The book’s introduction analyzes Brett Bailey’s touring performance art piece entitled ‘Exhibit B’ (2013−15) and the controversies it generated in European cities to introduce the book’s larger theoretical framework on the intersection between race, the gaze, and display. It defines the book’s central notion of ‘institutionalized spectacularism’ and outlines four arenas in which this ‘culture of looking’ manifests itself in contemporary France: historical, socio-political, cultural, and disciplinary. Far from hermetic and completely independent, these different iterations of institutionalized spectacularsim constantly inform one another. What unites them are common gazing dynamics: racial and ethnic alterity is approached as an object on display, while the underlying structures legitimizing the spectator’s gaze evades inquiry. Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France, then, like the works it studies, suggests that to combat racist stereotypes that persist in the postcolonial moment requires exposing and subsequently interrogating the ways of looking underpinning them.