Across the Cordon of the Color Bar: Japan and Korea as Subjects in the Capitalist World of Exhibitions

Abstract

Analyzing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expositions and their “human zoos” as instances of racialist subsumption of the colonies, I argue that they gave rise to a new form of objectification and subjectivity that cannot be subsumed into colonial or anticolonial dichotomies. In particular, I focus on the case of Japan and Korea as two countries whose fate diverged on the fair site and compare Japanese and American use of the fair as a means of claiming higher status in the racialized global hierarchy. Their convergence upon the so-called civilizing mission presaged the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905) and facilitated Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910. At the same time, however, Korean voices from inside the Japanese exhibition give a glimpse of new modern subjectivities that were forged in the furnace of colonial commodification.