Blueprints for Haiti on the World Stage: Representing Race and Nation at the 1900 Exposition Universelle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The plans of Haitian diplomats to (quite literally) step up on the world stage during the 1900 exposition universelle in Paris mattered for Africa and its diasporas. International fairs empowered governments and individuals alike to reflect on their allegiances to both racial and (trans)national senses of self and community. However, citing financial constraints, Haiti did not move forward with a pavilion at a geographically symbolic locale in the heart of the French capital. This article offers a close reading of a curious item in the French national archives – what one might consider a book of lost dreams – a collection of blueprints and correspondence of Haitians, alongside representatives from other Latin American and African nations, that ultimately never participated in this world’s fair. I also juxtapose Haitian aspirations in relation to W.E.B. Du Bois’s pavilion about the Black experience in the United States and assess other events in which Haiti had a more solid presence, such as the Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893 and London’s First Pan-African Conference in 1900. By unraveling Haitians’ navigations of the landscape of international events across the Atlantic World, we might historicize the malleability of Blackness as a border-crossing bridge during the rise of Pan-Africanism at the turn of the century. As the first Black republic with a century-long legacy of freedom leading up to the 1900 exposition, Haiti’s representations of itself – whether imagined or actualized – reverberated for people of African descent everywhere. Even with dashed dreams for a pavilion, Haitian thought at this time contributes to our understanding of the workings of race, nation, and transatlantic legacies of European colonialism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".