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This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto 'savage' or 'primitive' cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism. In concentrating on writers from the age of the New Imperialism (1880-1920), this book reveals an important contradiction at the heart of the exoticist impulse: the very expansion that enabled European writers to go in search of exotic Others ensured the eventual disappearance of the exotic. Turn-of-the-century writers of exoticism thus give voice to a deep nostalgia both for the values supposedly lost to the West in its process of modernization and for those once exotic places in which they found, with increasing disappointment, not pristine innocence but merely the traces of their own culture. The author concentrates on four writers - Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad - although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. The works of these four writers foreground attitudes and assumptions useful for understanding a wide array of phenomena: an examination of these works shows how nostalgia for a cultural Other was built into the intellectual configuration of modernism, throws light on the early history of anthropology, and helps us understand features of our own cultural formation that are becoming increasingly important in today's global village. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the 'weak thought' of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose poststructuralist theories are only now becoming known in the United States. 'Weak thought' seeks to supersede outmoded, metaphysical categories of thought, not by replacing them with something new, but by an elegaic, recollective, and rhetorical dwelling within those categories. The author also makes creative use of narrative theory, and draws on the recent 'new historicism', reading literary texts to excellent effect against the historical events that made them possible.
Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Global in scope, the book takes in everything from: * the latest 'Indo-chic' to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series * from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system *from Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian 'tourist novels'. This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.
Examines the ambiguous constructions of the Orient in the works of four major twentieth-century French writers.
In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period are examined in this volume through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.
Extraordinary global creations from the chef of Michelin-starred Junoon! Aliya LeeKong, one of New York City's top culinary innovators, has traveled the world to fulfill her passion to translate global flavors into accessible, delicious meals for you to cook at home. In this book, she transports you to faraway lands with more than 100 recipes inspired by both familiar and traditional Western recipes and the cultures she's visited during her culinary journeys. You will also learn the fascinating stories behind many of these globally inspired dishes and her simple techniques for mouthwatering recipes like: Harissa and cheese-stuffed fried olives Israeli couscous salad with lemon, fennel, and basil Kenyan coconut-coriander chicken Honey-braised lamb shanks with butternut squash and apples Mexican chocolate loaf cake Whether you're a culinary adventurer or a weeknight cook looking to spice up you repertoire, Exotic Table will take you on an unforgettable tour around the world--without leaving your kitchen.
This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the range of French and francophone encounters with the East from the medieval period to the present day. --book cover.
The Trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life) is a series of three films that Pier Paolo Pasolini completed before his horrifying assassination in 1975, and it remains among the most controversial of his cinematic works. In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble provides an incisive critical and theoretical study of these films and the Marxist filmmaker's complex, original concept of the cinematic medium. With the three films that make up the Trilogy of Life – The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, andThe Arabian Nights – Pasolini attempts to recapture the aura surrounding popular, predominantly oral forms of storytelling through a pro-modern vision of innocent, unalienated bodies and pleasures. In these works Pasolini appears to abandon the explicitly political engagement that marked his earlier works - films that led him to be identified with other radical filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. However, Pasolini insisted that these were his 'most ideological films,' and his political engagement translates into a mannerist, anti-classical style or what he called a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination,' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic contamination concerns the mediation between different cultures and different historical moments. Through stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life presents a genealogy of visual codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In these films Pasolini celebrates life, and perhaps therein lies their simple heresy.
From his premature death in 1919 until the final decades of the twentieth century, the French traveller, author, and naval doctor Victor Segalen remained relatively obscure, his extensive work on exoticism largely unavailable. With the appearance of the Complete Works in 1995, the dramatic scope and wide-ranging implications of his reflections on diversity were at last fully apparent. Segalen's understanding of the exotic is radically different from that of his colonial contemporaries. His exoticism - or Aesthetics of Diversity - focuses on the instability of contact between different cultures and represents a unique response to the decline of diversity triggered by colonialism and Westernization. Recent attention to Segalen in a variety of fields - post-modern sociology, post-colonialism, literary criticism, anthropology - indicates his role as a precursory theorist of the exotic whose work is of increasing contemporary relevance. At a moment when exoticism is rapidly emerging as a term of critical currency, this study of the genesis of Segalen's aesthetics is a timely contribution to work in this area.