Representing the Exotic and the Familiar : Politics and Perception in Literature

"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"-- Provided by publisher Representing the Exotic and the Familiar Editorial page Advisory board Title page Copyright page Table of contents Series editor’s preface Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction Foreword: Literary politics and perception: Moving beyond representation Part I. Traversing unfamiliar spaces Chapter 1. Magical modernities: The familiar and the exotic on Indian lifestyle TV Lifestyle pedagogy and televisual modernities Managing fate, fortune and risk: Tele-astrologers “Meet your better self”: Religious TV, enterprising enchantment and neo-spiritualism Governmentality and beyond: Somatic publics and “magnified” gurus Exoticizing the familiar?: Doing media modernities differently Chapter 2. Kipling’s “wild and strange” India: The “insider” perspective of the short stories Newer maps for reading Kipling The exotic tale-teller: The culturally “other” Kipling Bridging imperial ideologies and native beliefs “The Two-sided Man” telling stories of “Mine Own People” Straddling exotic and familiar territory: Kipling’s cultural boundary-crossings Chapter 3. Exoticism and familiarity in Victor Segalen’s travel poetry The intellectual, the dilettante, the amateur and the exote Stèles / 古今碑錄 [Gu jin bei lu] Segalen’s relationship to his Chinese sources The exote and le divers Chapter 4. Cambodia through Western eyes: The exotic, the familiar, and the universal French colonial era “Genre” fiction: Crime and thriller General fiction Chapter 5. Italian travel narratives on twentieth century China: Alterity, distance and self-identification Impressions, allegories, dystopias China as a verminaio in mid-1920s fascist travel literature La Cina è Vicina: The PRC in 1950s leftist Italian travel literature 1980s Italian travel narratives from Maoland Chapter 6. Affect labelling as a means of challenging exotic stereotypes in readings of Salwa Bakr’s “The Golden Chariot” Experiencing empathy with literary characters The life story of an Egyptian prisoner Defusing the destructive power of stereotypes The possibility to feel compassion Chapter 7. Exoticization of Russia and the Russian people in Polish literature The absence of Russia in postcolonial discourse and its reasons The attempts to orientalize Russia: A mysterious “Russian soul” The absence of Polish literature in postcolonial discourse Polish-Russian relations and the image of Russia and Russian people Exoticization Exoticization strategies Selection of information to stress the country’s intellectual and cultural backwardness Hyperbolization in the description of reality Using the locus horridus (terrible place) topos Part II. Mediating local voices Chapter 8. The power and powerlessness of the exotic status Chapter 9. Challenging taxonomies of the “local” and the “exotic”: The works of Hansda Showvendra Shekhar Displacement of centres: Fluidity and Welding of Textual Solidity and the Unseen Hansda’s texts: Deconstructing hierarchies of the rational and the beyond Beyond the postcolonial: Reading the local and the exotic Chapter 10. Overturning the familiar and the exotic: The fiction of Ranendra and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar The Indian writer and the (exotic) representation of the subaltern The neo-colonial Lords of the Global Village Representing adivasi women Religion as a tool of cultural imperialism and women’s subordination Other models of governance and resistance Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance Deconstructing the Adivasi The trope of prostitution Reader responses Two writers, two approaches to representing the Santhals Chapter 11. Translation as the interplay of the familiar and the exotic in A. K. Ramanujan’s Poems of Love and War Defamiliarization in translation Translation of a poem into a poem Analysis of the poems Chapter 12. The exotic and the familiar and translation Chapter 13. A play of the familiar and the exotic through the lens of Madhwacharya’s Bhasha theory: The Sangraha Ramayana and its translations Sankaracharya and Ramanujacharya Madhwacharya Madhwacharya’s students Madhwacharya and the Ramayana The place of Ramayana in Hinduism The Ramayana – comparison of texts Meeting of Rama and Parsurama Translations Chapter 14. Exoticizing 1984: Trauma, telling and the anti-Sikh pogrom Traumatic past as exotic Politics of remembering 1984 (Un)familiar violence of 1984 Part III. Transcending familiar boundaries Chapter 15. André Brink’s A Dry White Season as film: Foreignization and domestication Translational approaches: A short overview Equivalence theories Systemic approaches Translation as mediation between cultures: The concepts domestication and foreignization “Skopos”-theory Film as a distinctive medium A Dry White Season: Skopos, manipulation, domestication and foreignization Skopos Translation Manipulation, domestication and foreignization Mise-en-scène-elements as manipulative, domesticative or as elements of foreignization: A semiotic interpretation within a cinematographic sign system The choice of actors Acting style The novel and the film Space as manipulation Direct environment Superposition and background projection Sound Chapter 16. No tiger in the tale: Effacing otherness in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi Writing an exotic India in the ancient past and the multicultural present Present-day concerns of multiculturalism and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi Canadian ethnocultural diversity and representation in Life of Pi: Who speaks? Being and becoming, disruption and transformation: An alternative reading of Life of Pi Effacing identity: Deculturation into schisms and liminality Chapter 17. From exotic to domestic: The other, the native and cultural relativism in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible Encountering exotic; challenging homeland Exoticism, otherness, and trope of disability Depiction of fictional native characters Depiction of historical native characters Chapter 18. V. S. Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri: The politics of identity and the performance of exoticism Exoticism as a mode of representation Representation based identity politics Appropriation of language for the production of identity Chapter 19. Turning the exotic into the familiar: Tabish Khair’s novels and their contemporary cultural and political context Political contexts of terrorism, past and contemporary Western perceptions of Muslims Identity-anxiety and conflict among immigrants Chapter 20. Coloured exoticism in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child The emergence of the exotic Representing the exotic: The racialized exotic as a body of knowledge Racializing the social: Socializing race Miscegenation: The idea of the exotic as sheath Chapter 21. Exotic madness in Caribbean literature: From marginalization to empowerment and indigenization Caribbean women migrants and exotic madness Challenging exoticization Achieving empowerment in stories by Dionne Brand and Jean Rhys Indigenizing exotic madness Making the exotic familiar in Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child Taxonomic instability and the Jean Rhys connection Chapter 22. Plant/woman encounters in contemporary fairy tale adaptations From zoocentrism to phytocentrism: Fairy-tale collisions in contemporary art “The fairy tale is in everything I do:” Janaina Tschäpe’s botanical hybrids in Melantropics Bibliography Author index General index