Representing the Exotic and the Familiar: Politics and perception in literature

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