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2 books match the query 'Exoticism'
Essay on Exoticism
An Aesthetics of DiversityVictor Segalen
Duke University Press, 2002
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.
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.
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Exoticism and the Culture of Exploration, Volume 26
Robert P. Maccubbin and Christa Knellwolf, eds.
Duke University Press, 0
Historians use the phrase “the cult of the exotic” to describe the fascination with the foreign or strange that both led to and was intensified by the eighteenth century’s scientific and imperialistic ventures in the Pacific and elsewhere. This volume offers new historical contexts for encounters both real and imaginary and shows the evolution of Europeans’ ideas about themselves and those cultures they considered exotic. The essays draw on a wide variety of sources—art, architecture, scientific and literary works, journals and diaries, and the European popular cultural and political press—to explore eighteenth-century perceptions of the exotic and to demonstrate just how far-reaching “the cult of the exotic” was.
Contributors. Geraldine Barnes, Alexandra Cook, David Culpin, John Greene, Suzanne Kiernan, Christa Knellwolf, Adrian Mitchell, Lisa O’Connell, David Paxman, Ali Uzay Peker, Glynis Ridley, Nicholas Rogers, Walter Veit
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