The term exoticism describes a cultural phenomenon that projects Western fantasies about profound cultural differences. The Guardian, 21 January. In most cases too, we find a country having several social/cultural diversities. The foreignizing method of translating, a strategy Venuti also termed ' resistancy ' , is a non-fluent or estranging translation style designed to make visible the persistence of translator by highlighting the foreign identity of ST and protecting it from the ideological dominance of the target culture. This essay is based on the notion that the early modern world was shaped by connections that stretched across geographical, political and cultural boundaries. (LogOut/ Social and cultural differences exist between and amongst nations. Durham: Duke University Press. Much could be and has been written on this topic, which explains why exoticism is such a highly contested concept. But Chow goes one step further, suggesting that any form of cultural translation, whether it is ethnography or the kind of autoethnography underpinning exotic world cinema, is necessarily a form of distortion or even betrayal.3 Firstly, as the Italian expression Traduttore, traditore Translator, traitor implies, the task of translating is associated with the pejorative implication of infidelity (Chow, 1995: 183). Kabbani, Rana. Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-Cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema. Was Van Vliet involved in some of Rembrandt's own etchings? Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). It is used to give the reader a sense of something "exotic" and "unusual". I am, of course, not suggesting that all world cinema filmmakers perform exoticism. Westerners, along with a westernized global elite, interact with one another against the background of scenery that refrains from challenging their privileges and supposed superiority. Notions of the exotic are associated with the lush vegetation of the tropics, geographically positioned between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. 2004 (1994). The Assassin. 'x6cB2 `Me * ), Budapest, 2014. Send us feedback about these examples. Tannese children and the star-crossed lovers frolicking amid ferns and fronds and a native heralding a call to all villagers on conch shell are further references to what can be regarded as the cinematic Urtext of the South Sea genre (cf. You can email a link to this page to a colleague or librarian: The link was not copied. 1630. It begins, if we agree with Chow, with filmmakers internalisation of the exotic gaze or, alternatively, their strategic performance of exotic Otherness to satisfy the expectations of Western critics, festival juries and audiences. London and New York: I. For very technical texts, where accuracy of content is king, it might be closer to -2 or -1. Ron Shapiro (2000: 41) sums up the pejorative attitude, prevalent in particular amongst postcolonial scholars, with acerbic cynicism: To speak of the exotic [] is to condone all manner of European imperialisms and colonialisms, and to deliberately condemn the so-called sub-altern to continued misery. Yet he is actually one of the relatively few defendants of exoticism and argues that exoticism is not necessarily false and evil (42) but has a rightful place as an imaginary construction of the Other, or indeed the Self as Other, because politics and the imagination need to be kept separate. Lost in Translation: Exoticism in Early Modern Holland - Academia.edu . He was following in the footsteps of the painter Paul Gauguin, whose colourful paintings of semi-nude Polynesian women against the backdrop of lush tropical scenery have shaped the Western imagination of the Polynesian islands. Sight & Sound, February, p. 68. In: Stephanie, Dennison and Song, Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. In: Sheldon, Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. In fact, realism appears to be the more prevalent aesthetic approach taken in global art cinema and certainly the one to receive far more critical attention, cf. Chow, Rey (1995). Homi Bhabha and subsequent scholars of hybridity and the encounters between subaltern and dominant cultures, therefore, make every effort to draw attention to exoticisms parodic dimension in order to empower and render eloquent its latent subversion of oppressive and exploitative fantasies. Encyclopedia.com. Experience the exoticism of the Medina of Marrakech. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. 33. Goods ranging from treasured, unique objects to commodities traded in vast quantities always accumulate layers of meanings as they move through time and space. While world cinema includes popular genre films like Bollywood and Nollywood melodrama or Hong Kong action films, global art cinema does not. Exoticism | Encyclopedia.com exoticism noun [ U ] uk / zt..s.z m / us / z.t.s.z m / the quality of being unusual and exciting because of coming (or seeming to come) from far away, especially a tropical country the exoticism of the East Want to learn more? Now, in a remarkable reversal of fortune, it is the West that points out what is outstanding and characteristically Chinese in artworks from China. Although this kind of cultural translation has, historically, been the domain of ethnography, it is by no means restricted to the scientific discourse on cultural difference. 1839, in English. Of special importance is Edward Saids description of Orientalism as a discursive construction of European fantasies. Identifying one of the most prevalent iconographic conventions of exoticism, Victor Segalen (2002: 13), one of the chief commentators on exoticism, writes: Exoticism is willingly tropical. (PDF) Translation as a Virtuous Circle: A Case of Borrowing in Arabic ." Fantasy, mans capacity to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, has long intrigued poets, playwrights, and painters, ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. xviixxii. White Western writers, painters and filmmakers have equally partaken in the process of cultural translation by making foreign people, their cultures and traditions as well as ethnic minorities within their own national or cultural sphere. For instance, if I were translating the classic VW advertising text from the early 1990s, I might leave the German term for "the joy of driving" in German: "Fahrvergngen". The same holds true for world cinema, which must travel from its site of origin and be watched by audiences originating from different nations, regions or cultures. Loosely plotted around one of Disneylands hoariest theme-park rides (which, even after recent updates, still teems with faux savagery and denatured, Her affinity for combining chinoiserie, Moghul-style flowers, and Provenal accents surfaces subtly, giving the rooms a whiff of, Bhutan has often been ranked as one of the worlds happiest countries, and WeCroak seems to be trading on a casual, Puertas assemblages, with their fake tropical greenery, faux fur, lace, rhinestones and sexualized forms, represent the, There's no trace of her Asian background or even the, For decades, Bollywood movies, at least when they were released here, had an undeniable, The earliest pictures here, dating from the 19th century and taken of Indigenous North Americans by non-Native photographers, emphasize. One of course can try to balance that. Within that early modern connected world, material culture played a key role. endobj Improve your vocabulary with English Vocabulary in Use from Cambridge. The Location of Culture. Furthermore, as defendants of cultural translation have argued, such hermeneutic collisions and reconfigurations are actually highly productive interactions that bring about cultural innovation, provided that the power differentials are not too extreme (Papastergiadis, 2011: 7). Her transnational appeal rests primarily on her ability to signify Chineseness, femininity and mystery outside her own culture. The visual pleasure afforded by exotic cinemas sumptuous style is arguably the chief vehicle that allows world cinema to travel and be understood, or misunderstood, as the case may be, by transnational audiences who are potentially disadvantaged by a hermeneutic deficit of culturally specific knowledge when trying to understand films from outside their own cultural sphere. It really depends. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Childs, Elizabeth C. (2013). 554581. Did Rembrandt plan a substantial series of reproductive engravings and did he make a series of oil sketches especially for that purpose? rogerebert.com 27 March. An abundance of colors, sounds, smells, and tactile experiences promise to gratify the senses within an economy that gives free rein to consumption, unrestrained by political responsibility and ethical commitment to the real actors of exotic fantasies: that is, it disregards the role of disadvantaged people, coming mainly from third-world nations, who make a meager living from appearing in the dramatized fantasies staged in tropical holiday resorts and nightclubs. I seek to show that through vision and touch, and the proximity of objects to bodies in domestic environments, goods from all over the world become part of the material culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Historically, the exotic is inextricably linked to eighteenth-century voyages of exploration during which the encounter with radical cultural difference in remote corners of the world prompted a mutual sense of astonishment and wide-eyed wonder (though historical records, travelogues and novels of adventure are invariably skewed towards the astonishment experienced by Europeans). Mulvey, Laura (1975). It has been deeply entrenched in the European imaginary of the Orient ever since Pierre Loti conflated exoticism and eroticism and his immensely popular novel Madame Chrysanthme (1887) inspired Giacomo Puccinis opera Madama Butterfly (1904) and served as a template of Asian femininity in the popular imagination of the West (cf. In most contemporary exotic films, visual pleasure is combined with haptic visuality (Marks, 2000), denoting a particular type of embodied perception that invokes memories of touch, with other forms of synaesthesia (the perception of one sensation by another modality) and intermodality (the linking of sensations from different domains) in order to reproduce the multi-sensory pleasure that has conventionally been associated with exoticism. "Jan van Vliet and Rembrandt van Rijn: Their Collaboration Reassessed", in: S. Dickey (ed. Framegrab. endobj Ever since Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (in 1768) and other European explorers travelled to Polynesia and perceived the islanders as the incarnation of Rousseaus ideal of the natural man, untouched by the corrupting influence of Western civilisation, the South Pacific islands have come to epitomise paradise on earth (Childs, 2013; Connell, 2003). Entirely apart from the plot, there is the sensuous pleasure of the architecture, the fabrics, the color contrasts, the faces of the actresses.. Monstrous Ethiopians? Racial Attitudes and Exoticism in the Old English 48 0 obj Forsdick, Charles (2003). However, the relationship between realist and exoticist modes of representation is more complicated and they are not mutually exclusive. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Papastergiadis, Nikos (2011). <> Although her martial arts skills are unsurpassed, on several occasions, her heart blocks her from completing her deadly assignments. This prominent ethnic stereotype, which readily homogenises Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian women, is instantly legible as exotic. The exotic first emerged as a concept in Western history when European nations began to explore and appropriate far-flung parts of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Get ready with Test&Train, the online practice tool from Cambridge.Build your confidence with hundreds of exam questions with hints, tips and instant feedback. During the nineteenth century exotic gained the connotation of a stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic could be (safely) spiced. Literal translation is your straightforward word-for-word translation. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ). It thus follows that, the exotic is not [] an inherent quality to be found in certain people, distinctive objects or specific places (Huggan, 2001: 13), but instead denotes a particular perception of cultural difference that arises from the encounter with foreign cultures, landscapes, animals, people and their customs that are either geographically remote or taken out of their original context and absorbed into a home culture, essentialized, simplified and domesticated (Forsdick, 2003: 48). By looking at a number of things in circulation in the early modern Netherlands, we can identify them as both global, in the sense of having travelled across long distances, having accumulated associations with the exotic, and as local, part of the cultural practices we have come to think of as Dutch. Huggan, Graham. Although this article examines how some contemporary world cinema filmmakers exoticise their own cultures, world cinema also exoticises other cultures. This article aims to make a contribution to this urgent critical endeavour, not by mapping the various critical debates that surround the concept of world cinema, but, instead, by exploring the role exoticism plays in the transnational reception of world cinema.
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