ABOUT THIS BOOK
In May 1853, Charles Dickens paid a visit to the “savages at Hyde Park Corner,” an exhibition of thirteen imported Zulus performing cultural rites ranging from songs and dances to a “witch-hunt” and marriage ceremony. Dickens was not the only Londoner intrigued by these “living curiosities”: displayed foreign peoples provided some of the most popular public entertainments of their day. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial difference, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work, and empire.
Peoples on Parade provides the first substantial overview of these human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain. Sadiah Qureshi considers these shows in their entirety—their production, promotion, management, and performance—to understand why they proved so commercially successful, how they shaped performers’ lives, how they were interpreted by their audiences, and what kinds of lasting influence they may have had on notions of race and empire. Qureshi supports her analysis with diverse visual materials, including promotional ephemera, travel paintings, theatrical scenery, art prints, and photography, and thus contributes to the wider understanding of the relationship between science and visual culture in the nineteenth century.
Through Qureshi’s vibrant telling and stunning images, readers will see how human exhibitions have left behind a lasting legacy both in the formation of early anthropological inquiry and in the creation of broader public attitudes toward racial difference.
REVIEWS
“Peoples on Parade breaks new ground in two increasingly prominent fields in the history of science: popularization and race. Dissolving the traditional dichotomy between the making and the popularization of knowledge, Sadiah Qureshi shows that science was made as well as staged in the shows she analyzes. Her book also transcends simple equations between exotic human displays and racist oppression, unpacking the complex social, political, and personal negotiations which made these shows such an important part of nineteenth-century public culture.”
— Ralph O’Connor, University of Aberdeen
“In vivid prose and with striking images, Peoples on Parade overturns conventional accounts of nineteenth-century ethnographic performances as naive encounters across an absolute imperial divide. Sadiah Qureshi reveals the productive interactions of performers, impresarios, audiences, and anthropologists in an imperial metropole already traversed by cultural, racial, and ethnic differences. This book will be of interest to students of empire, popular culture, and the history of science.”
— Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University
“Sadiah Qureshi’s sensitive and wide-ranging exploration of the troubled and freighted history of displayed peoples in nineteenth-century Britain richly complicates our understanding of the intersections between natural science, racial theories, and popular culture. Attending both to the forms of production and promotion of the shows and to the showmen, the audiences, the ethnologists, and the anthropologists who sought to define their meanings, she carefully illuminates the ways in which debates about human variety were produced on multiple sites and were subject to contestation, not least from the performers, who intervened, demonstrating their own, albeit constrained, agency.”
— Catherine Hall, University College London
“Peoples on Parade is a major contribution to the cultural history of Victorian Britain. Sadiah Qureshi offers a new perspective on the domestic imaginative life of the British Empire, deftly poised between the ‘high’ and popular cultures of race, science, religion, debates about foreign and colonial policy, and a vast commercial world which marketed exotic peoples through spectacular shows and sensational imprints. She offers an elegant rebuttal of those who still think imperialism was ‘absent minded’ or that it, or science, was merely the concern of an ‘official mind.’”
— Richard Drayton, King’s College London
“[E]ntertaining and instructive. . . . [T]he vividness, humour, poignancy and humanity of the relationships between showmen, public, and the participants on parade make for irresistible reading.”
— Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Literary Review
“Expertly researched and academically stimulating, . . [t]his book contributes to a growing body of literature that succeeds in providing an in-depth, interdisciplinary approach to the history of science through the lens of visual culture. Highly recommended.”
— D. M. Digrius, Choice
“[This] interesting, informative, and quite beautiful book is a great service to anthropology.”
— Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database
“[H]ighly informative and closely argued. . . . [A] valuable read.”
— Philip McEvansoneya, Journal of Victorian Culture
“[A] fascinating argument, a dizzying tour of the ethnic entrepreneurship of Victorian London supported by the brilliant visual evidence of posters, playbills, postcards and ephemera. As a decisive statement of how entertainment and ethnography coalesced in the fertile Petri dish of Victorian popular culture, resulting in far more subtle and contingent consequences than is permitted by reductionist assumptions of endemic nineteenth-century racism, Peoples on Parade is a brave, stimulating and important book.”
— Geoffrey A. C. Ginn, University of Queensland, Australian Journal of Politics and History
“[An] impressive new book.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Beautifully written, and rich in detail. . . . The work will appeal to scholars interested in imperialism, history of race, Victorian popularizers of science and nineteenth-century visual culture. There can be little doubt that it will feature on most course reading lists relating to the history of nineteenth-century science.”
— Efram Sera-Shriar, York University, Canada, British Journal for the History of Science
“The originality of this book and the importance of its contribution lies in the way Qureshi brings together various strands of nineteenth-century British history: the changing social landscape of the metropole, the networks of empire, and the diffuse origins of scientific ideas.”
— Radhika Natrajan, University of California, Berkeley, Invisible Culture
“A lavish, beautifully produced, and exotically illustrated spectacle. . . . This is an excellent and compelling book with a wide appeal: essential reading for those with a scholarly interest in the history of anthropology, race, and metropolitan cultures of empire but highly rewarding for those with a more casual interest in Victorian Britain and popular entertainment.”
— Historian
“Peoples on Parade is an important book that maps shifting perceptions of the relationships among spectacle, science, and race and reveals the ways in which exhibitions of non-Western peoples contributed to dynamic and contentious debates about human variation. Qureshi contributes to the vibrant scholarship on the relationship between popular culture and the cultures of nineteenth-century science, as well as consolidating arguments about the nature of Britain’s metropolitan imperial culture.”
— Cultural and Social History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ladies and Gentlemen, I Bring You… - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0001
[living foreign peoples, live performances, savages, mass entertainment, human exhibitions, nineteenth century, native villages]
This introductory chapter discusses the factors contributing to the widespread popularity of exhibitions of living foreign peoples in nineteenth century. Originally presented on a small scale as servants and shopkeepers, by the 1880s performers were displaced by the hundreds from their homelands and lived on site in ostensibly authentic “native villages.” Within this context, living foreign peoples were transformed into professional “savages” and became tied to new forms of cheap mass entertainment. (pages 1 - 12)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part One: Street Spectacles
Glimpsing Urban Savages - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0002
[human displays, human exhibitions, London, urban spectatorship, Henry Mayhew, demography, ethnic heterogeneity, showmen, urban savages]
This chapter explores the relevance of the streets in creating a market for human displays. In doing so, it examines how Londoners became the makers and users of urban spectatorship across social and ethnic divides, beginning with the journalist Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was heir to a long-standing tradition that presented London's streets as a spectacle and its inhabitants as alien and visually interesting sights. In turn, demography exhibited striking, but all too often forgotten, ethnic heterogeneity. Understanding how these racialized tropes, observational practices, and population differences developed and were self-consciously used is a helpful departure point for understanding how showmen courted their future clientele. (pages 15 - 46)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Artful Promotion - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0003
[shows, printed materials, London, promotional materials, displayed peoples]
This chapter explores how printed promotional materials shaped the meanings of shows for both potential and paying visitors. In doing so, it draws on the lessons of museological studies, which have shown that curatorial decisions regarding the context in which an artifact is placed, as well as its positioning and labeling, can all structure visitor responses. The discussion also adds to recent work that has explored the use of guidebooks by working-class visitors to the British Museum and the interpretation of panoramas. Examining promotional material in this vein suggests that it created a publicly accessible network of artifacts and claims that must be considered in discussions of how displayed peoples came to be consumable commodities. (pages 47 - 97)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part Two: Metropolitan Encounters
Managing Performance - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0004
[show manager, showmen, human displays, human exhibitions, foreign peoples]
This chapter focuses on the show manager. Show managers came from diverse backgrounds and had numerous motivations for displaying foreign peoples; but they all capitalized on their entrepreneurial instincts to bridge the gap between supply and the market demand they created in order to turn a profit. They also invented and shared many techniques to frame human display and which, when fully appreciated, suggest that managers played instrumental roles in shaping the shows' receptions and the knowledge they helped produce. (pages 101 - 125)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Recruiting Entertainers - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0005
[foreign peoples, human displays, human exhibitions, performers, self-expression]
This chapter explores the ways in which foreign peoples were recruited and transformed into performers while reflecting on why they may have become performers at all and how they experienced life abroad. Such discussion is intended to avoid casting performers as passive victims. Instead, the aim is to trace the many ways in which performers adapted to their new lives, often resisting being confined to the roles expected of them, while also locating these reflections within the broader context of the performers' often heavily circumscribed opportunities for such self-expression. (pages 126 - 154)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Interpreting Exhibitions - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0006
[spectators, performances, performers, patrons, audiences, human exhibitions, human displays]
This chapter examines the responses of spectators to both performances and performers. It highlights the ways in which the shows were interpreted as relevant for, among other issues, personal predilections for the curious, discussions of human development, foreign policy, military activity, and social satire. (pages 155 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part Three: The Natural History of Race
Transforming “Unfruitful Wonder” - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0007
[human displays, ethnological research, displayed peoples, Robert Gordon Latham, natural history, Crystal Palace]
This chapter first considers the ways in which human displays were made amenable to being used as opportunities for ethnological research in the early half of the nineteenth century. It then explores how displayed peoples were formally incorporated into ethnological education and practice by Robert Gordon Latham's curatorship of the court of natural history at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. It is argued that exhibited peoples were turned into ethnological specimens that became both the objects and the means of ethnological investigation among the lay public, phrenologists, physicians, anatomists, and ethnologists, and in a range of settings from institutionally backed private examinations to personal connections made at commercial performances. (pages 185 - 221)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The End of an Affair - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0008
[human displays, international exhibitions, international fairs, South Africa, nineteenth century, anthropology, entertainment, spectacle]
Human displays were incorporated into and ultimately transformed under the aegis of international fairs. This chapter traces how human displays developed by exploring the relationship between Savage South Africa, international fairs, and later nineteenth-century conventions of entertainment and spectacle. By exploring their shifting associations with institutionalized anthropology, it also suggests how the kinds of knowledge the shows produced were transformed in the final decades of the nineteenth century. (pages 222 - 270)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion Afterlives - Sadiah Qureshi
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226700984.003.0009
[human displays, human exhibitions, displayed peoples, nineteenth century, human variety]
This chapter summarizes the main themes covered in the preceding chapters and presents some final thoughts. This book has attempted to offer a history of displayed peoples that accounts for why they proved so commercially successful, how they were transformed from small entrepreneurial speculations into government-sponsored initiatives, and what their lasting significance has been to scientific debates on the nature of human variation in the nineteenth century. It suggests the need for more compelling accounts of how the association between displayed peoples and human variety was created and maintained. (pages 271 - 284)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Terminology
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
