For graduate school, one of our writers is reading a fantastic book by Timothy Mitchell titled Colonising Egypt. The book deconstructs the historical and political conceptions of order and truth of the European colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.
He recommended it to the staff and being the smarty-pants we all are, we spent the last week reading it.
A peculiar section on the prominence of exhibitions in Europe caught our attention:
Spectacles like the world exhibition and the Orientalist congress set up the world as a picture. They ordered it up before an audience as an object on display, to be viewed, experienced and investigated. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London claimed to present to its six million visitors ‘a living picture’ of the development of mankind. Orientalism, it was claimed in the same way at the inauguration of the Ninth International Congress in London in 1892, had ‘displayed before us the historical development of the human race’. An earlier Orientalist, the great French scholar Sylvestre de Sacy, had envisioned this process of display in a manner very similar to the future world exhibitions. He had planned to establish a museum, which was to be ‘a vast depot of objects of all kinds, of drawings, of original books, maps, accounts of voyages, all offered to those who wish to give themselves to the study of [the Orient]; in such a way that each of these students would be able to feel himself transported as if by enchantment into the midst of, say, a Mongolian tribe or of the Chinese race, whichever he might have made the object of his studies’. By the later decades of the century, almost everywhere that Middle Eastern visitors went they seemed to encounter this rendering up the world as a picture. They visited the museums, and saw the cultures of the world portrayed in objects arranged under glass, in the order of their evolution.
This exhibition behind glass is taking place here on tumblr. Behind the glass of the internet, post after post is taken as reality — a window depicting what reality should or shouldn’t be. Who are we, or rather, who are you?
We aren’t sure how healthy tumblr is for mankind.
But we do know one thing: Don’t believe those hippies in Seattle, bacon fucking rocks. In every form.
Pros: Bacon! Also, not called “Fuck Yeah Bacon.”
![For graduate school, one of our writers is reading a fantastic book by Timothy Mitchell titled Colonising Egypt. The book deconstructs the historical and political conceptions of order and truth of the European colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.
He recommended it to the staff and being the smarty-pants we all are, we spent the last week reading it.
A peculiar section on the prominence of exhibitions in Europe caught our attention:
Spectacles like the world exhibition and the Orientalist congress set up the world as a picture. They ordered it up before an audience as an object on display, to be viewed, experienced and investigated. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London claimed to present to its six million visitors ‘a living picture’ of the development of mankind. Orientalism, it was claimed in the same way at the inauguration of the Ninth International Congress in London in 1892, had ‘displayed before us the historical development of the human race’. An earlier Orientalist, the great French scholar Sylvestre de Sacy, had envisioned this process of display in a manner very similar to the future world exhibitions. He had planned to establish a museum, which was to be ‘a vast depot of objects of all kinds, of drawings, of original books, maps, accounts of voyages, all offered to those who wish to give themselves to the study of [the Orient]; in such a way that each of these students would be able to feel himself transported as if by enchantment into the midst of, say, a Mongolian tribe or of the Chinese race, whichever he might have made the object of his studies’. By the later decades of the century, almost everywhere that Middle Eastern visitors went they seemed to encounter this rendering up the world as a picture. They visited the museums, and saw the cultures of the world portrayed in objects arranged under glass, in the order of their evolution.
This exhibition behind glass is taking place here on tumblr. Behind the glass of the internet, post after post is taken as reality — a window depicting what reality should or shouldn’t be. Who are we, or rather, who are you?
We aren’t sure how healthy tumblr is for mankind.
But we do know one thing: Don’t believe those hippies in Seattle, bacon fucking rocks. In every form.
Pros: Bacon! Also, not called “Fuck Yeah Bacon.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksg5pdsvde1qa67nno1_r1_500.jpg)
