In the past decades and beyond, world’s fairs have proven to be excellent ‘laboratories for scrutinizing modernity’.2 Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Lieven de Cauter, Penelope Harvey, Rosalind Williams and many others have described world and imperial expositions of the second half of the nineteenth century as geopolitical manifestations of modernity. World’s fairs cannot only be described as cultural manifestations of geo-politics but also of chrono-politics. Johannes Fabian argues in Time and the Other that ‘geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics’.3 For Fabian, the modern perspective ‘denied coevality’ to any form of life different from its own; it construed the Other of itself as ‘living in another time’. The forward march of reason-guided progress exhibits the Other as outdated, primitive or as equivalent to such a decision, especially in combination with other expressions of spatial and time politics.4 At world and ethnographic expositions the Others were cast in ‘the role of backward, allochronic contemporary ancestors’ on which visitors were given the illusion of ‘a panoptic position of an omniscient spectator’.5 It would be a mistake, however, to take contemporaneity within the West for granted.