Returning the Gaze

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 Polos and Mandevilles travel accounts, Shakespeares The Tempest, Montesquieus 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 Bhabhas intervention on the exotic, Hegels Master/Slave dialectic, Michel Foucaults archaeology of Western cultural history, and Sartres 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 Shakespeares The Tempest, the author throws into question lExote 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.