Representing the Exotic and the Familiar

The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a 'fetishizing process', as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a 'first world' from a 'third world', the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the 'exotic' to the comparatively 'familiar' space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.