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“When Camels Fly”: The 1934 Tel Aviv Levant Fair and Colonial Representations in Palestine
Abstract
The Levant Fair, which opened on April 26, 1934, was previously known as the Near East fair. However, by the early 1930s the fair had outgrown its previous venues, and the Tel Aviv municipality commissioned the planning and building of new and permanent fair grounds in an open (then) undeveloped area north of the city. Planning the new venue was entrusted to a group of architects, most of who migrated from Europe upon graduation from some of the famous faculties of architecture in Vienna, Rome, Dessau and Paris. El-Hanani, Kauffman, Sharon and their colleagues are credited for the transformation Tel Aviv was going through in the 1930s, when hundreds of modernist building facades (known today as the Bauhaus vernacular of the International Style) emerged all over the city, eventually granting Tel Aviv the status of a World Heritage Site by UNESCO several decades later, in 1994. Rather than reading the fair as an extension of the city, I suggest to perceive Tel Aviv as an extension of the fair, not only through the victory of modernist architecture and the proliferation of International Style structures throughout the city, but rather, through the effect of the fair on the spectator. Following Timothy Mitchell, I claim that fairgoers’ perception of the world was altered: men and women who traveled though the world by proxy and viewed its wares classified and presented behind glasses, now left the fair back into the city to look at it as a much bigger exhibition; the white pavilions turned into the white city, streets into commercial areas, showcasing wares behind glasses and newly constructed department stores. I therefore argue that the Levant Fair was a high modernist project and a dreamscape, a city within a city, and the triumph of a futuristic vision for a liberal, bourgeois and consumerist city, which also produced Tel Aviv (and by extension – Palestine) as a modern, European and exclusively Jewish colony, de-Arabized and western-oriented. But the fair was not just a self-congratulatory festival of hegemony. It was also a site of contestation: between empire and nationalist interests, elites and (working class) masses, between rival political ideologies and between traders and exhibitors competing for consumers’ attention and wallets. Despite its official claim for cohesion, the Levant Fair was therefore a free market of wares, ideas and social roles.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Urban Studies