In September 1954 the United States Information Service presented Cinerama's panoramic widescreen projection and surround-sound technology at the First Damascus International Exposition. This exercise in “soft-power” cultural diplomacy underlay the U.S. government's participation in the event, a “festival” of national progress and development staged in the midst of three interrelated contests—the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and a multisided struggle for Arab supremacy via control of Syria's foreign policy orientation. Drawing on declassified U.S. diplomatic correspondence, Syrian press coverage of the exposition, and the content of the film This Is Cinerama, this article compares U.S. and Syrian perceptions of the exposition and the multimedia spectacle it embodied. In the process, the article explores the reach of U.S. “soft-power” cultural diplomacy efforts in the Arab world after World War II, as well as the relationship among politics, technology, and cultural representation.

Like much of the “developing world,” Syria experienced urban population growth at historically unprecedented rates in the 1950s. Such rapid urbanization, like all transformative historical phenomena, animates (and, to a certain extent, reifies) a host of dreams and anxieties in those who experience it. To get an inkling of how “Syrians”—as individuals, groups, or representatives of institutions—felt about these changes, one has to look beyond the ubiquitous and frequent pronouncements of intellectuals and government officials extolling the virtues of modernity and the liberating effects of science and technology.

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International fairs—the “folk-festivals of capitalism”—have long been a favorite topic of historians studying quintessential phenomena of modernity such as the celebration of industrial productivity, the construction of national identities, and the valorization of bourgeois leisure and consumption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. To date, however, such spectacles occurring in the modern Middle East remain largely unexamined. This article, an analysis of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition in 1954, is conceived in part as a preliminary effort to redress this historiographic imbalance.

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