Essay On Exoticism

DIVA series of notes on alterity written by Victor Segalen between 1904 and 1918, and here translated into English for the first time, anticipates the post-colonial critique of colonial theory./div

The “Other”—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen’s early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of alterity, diversity, and ethnicity. Written over the course of fourteen years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism, Essay on Exoticism encompasses Segalen’s attempts to define “true Exoticism.” This concept, he hoped, would not only replace nineteenth-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries’ propensity to reduce the exotic to the “colonial.” His critique envisions a mechanism that appreciates cultural difference—which it posits as an aesthetic and ontological value—rather than assimilating it: “Exoticism’s power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise,” he writes. Segalen’s pioneering work on otherness anticipates and informs much of the current postcolonial critique of colonial discourse. As such Essay on Exoticism is essential reading for both cultural theorists or those with an interest in the politics of difference and diversity.

Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the ‘art of fiction’ debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction? This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of ‘exoticism’, arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a ‘self’ encountering an ‘other’ results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities – mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other – that befit an ‘exotic’ representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction. This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference – self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness – onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.

The history of East Asia can be most productively studied through a transnational, translingual, and transcultural approach to the region. In The Sinosphere and Beyond, twenty-six leading and emerging scholars use such approaches in rich clusters of essays on Historiography, Sino-Japanese Encounters, Law and Justice, Politics, Art, Literature, and Translation. Each essay builds on the legacy of Joshua Fogel, whose scholarship defined the contours of the Sinosphere in the Western world and beyond. The collection will be of interest to scholars and students with specific research concerns within these broader rubrics: from the towering progenitors of Japanese Sinology to gendered, diplomatic, and cultural dimensions of Sino-Japanese encounters; from Sinitic poetry to legal culture and revolutionary life; from art commerce and levels of literary expression to the quandaries of translation. In addition to offering a broad range of case studies, the volume is testimony to the methodological importance of a dynamic intra- and transregional approach for an understanding of the layered history of East Asia.

The Modernist Traveler considers figures whose writing about travel rebelled against a literary tradition of exoticism, adventure stories, and novelistic travelogues. Instead these writers initiated a modernist strain in travel writing and a shift in the literary establishment and the culture at large. Kimberley J. Healey focuses on those French writers and thinkers who traveled in order to experience a displacement of both the inner self and the physical body while writing against the prevalent tradition of travel literature. ø The modern self, modern time, colonial spaces, and the physical body are Healey?s concerns as she reads works by Victor Segalen, Paul Morand, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Saint-John Perse, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Nizan, Albert Londres, Andre Malraux, Valäry Larbaud, and Isabelle Eberhardt. This book shows how, in the field of French literature, these texts about travel best capture the modernist experience of being alone in a world of new technologies, cultural diversity, and anxiety about the self.

First English critical edition of a bilingual masterpiece with facsimile and facing-page translation

The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.

Positioning the Caribbean within the complexes of the world community, this collection uses the metaphor of the global Caribbean to discuss the multiple movements, identities, epistemologies and politics of the West Indies. Examining the processes of the transnational transport of peoples, languages, and literatures between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and North America, the essays look at the complexities of geographical, intellectual, and artistic migrations: at the ways Caribbean writers negotiate the construction of literary and political identities and the ways in which the Caribbean influenced writers and thinkers in North America or Europe. These kinds of reciprocal exchanges locate the islands of the Caribbean within a global context, as recipients of multi- and trans-national influence and as makers of transnational meaning. Building on the dynamic processes of globalization, this collection suggests that the Caribbean provides a perspective for thinking about multiple intercultural connections with the Caribbean that include antebellum New Englanders, the Jews of twentieth-century Europe, literary artists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France, and modern pleasure seekers. A culturally and linguistically rich region of the world, the Caribbean also provides a fascinating literature of its own that is complicated by its history of migration and colonization, as well as by its location between continents.