This cluster was the product of a symposium entitled, "Exhibiting the Nation: World's Fairs, International Exhibitions, and the Place of Southeastern and East Central Europe" held at the University of Texas, Austin, in October 2007. Thanks go to the University of Texas for funding the event and to the fourteen participants for sharing their new and intellectually exciting work. I extend particular gratitude to Christopher Long, my coorganizer, for facilitating the event. Finally, I would like to recognize the special efforts of Cathleen Giustino, one of the symposium participants, in helping to coordinate the publication of this cluster.

1 Fairs were one of the institutions that, according to Tony Bennett's influential formulation, best exemplified the “exhibitionary complex” that included the nineteenth-century phenomena of the museum and the department store. See Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73–102. This “complex” has attracted increased attention in the east European field. For example, this fall (2010) the Slavic Review 69, no. 3 (Fall 2010) University of Western Ontario will host the conference “Museums and the Exhibitionary Complex in Central Europe, 1850–1939.” In using the terms east and west here, I acknowledge the very constructed and problematic nature of these designations. On the question of the east, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), and on the west, see Carrier, James, ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995 Google Scholar).

2 See, for example, Rydell, Robert, Findling, John, and Pelle, Kimberly, eds., Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States (Washington, D.C., 2000);Google Scholar Rydell, Robert and Gwinn, Nancy, eds., Fair Representations: World'sFairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam, 1994 Google Scholar); and Greenhalgh, Paul, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, Eng., 1988 Google Scholar).

3 See Rydell, Robert, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1987 Google Scholar); Hoffenberg, Peter, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, 2001 Google Scholar).

4 For a few “eastern” reactions to western displays, see Carter Vaughn Findley, “An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gulnar, 1889,” Amerian Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998): 15–49; and Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt, 2d ed. (Berkeley, 1991), 1–134.Google Scholar

5 Although the term eastern Europe has fallen out of favor, especially with scholars working on regions and peoples north of the Danube, I have consciously used it here, to suggest that there was a shared eastern European experience—even before the Cold War—namely, declining and reforming multinational empires, fluid and “hermaphrodite” identities, “small nation” complexes and dynamics, and ambiguous entanglements with “west” and“east.” For the purposes of this introduction and the cluster, Russia is largely left out of the discussion.

6 Work on Cold War fairs in eastern Europe is also a relatively new and productive area of study, one recently given an intellectual boost by a symposium organized by Gyorgy Peteri in Budapest in May 2009.

7 For an insightful theoretical discussion of the concept of “display,” see Barker, Emma, Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven, 1999), 8–17 Google Scholar. See also Carrier, David, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham, 2006 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Cherry, Deborah and Cullen, Fintan, eds., Spectacle and Display (New York, 2008 Google Scholar).

8 In many cases, east (or central) European design innovations—such as the modernist Austrian pavilion in St. Louis in 1904—drew the attention of and had an impact on American designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright. See, for example, Christopher Long, “Modernism and National Identity: The Austrian Pavilion at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in St. Louis” (paper presented at the conference “ Exhibiting die Nation,” University of Texas, Austin, October 2007). See also Long, Christopher, “The Viennese Secession's Stil and Modern American Design,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 2007): 6–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 In fact, “folk,” like “oriental,” themes, as well as the materials and form of east European handicrafts, became important inspirations for turn of the century “arts and crafts” design sensibilities. Eric Anderson,“Transylvanian Villages to Viennese Salons: Culture on Display at the 1873 World's Fair” (paper presented at the conference“Exhibiting the Nation,” University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).

10 Freifeld, Alice, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (Baltimore, 2000), 230–54;Google Scholar Dabrowski, Patrice, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington, 2004), 181–26.Google Scholar On the Vienna Universal Exhibition of 1873 and also the L'viv exhibition of 1894, see, for example, Unowsky, Daniel, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, 2005), 54, 72 Google Scholar.

11 See Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 78.

12 Bennet also talks about the fair as a site for the development of academic “disciplines” like anthropology; this theme has been developed elsewhere in the fair literature. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 81. See, for example, Parezo, Nancy and Fowler, Don, Anthropology at theFair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln, 2007 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed).

13 See, for example, Celik, Zeynep, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, 1992).Google Scholar See also Long, “The Viennese Secession's Stil.”

14 On the Budapest fair and urban tourism, see Alexander Vari,“Commercialized Modernities: A History of City Marketing and Urban Tourism Promotion in Paris and Budapest from the Nineteenth-Century tothe Inter-War Period” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2005).

15 See Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 230–54; and Dabrowski, Commemorations, 181–26.

16 Rossner, Rachel, “The Culmination of a Dream: The Exhibition of Croatian Art at the 1896 Exhibition in Budapest” (paper presented at the conference “Exhibiting the Nation,” University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).Google Scholar

17 Dean, Michael W., “Dzan Kudla at the Fair: The American Settlement at the Czechoslav Ethnographic Exposition of 1895” (paper presented at the conference “Exhibiting the Nation,” University of Texas, Austin, October 2007)Google Scholar.

18 See, for example, Smith, Woodruff D., Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York, 2002 Google Scholar); Roche, Daniel, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, Eng., 2000);Google Scholar Daunton, Martin and Hilton, Mathew, eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 For one example, see Gabor, Gyani, Parlour and Kitchen: Housing and Domestic Culture in Budapest, 1870–1940 (Budapest, 2002).Google Scholar

20 Anderson, “Transylvanian Villages.”

21 See Houze, Rebecca, “Austrian, Hungarian or Romanian? Embroidery and Empire at the 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung” (paper presented at the conference “Exhibiting the Nation,” University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).Google Scholar

22 On the Bosnian pavilion, see Makas, Emily Gunzburger, “The Bosnian Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle” (paper presented at the conference “Exhibiting the Nation,” University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).Google Scholar