Submitted by John K. Riggins on Wednesday, 10/19/2011, at 1:36 AM

Exoticism is the experience of the “alien-ness” of another culture. The initial innocent genuine curiosity of “foreignness” in exoticism is complicated by the question of power. Power and exoticism are embedded in one another. European explorers used exoticism as a justification to subjugate native persons. Landscape, race and the internal sense of self is tainted by colonial exoticism, a form of exoticism with the main intentions rooted in the ideas of subjugation and power. Colonial exoticism seeks to demoralize the subjugated by getting them to identify with their “inferior” foreignness. Exoticism does have a reversible relationship between groups of people, but it is deeply rooted in the historical context as a means for one group of people to subjugate or kill off another group of people.

Exoticism quotes:

p.176 “Exoticism is thus a first movement in the relation between countries and peoples”.

p.176 “The exotic vision is a view of man taken ‘from the other side’, from outside beyond geographical frontiers”.

p.178 “The problem of exoticism is thus connected to historical development and will only be resolved as the level of collective and personal involvement in the political struggle rises”.

The exotic

Submitted by John E. Drabinski on Monday, 10/3/2011, at 12:39 PM

In Menil's essay, he makes the claim that...