The Exotic

Description

The idea of the exotic is a paradox. On the one hand it denotes an experience, person, or object that is new and unfamiliar, while on the other hand it makes reference to a very longstanding and familiar category. Somehow, even though the exotic is new to us, we know in advance what to expect from it.

This is because since ancient times all sorts of cultural agents – explorers, politicians, artists, novelists, travel agents, reality-TV producers – have drawn upon the exotic as a stock of images, narratives and meanings that can be deployed when dealing with cultural difference. In times of war, exotic stereotypes portray the enemy as an inhuman brute; in peacetime, exotic places and peoples are idealized, often to critique our own culture, or to sell us a vacation from it. In the arts and in consumer culture, exotic styles and materials go in and out of fashion – this year’s exoticism is next year’s cliché. We might begin to wonder: does the exotic really exist at all? Or is it just a way of looking at something? Are there any circumstances under which we might ourselves be considered exotic?

This course will concentrate on four main sub-categories of the exotic, which are very old but still very prevalent: the oriental, the primitive, the marvelous, and the introduced. By reading literary texts from widely disparate times and places (from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Surinam to Pondicherry) we will seek to understand how exoticism functions as a structure of feeling and a category of taste. By analyzing how the exotic operates politically, culturally and historically, we will engage with some of the most important issues confronted by literary and cultural studies today: the legacies of colonization, decolonization and modernity, the impact of globalization, the implications of the environmental crisis and the collapse of humanism, the politics of cultural difference and economic inequity.

(Image: "Carta Marina" by Olaus Magnus (1539))