European identity and literature have developed on a bedrock of constant confrontation with the 'exotic'. If, in 1978, Said's seminal Orientalism has convincingly demonstrated that the prevailing image of the 'Orient' was a Western construct, generated by a complex set of economic and political concerns, it is equally true that exotic representations have defined the European culture from which they originated. The appropriation and subsequent domestication of the exotic have variously reflected ideological and religious stances over time, and the difficulty of unsettling certain established convictions has intersected cultural mobility and porosity, in a process whose traits are only apparently paradoxical. This process is overwhelmingly embedded in the history of colonialism, and the more recent postcolonial turn in critical thought. Indeed, literature has played a central role in the construction and deconstruction of both colonial power and exoticism as an aesthetic category.
This fourteenth issue of MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities seeks to engage with the multifaceted category of the 'exotic' in European literature, art, and culture, with its ever-changing character, and with its position in past and present discourses. We encouraged contributors to interrogate the established discourse in this field. How might recent developments in world literature, comparative, and postcolonial theory challenge and enhance Said's work? To what extent has exoticism – if not exoticisms – changed over time and in different national contexts, according to mutating historical conditions? In what way have narrative, philosophy, and ideology engaged with the shifting parameters of exoticism? How have different traditions dealt with those moments of 'cultural contact' which bring into focus the alienation of self/other? In light of globalisation, have we outrun the usefulness of exoticism as a cultural concept?
Jean Genet’s political and personal allegiance to the Palestinians has often been interpreted as a putative exoticism, born out of a homoerotic fetishization of Arab alterity. This essay probes such criticisms to suggest instead that Genet’s Palestinian poetics deconstruct orientalist tropes by subversively over-exaggerating them. In bearing witness to the Palestinian revolution, or in trying to pay homage to the massacres at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, Genet can never adopt an authorial position of confederation. His voice is mired in the privileges of resource, readership, and mobility facilitated by Western hegemony, which stands anathema to the democracy of his political project. In order to gesture to the reality of the Palestinians, without reification or evangelization, I argue that Genet subversively borrows the language of fairy-tale, folklore, epic, and mythology long associated with nineteenth-century French exoticism, to draw attention to the ultimate artifice of his portrayal. He invites us to glean the authenticity of an Arab world beyond the clutches of the European author, repurposing exoticist legends and formerly lurid colonial representations to transform them into revolutionary fable. In his overly aestheticized portrayals, I argue that Genet does not immobilize the fedayeen in the flat planes of a one-sided image, but disguises them in the layers of such folkloric make-believe that he makes a spectacle of the orientalist fantasy itself.
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18-28
Beyond Asiatic Despotism: The Stagecraft of Erwin Piscator’s Adaptation of Tai Yang erwacht (1931) Lucy Byford doi:10.59860/wph.a8d0c21
While exotification hinges on the imagined or fantastical in order to dominate or ‘other’ its subject, objectivity was upheld as a guiding principle by practitioners of socialist epic theatre in their ambitions to broadcast historical materialist truth. Both Erwin Piscator’s stagecraft for the 1931 premiere of Friedrich Wolf’s Tai Yang erwacht at Berlin’s Wallner-Theater, and its stage scenery by former Dadaist, John Heartfield, sought to foster a sense of proletarian, transcultural identity. Heartfield produced protest banners displaying slogans in German and Chinese script, framing parallels between imperial oppression in both countries, messaging reinforced with film projections. In tracing the progression of the female protagonist from factory worker to communist rebel, this collaborative piece successfully bypassed many tropes of ‘the Orient’ that otherwise saturated Weimar entertainment culture. This paper therefore asks: as postcolonial theory increasingly eschews notions of universal commonality for a more nuanced understanding of pluralities and intersections of identity, how may we critically assess the case study of Tai Yang erwacht today?
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29-37
An Orientalist Masquerade: The Self-Exoticizing Gaze in the Works of Elissa Rhaïs Edwige Crucifix doi:10.59860/wph.a0569e8
An author of popular exotic novels, Elissa Rhaïs was a Jewish Algerian woman who set out to ‘narrate [her] country in the French language’ in the 1920s. Celebrated by her contemporaries for the authenticity of her exotic depictions from the inside, Rhaïs’s literary debut was nevertheless done under an enticing and problematic disguise since she was presented as a Muslim woman having escaped from a harem. To many scholars, Rhaïs is therefore somewhat of a phony oriental, whose deceptive presentation was nothing less than a ‘masquerade’ employed to sell conventional exoticism. Considering the complex historical position of Algerian Jews, this paper argues that Rhaïs’s authorial persona should be understood less as a commercial lie and more as the result of an impossibility for the colonized subject to situate herself, to be seen accurately, in France’s imperial culture, due both to her gender and to her ethnicity. As a result, this paper proposes to consider Rhaïs’s reflective treatment of the exotic gaze as a self-designating gesture, pointing at its own playfulness and artificiality, as can be seen in her novels Le Mariage de Hanifa (1926) and Le Sein blanc (1928). The exotic ‘masquerade’ is rather a resounding larvatus prodeo, which implicitly questions the validity of orientalist dichotomies.
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38-47
Undermining Exoticism: The Memory of al-Andalus and Fluid Identities in Lope de Vega’s Comedias Fronterizas Rebecca De Souza doi:10.59860/wph.a165dcb
Early modern Spanish literature set before the fall of Granada (1492) that features characters from medieval al-Andalus has thus far been considered to be either idealized and thus ‘maurophile’ or exoticist and thus ‘maurophobe’. This article instead proposes a reconsideration of the true extent of ‘exoticism’ in early modern medievalist literature by offering a new reading of three of Lope de Vega’s comedias that feature Andalusi characters. El cordobés valeroso, Pedro Carbonero (1603), El bastardo Mudarra (1612) and El remedio en la desdicha (1620) all depict religio-cultural identity as contingent and move beyond aristocratic maurophilia in portraying broad panoramas of Andalusi society. These history plays subvert extant politicized readings of early modern literature featuring Muslim characters, in their ambivalence and scepticism towards the capacity of religio-cultural identity to define self and other, precisely because of the reality of Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.
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48-56
Identifying with the Orient: Exoticism and Similarity in Jean Lahor’s Quatrains d’Al-Ghazali Julia Caterina Hartley doi:10.59860/wph.a275212
This article looks at a rare example of a nineteenth-century author who sought to present the Orient in terms of its similarity rather than its difference: the minor Parnassian poet Jean Lahor (pen name of Henri Cazalis). Lahor’s collection of poems, Les Quatrains d’Al-Ghazali (first published in 1896 and then expanded for a second edition in 1907) presents the Islamic theologian Al-Ghazali as its author’s alter-ego. The article analyses the language of similarity used in the collection’s prefatory material and compares Lahor’s poems to their alleged sources, which are Al-Ghazali’s al-Munqidh min al-Dalāl and the Robāyyat of Omar Khayyam. It is shown that, ultimately, Lahor seeks to familiarize Al-Ghazali and remove their cultural differences in order to better exoticize himself. Lahor’s seemingly contradictory pursuit of similarity and exoticism is further explained in light of Edward Said’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s analyses of French writing on cultural difference.
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Bibliography entry:
Dellacasa, Claudia, and Hannah McIntyre (eds), Reframing Exoticism in European Literature (= MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 14 (2019)) <https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-14> [accessed 8 October 2024]
First footnote reference:35Reframing Exoticism in European Literature, ed. by Claudia Dellacasa and Hannah McIntyre (= MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 14 (2019)) <https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-14> [accessed 8 October 2024], p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Dellacasa and McIntyre, p. 47.
Dellacasa, Claudia, and Hannah McIntyre (eds). 2019. Reframing Exoticism in European Literature (= MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 14) <https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-14> [accessed 8 October 2024]
Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Dellacasa and McIntyre 2019: 21).
Example footnote reference:35 Dellacasa and McIntyre 2019: 21.
