Ambient Empire: Ecologies, Colonies, and Nature Vivante in Modern Paris, 1860–1940

This dissertation is an art, architecture, and media history of greenhouses, aquariums, and colonial gardens in Paris (c. 1860–1940). Many of these spectacular sites were constructed at Exposition Universelles, world’s fairs that showcased imperial projects and new technologies. Because these simulated environments featured living beings, they required vast imperial networks and complex technological supports in order to keep animals and plants alive as they moved around the globe. Consequently, this dissertation narrates the rise of a biopolitics of the nonhuman—a transformation across the French empire that impacted architectural forms and their infrastructures as well as other art and media that similarly tried to capture, sustain, and convey living ecosystems.

I focus on the enormous influence of nonhuman life and infrastructural ecologies on modern spectacles in Paris through documentary evidence of these built sites alongside the modernist artworks of impressionist painters, early filmmakers, and surrealists who visited these popular attractions and interrogated their ideologies and effects. In particular, I examine James Tissot’s paintings of greenhouses, Georges Méliès’s films using aquariums, and Man Ray’s suite of photographs of colonial gardens alongside other modern media with which these artists interacted, including museums, Orientalist painting, ethnographic photography, human zoos, science fiction novels, film studios, and travel magazines.

Greenhouses, aquariums, and colonial gardens were sites of state propaganda. They guided visitors to think about race, technology, and empire, teaching lessons about the state’s biopolitical power over plant and fish specimens (and, by extension, their colonial equivalents) as well as the increasing artificiality of nature in the age of industrial empire. Each chapter also identifies one major modernist idea—atmosphere, infrastructure, and hybridity, respectively—that was foregrounded within these immersive environments and then debated across diverse fields, showing how art, science, and colonial policy interacted in Paris and overseas.