Cultural Diplomacy and Europe's Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: Introduction

Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions – Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group – represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that was diplomatic – in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities – using means that were cultural – in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or ‘culture’, of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).

Mapping Miguel Covarrubias across Cultures and Disciplines

In this paper, I explore the Pageant of the Pacific, a sequence of mural-maps painted by the Mexican artist and illustrator, Miguel Covarrubias, for the San Francisco International Exposition of 1939–1940. By placing these mural-maps within the larger context of cultural geography and Covarrubias’s own theories of comparative anthropology, they offer an artistic and poetic explanation of the relationships found among the cultures of the Pacific Rim, drawing connections across historical epoch and geographical region. Within Covarrubias’s own historical context, these maps provide an important visual link that crosses disciplinary boundaries, providing insight into the intellectual conversation of his era and, perhaps, providing a model for interdisciplinarity in the present age as well.

Problematics of Democratizing Curatorial Power in the Royal Museum for Central Africa's Online Collection

What do a nineteenth-century ethnographic exhibit and a twenty-first-century museum website tool have in common? More than one might expect. Belgium’s 1897 International Exposition included a colonial exposition that displayed panoplies and dioramas of items taken under colonial violence in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These objects came to form the initial collection for Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, an institution that has in recent years underwent a period of renovation and expansion (reopening in 2018) with the aim of revisiting its history and displays. To create engagement with the museum, its website has offered a feature that allows visitors to curate virtual image boards of objects from the collection, with resulting effects semantically linked to the 1897 Brussels exposition. This online tool, while stemming from an admirable impulse to share curatorial control, falls short by juxtaposing items that tell of traumatic histories with no criticality or contextualizing information. Analyses of visual configurations of this tool, along with comparative examinations of the 1897 displays, offer evidence for this argument, as well as an example of how collections that represent painful histories call for especially thoughtful design of digital, publicfacing tools.