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This book is proposed as a contribution to postcolonial critiques of the colonial and postcolonial exotic. It investigates the exotic as a representation of colonial cultural difference in colonial discourse, culture and history, and its oppositional rewritings in postcolonial thought and literature. Its analyses of the exotic include classical Arabo-Islamic ethnographic texts, Marco Polo's and Mandeville's travel accounts, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, and a variety of colonial and postcolonial texts. Its Deconstructive approach to the exotic breaks new grounds of analysis beyond the Saidian problematic of «Orientalism», Homi Bhabha's intervention on the exotic, Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic, Michel Foucault's archaeology of Western cultural history, and Sartre's theorization of the «gaze» and its underlying Phenomenological subject. The scope of critical discussions of the exotic in this book includes - apart from Western cultural history - postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the colonial Other and exotic, and anthropological and philosophical discussions of the exotic. While tracing the divided inscription of the exotic as a colonial subject with reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest, the author throws into question l'Exote and the exotic Other as problematic subject positions for reading and rewriting the exotic in cultural history, and the double binds of counter-Exoticist discourses.
List of contents
Contents: Re-reading the Alterity of the Exotic in Cultural History - Mapping Exoticism/the Exotic on Colonial and Postcolonial Culture - The Articulations of Exoticism on Culture, History and Subjectivity - Beyond Michel Foucault's Archaeology of the «Same» and the «Other» - Beyond Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic: Writing Back as Caliban, or as Prospero - Beyond the Manichean Drama of Postcolonial Exoticism.
About the author
Asma Agzenay has a Licence in English Language and Literature (Mohamed V University, Morocco), a Postgraduate Diploma in Literature (Essex University, UK), MAs in the Sociology of Literature (Essex University) and Cultural Studies (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, UK), and a PhD in Critical Theory & Cultural Studies (University of Nottingham, UK). She has taught at King Saud University (Saudi Arabia), Mohamed V University and Ibn Zohr University (Morocco), and has jointly supervised PhD students for the School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, and the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University since 1998. Her current research interests include Critical Theory, colonial and postcolonial thought and literature, postmodernism, cultural and cross-cultural studies, and Arabo-Islamic thought and literature.
