Presenting the “True Face of Syria” to the World: Urban Disorder and Civilizational Anxieties at the First Damascus International Exposition

Abstract

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.