The Making of Geographies of Knowledge at World’s Fairs: Morocco at Expo 2000 in Hanover

Abstract

The influence of world’s fairs today is hard to define—their cultural resistance, however, is evident. The viability of these erstwhile protagonists in the aesthetic dramatization of the modern narrative is surprising because one expects new representational formats to respond to the rather moderate story lines of late modernity. In previous ages the world’s fairs of modernity “were not just exhibitions of the world, but the ordering of the world itself as an endless exhibition” (Mitchell, 1989, p. 218). In light of that enormous impact, what representations of today’s world do contemporary world’s fairs provide?