Angkor by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée (1823–68), a French naval officer who had played an influential role in negoti- ating the French protectorate over Cambodia with King Norodom I in 1863.14 This short reconnaissance trip was preparatory to a later one-week stay in the Angkor region in June of the same year, a mere detour within the context of the Mekong Expedition (1866–68) organized by the navy. Although this long-standing mission eventually concluded that the Mekong was not the navigable road to China the French were seeking, it had led, inci- dentally, to the first archaeological survey of Khmer monuments, which was published within the expedition’s official report of 1873.15 The making of casts and the architectural survey had been prompted by Doudart de Lagrée’s encounter with two British men, H. G. Kennedy and John Thomson, who were busy taking the first photographs of Ang- kor that would soon be published in Britain.16 Doudart de Lagrée feared his competitors would outdistance his own men in the race to China, and within this fiercely competitive context, his casts rivaled — as did many markers of imperial appropriation — Thomson’s photographs. Within the framework of the imperial competition raging between France and Britain for colonies in India and Indochina, it is noteworthy that from 1866 onward, Henry Cole, director of the South Kensington Museum, studied how to bring casts of Indian monuments back to the center of the British Empire. In 1869–70, Cole’s own son,

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 65 Lt. Henry Hardy Cole, a royal engineer enrolled in the Archaeological Survey of India, was commissioned to supervise the making of numerous casts in India. They were first displayed at the 1871 International Exhibition in London and then unveiled as part of the architectural courts at the South Kensington Museum in 1873.17 After Doudart de Lagrée’s death during the Mekong Expedition, the torch was taken up by one of his fellow travelers, Louis Delaporte (1842–1925), another naval officer who, as the draughtsman of the mission, had produced picturesque renderings of the Khmer ruins and who would take it as his life’s goal to popularize Khmer architecture in France. In 1873, Delaporte set up an expedition funded by the Ministries of the Navy and of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, this time to explore the Red River toward inner China, again after another detour to Angkor.18 But due to the explorers’ illness and Tonkin’s troubled political situation, the mission halted after the survey in Angkor, where members made a hundred casts and collected nearly as many original fragments.19 Back home, Delaporte secured the installation of the material thus gathered in a new Musée Khmer located north of Paris — at Compiègne, in the former imperial residence — as a compensation for the Louvre, whose doors remained hermetically closed to antiquities of a then uncertain aesthetic status.20 Eager to flaunt his booty in the capital, Delaporte obtained the transfer of his collection to Paris for the 1878 Exposition universelle.21 Within its precincts, those Angkorean exhibits were displayed simultaneously in different con- texts, testifying to the objects’ shifting value. Several plaster casts could be found in an exhibition on the French colonies organized by the Ministry of the Navy in the Palais du Champ-de-Mars.22 A few original statues guarded the entrance of an anthropological section devoted to the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, which was located along the Seine at the base of the Trocadero hill.23 Khmer art — represented by drawings, casts, and a one-tenth scale model of a gateway to the walled city of Angkor Thom by sculptor Emile Soldi — was also on view in another section on scientific missions in the Palais du Champ- de-Mars, which was devised to prefigure the creation of the new Musée d’Ethnographie at the Trocadero.24 And finally, a reconstruction of a sculpted group of one of the causeways to Angkor’s Preah Khan temple made the most vivid impression on visitors to the Exposi- tion rétrospective de l’art ancien at the Trocadero Palace (fig. 1).25 Building on this favorable reception, Delaporte finally managed to secure the permanent transfer of his collection from Compiègne to the Trocadero Palace after he completed yet another government-funded mission in 1881–82; from then on, his ill health would force him to retire from the navy but allow him to devote himself fully to curatorial tasks. After two decades of work on the assemblage of monumental reconstructions and short-term openings during the 1889 and 1900 expositions, the Musée Indochinois would open permanently only in 1902 at the Trocadero. There, the Musée Indochinois constituted a colonial counterpart to its neighbor, the Musée de Sculpture Comparée. This other cast museum, founded in 1879 by Eugène Viollet- le-Duc, opened in 1882 to the public and was devoted mostly to French medieval architecture because it was intended by its founder to demonstrate the superiority

66 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) Fig. 1. A reconstruction of a sculpted group from the Preah Khan temple of Angkor, on display at the Exposition rétrospective de l’art ancien at the 1878 Exposition universelle in Paris. Drawing by M. Woodward. From Le Monde illustré, 2 November 1878, 277. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (ap1.m74)

Fig. 2. The Pagoda of Angkor at the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris. From Glucq, L’Album de l’Exposition 1889 (Paris: Gaulon, 1889), pl. 52. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (90.r.52) of French art.26 In the meantime, from his headquarters at the Trocadero, Delaporte commissioned further expeditions to Cambodia to fill the galleries of the Musée Indochinois. Yet, Lucien Fournereau’s casting mission of 1889, for example, served not only the museum’s display but also the building of the first major pavilion of Cambodia at the Exposition universelle.27 In the same way that Delaporte occasionally contrived fanciful architectural compositions for the museum,28 Daniel Fabre, architect of the colonial section and purposely dispatched from Cambodia, devised a pavilion that introduced visitors to the exposition with a fictionalized reduction of the temple of Angkor Wat (fig. 2). The structure of the original monument — three enclosed terraces, circumscribed by towers, surrounding central cross-shaped galleries surmounted by a tower — was, in Paris, contracted into a simple cruciform plan, but its tower was crowned by a feature that evoked Buddhist stupas of Siam or Burma.29 This new interpretation of the monument derived from the combination and repetition, on the four sides of the symmetrical composition, of casts made by Fournereau’s team on different parts of the

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 67 monument (i.e., one side of its central tower, one angle of its base, and one entrance to its first terrace’s galleries).30 Without firsthand knowledge of the original referent, a nonspecialist audience could easily fail to notice the recomposition process, and the pavilion could be taken for a stern archaeological reconstruction whose accuracy was reinforced by the amount of detail deployed in the coloring and gilding of the ornamentation. Indeed, the use of the plaster cast medium helped to authenticate the reconstruction, which was praised by the popular press in a revealing oxymoron: “Mr. Fabre . . . reproduced with as much taste as erudition the most beautiful fragments of Khmer art. The project was conceived after studies made on-site, at the very ruins of Angkor; during the execution process, he used the absolutely authentic casts brought back by Mr. Fournereau.”31 At the 1900 Exposition universelle, Angkor was evoked in an even more phantasmatic way than in 1889 — though no pagoda of Angkor was to rise above ground — outside the Trocadero, where Delaporte’s Musée Indochinois had just opened to the public. Due to the recent unification of French Indochina in 1898, that part of the colonial section hosted only thematic pavilions, though each of them was designed as a reproduction of a monument from one of the five countries constituting Indochina.32 The main pavilion was built by architect Alexandre Marcel and represented the Wat Phnom of Phnom Penh, a structure seemingly less iconic than Angkor Wat in terms of the way the French viewed their protectorate: during the restoration of the original Wat Phnom, officially opened in 1894, Fabre, architect of the 1889 Parisian pavilion, had rendered it more Angkorean by adding numerous bas-reliefs in a “pure Khmer style” taken from Angkor.33 As Edwards puts it, “Marcel’s Cambodge pavilion at the 1900 exhibition was thus a Pari- sian reproduction of a protectorate production.”34 What is more, in Paris, the aura of Angkor irradiated this time in a literally more subterranean way and, hence, a more mysterious one: the purposely built hill that supported the pastiche of the Wat Phnom pro- vided a home for a gloomy crypt. Its pillars and walls were covered with additional plaster casts of Angkorean ornaments (fig. 3). Building on the visitor’s expectation of some kind of telluric sensation, the element of surprise experienced upon entering the basement reinforced the alleged primitive quality of Angkor in the eyes of the audience, as is well conveyed by this comment:

To the right of the steep-stepped staircase, opens some sort of a mouth of a mine. This is where to go. In the dark, you take about twenty steps, up a gently inclined plane, and you suddenly come out into a vast crypt, dimly lit. Little by little, your eyes get accustomed to the twilight, and one of the wonders of the Exposition, definitely the most unforeseen, comes into sight.

You are in a subterranean room of ancient Cambodia. The sensation of the enor- mous and fantasy grips you. Around you swarm terrible stone fauna that would make short work of those of the gothic cathedrals, if a combat started. . . .

68 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) Fig. 3. The Angkorean grotto beneath the copy of the Wat Phnom at the 1900 Exposition universelle in Paris. From Jules Charles-Roux, ed., Album commémoratif: Exposition universelle de 1900, Section des colonies et pays de Protectorat (Paris: Chevojon, 1900), pl. 69. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (89-b25054)

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 69 It goes without saying that we only have plaster casts here, patiently made at Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, at Siem Reap, amongst the grand ruins left by the Khmer as a testimony to their power, high civilization and wonderful art. But the gathering of these casts, the arrangement of the subterranean temple that occu- pies the interior of this hill of reinforced concrete at the Trocadero, are the work of architect Marcel. And he is to be praised for bringing in enough taste so as to make us believe we are in the presence of a faithful reconstruction.35

Therefore, in spite of the altogether imaginary nature of this underground structure, the plaster casts of Khmer ornaments conveyed the illusion that an existing reality was actually reproduced, an illusion made all the more plausible because it conformed to the visitor’s aspirations to experience a primitivist thrill. In 1889 and 1900, the use of plaster casts in the Angkorean pavilions seems to have been sufficient to construct this narrative of authenticity; however, other Orientalist displays had already resorted to exhibiting native people, such as the Egyptian donkey-drivers of the Street of Cairo or the Javanese dancers, both of whom were presented at the 1889 Exposition universelle. Although craftsmen, soldiers, and rickshaws from Tonkin and Annam had already attracted the curious gaze of the Parisian audience, the Cambodian dancers made a comparatively late appearance on the metropolitan stage, likely owing to their prestigious and secluded status as part of the King of Cambodia’s harem.36 Therefore, the troupe was a novelty to visitors of the 1906 Exposition coloniale in Marseille — not least to Auguste Rodin, whose famous drawings captured some of the fascination the dancers inspired in their French audience.37 But what could have been the dancers’ reactions when they saw the Cambodian pavilion at the Marseille exposition (fig. 4)? If the young perform- ers were as frivolous as they were described,38 then they probably would not have been shocked at the sight of the pavilion. The reconstruction combined the motif of the four- faced tower — a distinctive feature of the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom — with a layering of the galleries whose proportions were reminiscent of Angkor Wat; the whole was articulated on a cruciform plan, as in 1889. The building was the work of Henri Vildieu, who was the architect of the Tonkin and Annam pavilions at the 1889 Exposition. In 1906, he had wished “to get as close as possible to the truth in the execution of [his] Pavilions of Indo-China at Marseille,” though the result hardly lived up to his expectations — except for the accuracy of the ornaments, again taken from casts of the Musée Indochinois.39 As a result, the 1906 Indochinese pavilion seems to have elicited fewer comments than did its predecessors; however, journalists noticed that the exposition gathered for the first time the two main components of the Cambodian identity as it was constructed for a French audience — that is, its ruins and its dancers. “It is a fallen country, which retained only two things of its glo- rious past: its incredibly grandiose ruins and its dancers, uncanny survival of the dead past, of which they strive to perpetuate the memory and to embody the abolished grandeur.”40 Similar combinations — staging performances by Cambodian dancers against the backdrop of Angkor Wat — would be renewed in 1922 and 1931, when the architectural

70 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) Fig. 4. The Indochinese pavilion at the 1906 Exposition coloniale in Marseille. From Camille Brion, Exposition coloniale de Marseille, 1906 (s.l.: s.n., 1906), n.p. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (95.r.99*) reconstructions’ accuracy would reach an unprecedented climax. At the 1922 Exposition coloniale in Marseille, the Musée Indochinois was joined by the Musée Guimet and by the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in providing, once again, molds and casts, this time for the reconstruction of the monument’s central portion (fig. 5). The pavilion stretched over a square seventy meters long on each side, while the central tower reached a height of fifty-four meters; the whole was preceded by two smaller pavilions located in water basins meant to simulate the temple’s causeway.41 Although some of the pavilion’s details had been re-created by the stucco contractors Auberlet and Laurent, and by architect Auguste Delaval, it reflected a new height of accuracy. This increased faithfulness could probably be credited to the growing sway of the EFEO, which from its foundation between 1898 and 1902 strove to clear Khmer architectural sites of overgrown vegeta- tion, to restore monuments, and to promote tourism to Cambodia.42 Far from precluding the visitor’s lust for exoticism, this accuracy seems to have magnified the magic of the dancers’ performances. And the pristine state in which the original eroded monument had been reconstructed allowed spectators to travel through time and commentators to emphasize the alleged continuity and immutability of age-old Khmer traditions, a topos of primitivist narratives:

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 71 Fig. 5. Cambodian dancers performing at night in front of the reconstruction of Angkor Wat at the 1922 Exposition coloniale in Marseille. Chromolithography by Joseph de la Nézière, titled “Fête Cambodgienne,” from L’Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille décrite par ses auteurs (Marseille: Commissariat Général de l’Indochine, 1922), 281. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (t727 1922.b1 e9 1923)

72 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) tonight, in the blue night, deep as the nights of the Orient, things take an aspect of magic and dream, and give us the sensation of the long time lived, of immemorial antiquity, of a mysterious gravitas that are necessary to the age-old sight we are going to witness. . . . Here come the dancers, mitred of gold. . . . And they give me the impression of a sculpture that goes on in its purity throughout the ages: Khmer art still lives in these human beings the same way it lived at the temple of Angkor, in works of flesh as in works of stone.43

Curiously, those dancers who were valued for the authenticity of their traditions were also called upon to perform plays taken from the Occidental repertoire: ironically, the Cambodian dancers were assigned to perform the Orientalist opera Lakmé by composer Léo Delibes.44 Its libretto, by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille, was written after the novel Rarahu ou Le Mariage de Loti, by the then major Orientalist writer Pierre Loti, who was also the author of a travel narrative to Angkor, Pèlerin d’Angkor.45 Regardless of local specificities, the native quality of the Cambodian dancers seemingly designated them to perform any “Oriental” roles: this particular play takes place in British India and involves a romance between a Hindu princess and a British soldier. Notwithstanding these inconsistent approaches to authenticity and contextuali- zation, the massive success of those performances prompted their self-evident renewal, seen from a distance, at the following Exposition coloniale organized in 1931 at Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris. There, the same central portion of the temple of Angkor Wat was reconstructed again (fig. 6), this time by architects Charles and Gabriel Blanche (father and son) with the help of casts taken from molds used by Auberlet in 1922 and of others sent afresh from the EFEO; however, chosen ornamental details could be repeated several times wherever the original monument showed variety.46 Yet, as Patricia Morton noted, winds of change were blowing on the 1931 Exposition. Although exoticism remained a theme for the organizers, it was now used merely to lure visitors into a pavilion conceived to demonstrate the then accomplished modernity of Indochina. Therefore, the exterior appearance of the pavilion was contradicted by its interior three floors of modernist display, which were separated by translucent ceilings that allowed zenithal natural lighting without opening windows into the basement of the reconstructed temple.47 As one of the organizers put it, the Governor General of Indochina, Pierre Pasquier, wanted to show:

the Indochina of pagodas, but also of factories, mines, plantations and ports; the Indochina of palanquins and elephants, but also of great railroads, great radio transmission networks and airlines; an Indochina that is traditionalist, immensely endearing, wrapped into a shroud of failing forces, but also an Indo- china that is young, quivering, awakening to all the advances under the eye of France, an Indochina ready for action, from which seeps out the lively force of an admirable renewal.48

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 73 Fig. 6. The reconstruction of Angkor Wat at the 1931 Exposition coloniale at Vincennes. Photograph by Chevojon. From L’Exposition coloniale de Paris (Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1931), pl. 12. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (t805 1931.c1 e96 1932)

74 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) This modernization of Indochina’s image was also mirrored in the representation of the Cambodian dancers: until then the keepers of national traditions, they now appeared for the very first time, outside their performances, clad in modern Westernized garments rather than in their stage clothes (fig. 7). What is more, although the dancers were still presented to the audience as forming the royal troupe, in 1931, they were, in fact, a pri- vate troupe run by Princess Wongat Say Sangvann, a former royal dancer and spouse of Prince Vong Kath, son of the late King Sisowath (r. 1904–27) and brother of King Siso- wath Manivong (r. 1928–41). After Say Sangvann left the court on grounds of domestic disagreement, she managed both to gain protection from colonial authorities and to take over for the royal troupe, which had turned down the offer to perform in Paris for lack of dancers.49 The 1931 Exposition coloniale paradoxically sounded the death knell of the civilizing mission of French colonization: on the one hand, France had failed to maintain or revive the Khmer traditions (the so-called decline of the royal dance troupe can be ascribed to limited funds allocated by the French colonial government as well

Fig. 7. A group portrait of the Cambodian dancers at the 1931 Exposition coloniale at Vincennes. Photograph by Chevojon. From L’Exposition coloniale de Paris (Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1931), pl. 16. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (t805 1931.c1 e96 1932)

Fig. 8. The Indochinese pavilion at the 1937 Exposition internationale in Paris. Postcard, published by Chipault. Collection of the author

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 75 as to acculturation to French ways by the Cambodian royal court); on the other hand, the actual modernization of Cambodia no longer required the patronizing authority of the imperial power.50 In retrospect, the manifest decline of French imperial power at the last large-scale colonial exhibition is not altogether dissimilar to the case of the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924–25, one of the last large-scale British imperial exhibitions, which also “epitomized the beginning of the Empire’s end.”51 At Wembley, British imperialism was challenged both by a proposed (and aborted) Indian boycott that threatened the intended representation of the unity of empire and by criti- cisms of the display of West Africa by a group of students of African descent.52 As if to confirm the failure of the dual mission of French colonization — which was likewise heralded in 1931 with the rise of contestation on the part of the colonized, the surrealists, and the communists53 — the 1937 Exposition internationale in Paris recorded a step backward and returned to the old Orientalist representational regime, opposing the modernity of the Western nations to the exoticism of their colonies. The latter were relegated to an island on the Seine, which reinforced their similarity to amusement parks. There, one more picturesque pavilion of Indochina took the shape of a part of the Bayon temple, a reference recognizable for the four-faced tower dominating the composition (fig. 8). Yet, although the decoration of the pavilion by sculptor Léon Binet was once again designed with the help of casts from the Musée Indochinois, the museum was simultaneously evicted from the Trocadero and its casts definitively consigned to storage as a result of the reconfiguration of Paris’s museum organization.54 Notwithstanding the nostalgia for Indochina that has persisted in French culture through literature and film up to the present,55 that pavilion of 1937 was the final word of the French Orientalist tale told at the universal expositions. The architectural fantasy of a French Cambodia crumbled along with the erosion of colonial institutions brought about by the upheavals of decoloniza- tion, before Cambodia took over its self-representation at universal expositions. Throughout the existence of the protectorate over Cambodia, Orientalist attitudes toward Khmer heritage went hand in hand with French colonial history, fueled as they were by government-funded explorations and surveys. While operating as signs of imperial appropriation directed toward a French and European audience, architectural reconstructions at the expositions also testified to an overall illusionist approach to the representation of architecture, drawing on a reality effect that was equally sought by contemporary architectural cast museums. Yet, whereas almost no artistic license was taken in reproducing the heritage of France or Europe at the Musée de Sculpture Comparée, countless material manipulations and distortions of the architecture of Cambodia had gone unchecked, rendering it even more exotic and alien to fairgoers than it could possibly have been to travelers on site. The alleged fidelity of the plaster medium to its original referent in Cambodia concealed to viewers the material manipulations such casts were submitted to — and which characterized both its deceptive quality and Orientalism’s visual regime. Moreover, this misrepresentation of Khmer monuments by the French intended to locate Cambodia in a premodern

76 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) phase of history untouched by colonization, by the very choice of the Khmer style of architecture and its reconstructions in a pristine state in 1922 and 1931. Meanwhile, these artificial restorations also reinforced the trope of a once prestigious, now degenerate civilization that needed the so-called beneficial influence of a modern imperial power to fully revive its former glory.56 Even the Cambodian dancers, though alive and well, were paradoxically perceived as a token not to the living arts of Cambodia but to the uncanny survival of immemorial traditions of an otherwise lost civilization. Such a conflation of different time-spaces — which was characteristic of the heterotopian nature of expositions — encouraged multilayered distortions in the form of constructs within constructs. Such was the case of the reproduction of the Wat Phnom in 1900, of the dancers’ performance in Lakmé in 1922, and of the filming of two movies in the Marseille reconstruction of Angkor that same year.57 On yet another level, the massive diffusion of postcards of the French reconstructions of Angkor that fairgoers kept as souvenirs of their visit — in much the same way as explorers to Cambodia would keep photographs of the real thing — testifies to the largely metadiegetic status of Khmer heritage in Orientalist narratives: the construct of Angkor was itself caught in self-referential narratives of the triumphalist relationship of the French to their colonial empire.

Isabelle Flour is currently completing her dissertation on the museum display of architectural casts (London and Paris, 1850–1950) at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Notes This article is the outcome of a lecture delivered at the Getty Research Institute on 23 May 2011. My thanks are due to Fran Terpak and Tim Winter for their help with the research in preparation of this original paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. I am also grateful to Annabelle Allouch for her comments on an early version of this article. 1. René Benjamin, “Une promenade à travers l’Exposition coloniale,” L’Illustration, 27 May 1922, 502. All translations from French are by the author. 2. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–33; Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 3. Studies on the representation of Angkor at the universal expositions have considered the subject from different standpoints, ranging from art history to cultural studies, through colonial history (mainly for the sake of concision, references to these yet essential precedents are kept to a minimum throughout this article). The most relevant and developed are Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 234–51; Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 31–39, 45–50, 153–55, 161–63; and Michael Falser, “Krishna and the Plaster Cast: Translating the Cambodian Temple of Angkor Wat in the French Colonial Period,” Transcultural Studies 2 (2011): 6–50 (which focuses, as to the expositions, on the translation of one particular motif from Angkor Wat, 35–45). Less accessible studies, held at the École du Louvre (Paris), have been completed as MA theses on the Musée Indochinois and include some brief references on the representation of Angkor at the universal and colonial expositions: Agnès Legueul, Les Moulages du Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro: Histoire et devenir (2005), 31–37; Agnès Combe, Le Rôle des collaborateurs de Louis Delaporte au Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro, de la collecte à la présentation des oeuvres (2000), 29–36; and Katia Houe, L’Oeuvre d’un conservateur, Louis Delaporte (1842–1925) (1992), 33–35, 43–44. See also Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 77 Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 14–33; Albert Le Bonheur, Angkor: Temples en péril (Paris: Herscher, 1989), 259–61; and, for its interesting iconography, Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, ed., Exotiques expositions: Les expositions universelles et les cultures extra- européennes, France, 1855–1937 (Paris: Somogy, 2010). The question of the use of Angkorean references in actual architectural practice, as such, is altogether different and could not be treated within the framework of this article; however, it seems that references to the architecture of Asia were scarce in Orientalist projects submitted by students of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On this point, see Marie-Laure Crosnier-Leconte, “Oriental ou colonial? Questions de styles dans les concours de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts au XIXe siècle,” in Nabila Oulebsir and Mercedes Volait, eds., L’Orientalisme architectural, entre imaginaires et savoirs (Paris: CNRS, Picard, 2009), 43–67. 4. For anthologies of literature on Angkor, see Georgette Naudin, Le groupe d’Angkor vu par les écrivains et les artistes étrangers (Saigon: A. Portail, 1928); Alain Quella-Villeger, Indochine, un rêve d’Asie (Paris: Omnibus, 1995); and Henri Copin, L’Indochine des romans (Paris: Kailash, 2000). Accounts of explorations were also regularly published in Le Tour du Monde and occasionally in L’Illustration. 5. Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” Communications 11 (1968): 84–89 (for an English translation, see Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in idem, The Rustle of Language [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], 141–48). 6. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Empreinte (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), and La Res- semblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008). 7. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 89–176; Don Slater, “Photography and Modern Vision: The Spectacle of ‘Natural Magic,’” in Chris Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 218–37. 8. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 72; Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” in idem, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 101; the chapter was initially published as an article in Screen 24, no. 4 (1983): 18–36. This analysis has been introduced in discussions of Orientalism in visual culture with Linda Nochlin’s essay, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 5 (1983): 118–31 and 186–91, in the wake of Said’s Orientalism. It was also taken up by Tim Mitchell’s analysis of the 1889 Street of Cairo; see Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 7–15 in particular. 9. For an account of the building of Méhédin’s pavilion at the 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris, see Frédéric Gerber, Christian Nicaise, and François Robichon, Un aventurier du Second Empire: Léon Méhédin, 1828–1905 (Rouen: Bibliothèque Municipale, 1992), 58–62; Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, “Le Mexique s’expose à Paris: Xochicalco, Léon Méhédin et l’Exposition universelle de 1867,” Histoire(s) de l’Amérique Latine 3 (2009): www.hisal.org/revue/article/Demeulenaere-Douyere2009-1. For an overview of the representation of Mexico at universal expositions, see Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 10. For the offer of these casts to the Musée Indochinois, see correspondence between Delaporte and Director of Fine Arts from November 1900 to January 1901, Paris, Archives du Musée Guimet, Fonds Stern-Delaporte; and Louis Delaporte to Director of Fine Arts, 29 June 1900, 31 December 1900, and 5 April 1901, Paris, Archives Nationales, F21 4489, Musée Indochinois. For a history of the pavilion itself, see Marieke Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at the World Exhibitions, 1880–1931 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006), 200–202. 11. For the offer (declined) of Delort de Gléon’s plaster casts to the then Musée de Sculpture Comparée, see correspondence of August to September 1901, Paris, Archives du Musée des Monuments Français, Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, C3, and Archives des Musées Nationaux, 5HH5(2). 12. On the 1889 Street of Cairo, see in particular Sylviane Leprun, Le Théâtre des colonies: Scénog- raphie, acteurs et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855–1937 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 138–48;

78 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 1–33; Çelik, Displaying the Orient, 75–78; Mercedes Volait, “La rue du Caire,” in Myriam Bacha, ed., Les Expositions universelles à Paris de 1855 à 1937 (Paris: AAVP, 2005), 131–34. 13. Among countless introductions to and readers of visual culture, several foundational or retrospective works frame the theoretical import of the visual turn, also known as the pictorial or iconic turn: W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Margarita Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2008): 131–46; Neal Curtis, ed., The Pictorial Turn (London: Routledge, 2010); Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, eds., The Handbook of Visual Culture (London: Berg, 2012). 14. See Ernest Doudart de Lagrée, Explorations et missions de Doudart de Lagrée, ed. Arthur Bonamy de Vilemereuil (Paris: Jules Tremblay, 1883), lxxiv and 447–48 for Doudart de Lagrée’s first mission to Angkor, and 305–11 for a list of the eighteen original fragments and twenty-seven casts that he brought back and that were displayed at the 1867 Exposition universelle, and afterward at the Exposition permanente des colonies at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris. 15. Francis Garnier, Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine effectué pendant les années 1866, 1867 et 1868, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1873), and Ernest Doudart de Lagrée, Francis Garnier, and Louis Delaporte, Atlas du voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine effectué pendant les années 1866, 1867 et 1868, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1873). See also Francis Garnier, Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine, effectué par une commission française (Paris: Hachette, 1885), which was first published in a series of installments in Le Tour du Monde from 1870 to 1873. 16. Doudart de Lagrée, Explorations et missions de Doudart de Lagrée, 446–47; John Thomson, The Antiquities of Cambodia: A Series of Photographs Taken on the Spot, with Letterpress Description (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1867). 17. On this point, see Isabelle Flour, “‘On the Formation of a National Museum of Architecture’: The Architectural Museum versus the South Kensington Museum,” Architectural History 51 (2008): 225– 30; Tim Barringer, “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project,” in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998), 17–20; Maria Antonella Pelizzari, “From Stone to Paper: Photographs of Architecture and the Traces of History,” in Maria Antonella Pelizzari, ed., Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2003), 35–38; Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 152–57; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Careers of the Copy: Traveling Replicas in Colonial and Postcolonial India” (Firth Lecture given at annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the U.K. and Commonwealth, “Archaeological and Anthropological Imaginations,” Bristol University, 8 April 2009, www.theasa.org/publications/firth /firth09.pdf); Upinder Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology (Delhi, Bangalore: Permanent Black, Orient Longman, 2004), 200–202. 18. Louis Delaporte, Voyage au Cambodge: L’Architecture khmer (Paris: Delagrave, 1880). The results of this and later missions conducted or commissioned by Delaporte were synthesized in Louis Delaporte, Les Monuments du Cambodge: Etudes d’architecture khmère (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1914–24). 19. Louis Delaporte, “Rapport de Louis Delaporte au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies et au Ministre de l’Instruction Publique, des Cultes et des Beaux-Arts sur sa mission scientifique aux ruines des monuments khmers de l’ancien Cambodge,” Journal Officiel, 1 April 1874, pp. 2516–18 and 2 April 1874, pp. 2546–48, Paris, Archives Nationales, F17 2953, Delaporte, and F21 4489, Musée Indochinois. 20. From the outset of the expedition project, Delaporte dreamed of enriching the collections of the Louvre (Dr. Amédée Delaporte, on behalf of Louis Delaporte, “Note relative aux ruines Khmers du Cambodge,” n.d. [ca. 1872–73], Paris, Archives Nationales, F21 4489, Musée Indochinois), but his cry for recognition was not heard by the authorities of the Louvre (Secretary-General of National Museums,

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 79 Frédéric Villot, to Director of Fine Arts, Marquis de Chennevières, 27 January 1874, Paris, Archives Nationales, F21 4489, Musée Indochinois). 21. On the Musée Khmer at Compiègne, see Edmé Casimir de Croizier, L’Art khmer: Étude historique sur les monuments de l’ancien Cambodge (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1875). 22. L. Simonin, “Exposition Universelle. IV. Les colonies françaises,” L’Illustration, 15 June 1878, 399. 23. L. Simonin, “Exposition Universelle. XVI. L’anthropologie,” L’Illustration, 21 September 1878, 186–87. 24. L. Simonin, “Exposition Universelle. XV. Missions scientifiques,”L’Illustration, 14 September 1878, 167–70; Catalogue du Ministère de l’Instruction Publique, des Cultes et des Beaux-Arts: Tome II, 2e Fasci- cule. Missions et voyages scientifiques. Exposition théâtrale (Paris: Société de Publications Périodiques, 1878), 17–19. This exhibition itself first took place at the Palais de l’Industrie in January, even before the universal exposition opened, see Notice sur le Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Paris: Palais de l’Industrie, 1878), 11–13, and Colonel Duhousset, “Exposition ethnographique des missions scientifiques au Palais de l’Industrie,” L’Illustration, 19 January 1878, 39. 25. Léo de Bernard, “Exposition universelle: Les géants cambodgiens,” Le Monde illustré, 2 Novem- ber 1878, 277 and 279; Duranty, “L’Extrême-Orient, revue d’ensemble des arts asiatiques à l’Exposition universelle,” in Louis Gonse, ed., L’Art ancien à l’Exposition de 1878 (Paris: A. Quantin, 1879), 543–45. 26. On the history of the Musée de Sculpture Comparée since its foundation in 1879, see Le Musée de Sculpture Comparée: Naissance de l’histoire de l’art moderne (Paris: Patrimoine, 2001); Le Musée des Monuments Français, ed. Léon Pressouyre (Paris: Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Nicolas Chau- dun, 2007); Isabelle Flour, “Style, nation, patrimoine: Du Musée de Sculpture Comparée au Musée des Monuments Français, 1879–1937,” in Jean-Claude Nemery, Michel Rautenberg, and Fabrice Thuriot, eds., Stratégies identitaires de conservation et de valorisation du patrimoine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 33–41. 27. For the results of Fournereau’s mission, see Lucien Fournereau and Jacques Porcher, Les Ruines d’Angkor: Étude artistique et historique sur les monuments khmers du Cambodge siamois (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890). 28. Edwards, Cambodge, 30–35. See also Bruno Dagens, Angkor: La forêt de pierre (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 60; Pierre Baptiste and Thierry Zéphir, “L’art khmer dans les collections nationales françaises,” in Pierre Baptiste and Thierry Zéphir, eds., L’Art khmer dans les collections du Musée Guimet (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2008), 14–15. I also intend to expand on the history of the Musée Indochinois in another article in order to bring to light the material practices of assemblage and re-creation that guided Delaporte in his compositions at the Indochinese Museum. These fanciful reconstructions were in sharp contrast with the accurate monumental reproductions of the Musée de Sculpture Comparée. The casts of this museum were made to be as irreproachable as possible in terms of their faithfulness to the original, as a token to their positive value to the science of art history. On the accuracy of this scientist display, see Isabelle Flour, “Les moulages du Musée de Sculpture Comparée: Viollet-le-Duc et l’histoire naturelle de l’art,” in Anne Lafont, ed., L’Artiste savant à la conquête du monde moderne (Strasbourg: Presses Universi- taires de Strasbourg, 2009), 219–30. 29. Le Bonheur, Angkor, 260. 30. Fournereau, “Rapport d’ensemble sur la mission archéologique accomplie dans le Siam et au Cambodge,” 11 August 1888, Paris, Archives Nationales, F17 2967, Fournereau; Delaporte, “Note relative à l’installation des Antiquités Cambodgiennes et aux autorisations à donner au Ministère de la Marine,” n.d. [ca. 1888–89], Paris, Archives Nationales, F21 4489, Musée Indochinois. 31. “Pagode d’Angkor,” L’Illustration, 5 October 1889, 280 (the emphasis is mine). On this pavilion, see also L. Farge, Exposition universelle de 1889 à Paris. Les constructions françaises et étrangères. Pavillons, édicules, portes monumentales, etc. (Paris: André Daly Fils & Cie, n.d. [ca. 1890]), 13–14.

80 getty research journal, no. 6 (2014) 32. See Pierre Nicolas, “L’Indochine à l’Exposition universelle,” in Pierre Nicolas, ed., Notices sur l’Indo-Chine. Cochinchine, Cambodge, Annam, Tonkin, Laos, Kouang-Tchéou-Ouan, publiées à l’occasion de l’Exposition universelle de 1900 ([Paris: Alcan-Lévy, 1900]), 3–13. 33. Edwards, Cambodge, 47. 34. Edwards, Cambodge, 48. 35. Maurice Normand, “L’exposition de l’Indo-Chine,” L’Illustration, 1 September 1900, 135. 36. Gervais Courtellemont, “Les danseuses du roi du Cambodge,” L’Illustration, 2 June 1906, 344–45. For a general account of the presence of Indochinese natives at the French universal expositions, see Alain Ruscio, “Du village à l’exposition: Les Français à la rencontre des Indochinois,” in Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., Zoos humains. XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 267–74; Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peo- ples, 1886–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 67–84 and 141–60. On the history of Cambo- dian dance and dancers, see Paul Cravath, Earth in Flower: The Divine Mystery of the Cambodian Dance Drama (Holmes Beach, Fla.: DatAsia, 2007 [1985]); Hideo Sasagawa, “Post/colonial Discourses on the Cambodian Court Dance,” Southeast Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2005): 418–41 (http://kyoto-seas.org/pdf/42/4/420403.pdf); Denise Heywood, Cambodian Dance: Celebration of the Gods (Bangkok: River Books, 2008). 37. Georges Bois, “Le sculpteur Rodin et les danseuses cambodgiennes,” L’Illustration, 28 July 1906, 64–65; Georges Bois, Les Danseuses cambodgiennes en France (Hanoï-Haïphong: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1913); Musée Rodin, Rodin et les danseuses cambodgiennes: Sa dernière passion (Paris: Musée Rodin, 2006); Heywood, Cambodian Dance, 50–59. 38. Bois, Les Danseuses cambodgiennes en France. 39. Henri Vildieu to Louis Delaporte, 9 October and 25 November 1905, Paris, Archives du Musée Guimet, Fonds Stern-Delaporte. 40. Courtellemont, “Les danseuses du roi du Cambodge,” 344–45. On the history of the trope of a continuity between the stone bas-reliefs of Angkor and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cambodian dancers, see Sasagawa, “Post/colonial Discourses on the Cambodian Court Dance.” 41. Pierre Guesde, “L’Indochine,” in L’Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille décrite par ses auteurs (Marseille: Commissariat Général de l’Indochine, 1922), 79–81. 42. The intentions of the EFEO in taking part in the colonial exposition can be sensed in an article by the curator of Angkor: Henri Marchal, “Le tourisme mondial: Les merveilles d’Angkor,” L’Illustration, 19 November 1921, 468–69. For a history of the development of tourism at Angkor, see Tim Winter, Post-Conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism: Culture, Politics and Development at Angkor (London: Routledge, 2007). For a brief survey of the restoration work carried out by the EFEO, see Catherine Clémentin-Ohja and Pierre-Yves Manguin, Un Siècle pour l’Asie: L’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1898– 2000 (Paris: EFEO, 2001), 91–100. 43. Léandre Vaillat, “L’Indo-Chine à Marseille,” L’Illustration, 29 July 1922, 91. 44. Ludovic Naudeau, “L’Indochine,” L’Illustration, 21 October 1922, 378; Ruscio, “Du village à l’exposition,” 273. 45. For the libretto, see Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille, Lakmé: Opéra en trois actes (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883). On the opera itself, see André Segond, ed., Lakmé (Arles: Actes Sud, Solin, 1997). 46. Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 247–50. The Blanches, as well as Auberlet, had cleaned temples at Angkor in the 1920s, as is noted by Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 194. 47. See, for example, illustrations of the interior of the pavilion in Edna Nicoll, A travers l’Exposition coloniale (Paris: Edna Nicoll, 1931), 131–40, and also Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 243–51. 48. Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris en 1931: L’Indochine (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1930), 35–36.

Flour Angkor at the Universal Expositions 81 49. Anne Décoret-Ahiha, Les Danses exotiques en France, 1880–1940 (Pantin: Centre National de la Danse, 2004), 43–47, and “L’exotique, l’ethnique et l’authentique: Regards et discours sur les danses d’ailleurs,” Civilisations: Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 53 (2005): 159–60; Cravath, Earth in Flower, 141–43; Sasagawa, “Post/colonial Discourses on the Cambodian Court Dance”: 427–29; Heywood, Cambodian Dance, 65. 50. Morton thus stresses the inconsistencies inherent in the French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), which the architects of the 1931 Exposition had to negotiate: “Colonized peoples had to be proved barbarous to justify their colonization but the mission civilisatrice required that they be raised above savagery. If they acquired too much civilization and became truly assimilated to France, colonization could no longer be defended, having fulfilled its mission” (Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 178–79). 51. Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Hound- mills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 168. 52. On the nationalist Indian contestation around the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, see Deborah L. Hugues, “Kenya, India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924,” Race & Class 47, no. 4 (2006): 66–85. On the 1924 Exhibition itself, and the protest over the representation of West Africa, see Geppert, Fleeting Cities, 134–78. For an overview of British imperial and colonial exhibitions, see John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 96–120. 53. On the anti-imperialist contestation in 1931, see Jody Blake, “The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art Indigène in the Service of the Revolution,” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1 (2002): 35–58; Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 98–134. See also Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L’Exposition Coloniale (Brussels: Complexe, 1991), 111–34; Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 96–129; Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 34–71. 54. Léon Binet to Philippe Stern, curator at the Musée Guimet, 18 June 1937, Paris, Archives du Musée Guimet, Fonds Stern-Delaporte. 55. Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina. 56. On this topos, see Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 27; Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 235–36; Edwards, Cambodge, 20, 25, 28, 29. 57. At the 1922 Exposition, directors Joyeux and Gaston Revel shot movies titled Sous l’œil de Bouddha and Tao, respectively. Both were released in 1923. See Commandant Claustre, “La presse française,” in L’Exposition nationale coloniale de Marseille décrite par ses auteurs (Marseille: Commissariat Général de l’Indochine, 1922), 294–95.

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