This paper complicates the post-colonial canon of gazing at representations and performances of modernity as platforms that primarily mirror the Western experience of order and truth for all audiences. The ways in which that order was generative of and dependent on the articulation of the Orient as the humiliated civilizational Other of Western modernity is a fundamental tenet of post-colonial theory. This is an indispensable but incomplete account of the reflexive platforms of modernity, because it does not cover the entirety of the representative and performative politics, ushered by a variety of official rationales and strategically employed in all geographies of modernity. In this paper, I argue that modernity as a discursive order of representations was a language spoken not only by colonial or enlightenment etymologies, but also by its very "others" to stake their own claims (not necessarily successfully), make their own cases (not necessarily rationally), and negotiate their own conflicts (not necessarily with emancipatory outcomes). Relying on contemporaneous periodicals, booklets, pamphlets, official correspondence and reports, I illustrate this argument by tracing the adaptations in self-representations of Ottoman technology across three world's fairs: the 1863 Istanbul General Exposition, the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition, and the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. In doing so, my aim is to enrich the role Mitchell's canonical "world-as-exhibition" plays in political theory from the viewpoint of the Oriental other's own rationale for and self-assessment in these platforms of—what seemed from certain angles as—competition, rather than spectacle: the "world-as-exhibitionism."