“Other” worlds in the showcase. The catalogs of universal exhibitions and the reproduction of the Western Colonialist discourse during the XIX century

Abstract

This article aims to study the reproduction of Western colonialist discourse in the universal exhibitions in the late nineteenth century. In order to achieve this, the author resorts to the critical study of the discourse used in the Catalogues that the participating countries prepared for said exhibitions. A series of symptomatic tendencies in Western discourse can be found there-- both conceptual and semantic--; they are contextually evidenced in the ethnocentric nature of the dominating discourse in the West, as well as the appropriation of a Eurocentric discourse by the United States as an emerging power.