Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism

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Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 12-29

  Forsdick, Charles ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149494623     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: 17500176     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/jsp.2001.24.3.12     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Edward W. Said, Traveling Theory , in The World, the Text and the Critic (London, Vintage 1991. First published 1983), pp. 226-47.
2. EdwardW. Said, Traveling Theory Reconsidered , in Critical Reconstructions, edited by RobertM. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 251-65.
3. For an application of Said s ideas, with particular attention to the emergence of American poststructuralist thought, see Traveling Theory: France and the United States, edited by Ieme Van Der Poel and Sophie Bertho (Madison, Teaneck, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London, Associated University Presses, 1999).
4. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad, The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality , Race and Class, 36:3 (1995), 1-20.
5. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, Routledge, 1995).
6. Stuart Hall, When was the post-colonial ?. Thinking at the limit , in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 242-60 (p. 259).
7. The clearest example of this lexical controversy that characterizes much postcolonial criticism is the epithet post(-)colonial itself. For a useful discussion of this issue, see B. Ashcroft, On the hyphen in post-colonial , New Literatures Review, 32 (1996), 23-32. There are some notable exceptions to this under-theorization, such as Roger Célestin, From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories, Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991).
8. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (New York and London, Routledge, 1998).
9. Renata Wasserman, Re-inventing The New World: Cooper and Alencar , Comparative Literature, 36:2 (1984), 130-45 (p. 132). See also Renata Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830-1930 (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1994).
10. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré (Paris, Seuil, 1982); Francis Affergan, Exotisme et altérité (Paris, PUF, 1987); Michel de Certeau, L Ecriture de l histoire (Paris, Gallimard, 1975); Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal: essai sur les phénomènes extremes (Paris, Galilée, 1990); and Jean-Didier Urbain, Secrets de voyage: menteurs, imposteurs, et autres voyageurs invisibles (Paris, Payot, 1998). Urbain reclaims the term exoticism to describe shifting patterns of cultural diversity resistant to contemporary globalization, suggesting that it is a quality inherent in perception and dimension. Focusing on travellers undertaking interstitial journeys, he describes them as worlds very close to home, terra obscura and terra prohibita-exotic universes for journeys with regard to which geographical distance is no longer a decisive criterion (104) and attempting to to reinvent this world s exoticism (438-9). (Translations mine.)
11. Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories, p. 4. 12 Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 3.
12. Two of Edward Said s texts have been translated, but have attracted little critical attention: L Orientalisme: l Orient crée par l Occident (Paris, Seuil, 1980), and Culture et impérialisme (Paris, Fayard/Le Monde diplomatique, 2000). Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak remain unavailable in French translation, but James Clifford s The Predicament of Culture has appeared as Malaise dans la culture: l ethnographie, la littérature et l art au XXe siècle (Paris, Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1996).
13. See Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, Introduction: The Post-Colonial Problematic in France , in their Post-Colonial Cultures in France (New York and London, Routledge, 1997), pp. 3-25.
14. Emily Apter, French Colonial Studies and Postcolonial Theory , SubStance, 76-7 (1995), 169-80 (p. 171).
15. See Victor Segalen, Essai sur l exotisme, in Oeuvres complètes, Volume I, edited by Henry Bouiller, 2 vols (Paris, Laffont, 1995), pp. 745-81 (p. 760). Translations from this text are mine.
16. On this subject, see Yaël Schlick, The French Kipling : Pierre Mille s Popular Colonial Fiction , Comparative Literature Studies, 34.3 (1997), 226-41.
17. Roland Lebel, Histoire de la littérature coloniale (Paris, Larose, 1931), p. 79. (Translation mine.) For a fuller account, see Jean-Marc Moura, Littérature coloniale et exotisme. Examen d une opposition de la théorie littéraire coloniale , in Regards sur les littératures coloniales, 2 vols, edited by Jean-François Durand (Paris, L Harmattan, 1999), II, pp. 21-39; and Yaël Schlick, Re-Writing the Exotic: Mille, Segalen, and the emergence of littérature coloniale , Dalhousie French Studies, 35 (1996), 123-34.
18. Louis Cario and Charles Régismanset, L Exotisme. La Littérature coloniale (Paris, Mercure de France, 1911), p. 285.
19. See, for example, Jennifer Yee, Clichés de la femme exotique (Paris, L Harmattan, 2000), p. 22.
20. See Charles Forsdick, Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 58-80.
21. On Gobineau s ambivalence, see Robert Young, Colonial Desire, pp. 99-109.
22. Victor Segalen, Le Maître-du-Jouir, in Oeuvres complètes, pp. 293-348 (p. 331). Translation mine.
23. See Charles Forsdick, L Exote mangé par les hommes , in Reading Diversity, edited by Charles Forsdick and Susan Marson (Glasgow, Glasgow French and German Publications, 2000), pp. 1-20.
24. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris, Présence Africaine, 1955), p. 31. Translation mine.
25. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (New York and London, Routledge, 1993), pp. 68-87.
26. Frantz Fanon, Racism and culture , in Toward the African Revolution, translated by Haakon Chevalier (New York and London, Monthly Review Press, 1967), pp. 29-44 (p. 35).
27. Denial of coevalness is a mechanism of Western anthropological representation, the first systematic study of which is to be found in Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, Columbia University Press, 1983).
28. Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder, Westview Press, 1996), p. 42.
29. René Ménil, De l exotisme colonial , in Antilles déjà jadis (Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1999), pp. 20-7 (p. 20). Translation mine.
30. On this subject, see Susan Hawthorne, The Politics of the Exotic: the paradox of cultural voyeurism , Meanjin, 48 (1989), 259-68, and Roland Suvélor, Folklore, exotisme, connaissance , Acoma, 2 (1971), 21-40.
31. Mildred Mortimer, Journeys through the French African Novel (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann; London, James Currey, 1990), and Romuald Fonkoua, Le voyage à l envers . Essai sur le discours des voyageurs nègres en France , in Les Discours des voyages, edited by Romuald Fonkoua (Paris, Karthala, 1998), pp. 117-45.
32. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London, Routledge, 1994), p. 34.
33. Gerry Smyth, The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems with Crossing the Border , in Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, edited by Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000), pp. 43-55 (p. 43).
34. Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris, Gallimard, 1990).
35. Edouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris, Gallimard, 1996).
36. The Carnets de l exotisme, edited by the Loti scholar Alain Quella-Villéger, were published by Le Torii in Poitiers for twenty-one issues until 1998. A new series will be launched in 2001.
37. Roger Célestin, From Cannibals to Radicals, pp. 5-7.
38. L Europe littéraire et l ailleurs, p. 53. The description of ALIUS as the utopian other is linked to Moura s use of Ricoeur s reference in Essais d herméneutique (Paris, Seuil, 1969) to the ideological and the utopian as the extremes of l imaginaire social, reflecting respectively self-preservation and self-questioning.
39. Bernard Mouralis, Les Contre-littératures (Paris, PUF, 1975).
40. Vincenette Maigne, Exotisme: évolution en diachronie du mot et de son champ sémantique , in Exotisme et création. Actes du colloque international de Lyon 1983, edited by R. Antonioli (Lyons, Hermès, 1985), pp. 9-16 (p. 11).