Books about Exoticism from Amazon.com

From the Great Pyramids to the Taj Mahal, the Middle East and India have for centuries lured Westerners to travel and have inspired their architecture, literature, music and fashion The Orientalists pursues the richest era of this fascination, the mid to late 19th century, when American and European artists traveled and painted throughout the Holy Land and India. The highly cinematic images they created suggest a great influence on modern visual culture. Travel, art, geography, cultural perception, and social and military history are all woven through the text. An extensive introduction provides a thought-provoking perspective on the evolution of Orientalism and the rise of Islam and its ever-changing relationship to the West. It is within this context that the author introduces us to Orientalist paintings. The author is well aware of September 11, 2001 and its implications on the book which was being researched and formulated in his mind before the horrific events unfolded. He does not pretend.
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Leading scholars address the myriad ways in which America's attitudes about race informed the production of Hollywood films from the 1920s through the 1960s. From the predominantly white star system to segregated mise-en-scènes, Hollywood films reinforced institutionalized racism. The contributors to this volume examine how assumptions about white superiority and colored inferiority, and the politics of segregation and assimilation affected Hollywood's classic period.

Contributors: Eric Avila, UCLA; Aaron Baker, Arizona State U; Karla Rae Fuller, Columbia College; Andrew Gordon, U of Florida; Allison Graham, U of Memphis; Sarah Madsen Hardy, Bryn Mawr; Joanne Hershfield, U of North Carolina; Arthur Knight, William and Mary; Gina Marchetti, U of Maryland; Gary W. McDonough; Chandra Mukerji, UC, San Diego; Martin F. Norden, U of Massachusetts; Brian O'Neil, U of Southern Mississippi; Roberta E. Pearson, Cardiff U; Marguerite H. Rippy, Marymount U; Nicholas Sammond; Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, U of Arizona; Peter Stanfield, Southampton Institute; Kelly Thomas; Herman Vera, U of Florida; Karen Wallace, U of Wisconsin, Oshkosh; Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke; Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, College of Staten Island, CUNY; Geoffrey White, U of Hawai'i; and Jane Yi.

Daniel Bernardi is assistant professor in the Department of Media Arts at the University of Arizona..
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In Beyond Exoticism, Timothy D. Taylor considers how western cultures’ understandings of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences have been incorporated into music from early operas to contemporary television advertisements, arguing that the commonly used term “exoticism” glosses over such differences in many studies of western music. Beyond Exoticism encompasses a range of musical genres and musicians, including Mozart, Beethoven, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Bally Sagoo, and Bill Laswell as well as opera, symphony, country music, and “world music.” Yet, more than anything else, it is an argument for expanding the purview of musicology to take into account not only composers’ lives and the formal properties of the music they produce but also the larger historical and cultural forces shaping both music and our understanding of it.

Beginning with a focus on musical manifestations of colonialism and imperialism, Taylor discusses how the “discovery” of the New World and the development of an understanding of self as distinct from the other, of “here” as different from “there,” was implicated in the development of tonality, a musical system which effectively creates centers and margins. He describes how musical practices signifying nonwestern peoples entered the western European musical vocabulary and how Darwinian thought shaped the cultural conditions of early-twentieth-century music. In the era of globalization, new communication technologies and the explosion of marketing and consumption have accelerated the production and circulation of tropes of otherness. Considering western music produced under rubrics including multiculturalism, collaboration, hybridity, and world music, Taylor scrutinizes contemporary representations of difference. He argues that musical interpretations of the nonwestern other developed hundreds of years ago have not necessarily been discarded; rather they have been recycled and retooled..
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Tiki torches, cocktails, la dolce vita, and the music that popularized them—Mondo Exotica offers a behind-the-scenes look at the sounds and obsessions of the Space Age and Cold War period as well as the renewed interest in them evident in contemporary music and design. The music journalist and radio host Francesco Adinolfi provides extraordinary detail about artists, songs, albums, and soundtracks, while also presenting an incisive analysis of the ethnic and cultural stereotypes embodied in exotica and related genres. In this encyclopedic account of films, books, TV programs, mixed drinks, and above all music, he balances a respect for exotica’s artistic innovations with a critical assessment of what its popularity says about postwar society in the United States and Europe, and what its revival implies today.

Adinolfi interviewed a number of exotica greats, and Mondo Exotica incorporates material from his interviews with Martin Denny, Esquivel, the Italian film composers Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani, and others. It begins with an extended look at the postwar popularity of exotica in the United States. Adinolfi describes how American bachelors and suburbanites embraced the Polynesian god Tiki as a symbol of escape and sexual liberation; how Les Baxter’s album Ritual of the Savage (1951) ushered in the exotica music craze; and how Martin Denny’s Exotica built on that craze, hitting number one in 1957. Adinolfi chronicles the popularity of performers from Yma Sumac, “the Peruvian Nightingale,” to Esquivel, who was described by Variety as “the Mexican Duke Ellington,” to the chanteuses Eartha Kitt, Julie London, and Ann-Margret. He explores exotica’s many sub-genres, including mood music, crime jazz, and spy music. Turning to Italy, he reconstructs the postwar years of la dolce vita, explaining how budget spy films, spaghetti westerns, soft-core porn movies, and other genres demonstrated an attraction to the foreign. Mondo Exotica includes a discography of albums, compilations, and remixes.
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Meyda Yegenoglu investigates the intersection between postcolonial and feminist criticism, via the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. Linking representations of cultural and sexual difference, she shows the Oriental woman to have functioned as the veiled interior of Western identity. Her original and compelling argument calls into question dualistic conceptions of identity and difference, West and East, masculinist assumptions of Orientalism, and Western feminist discourses that seek to "liberate" the veiled woman..
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Reflecting the burgeoning academic interest in issues of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media brings all of these concerns under the same umbrella, contending that these issues must be discussed in relation to each other. Communities, societies, nations, and even entire continents, the book suggests, exist not autonomously but rather in a densely woven web of connectedness.

To explore this complexity, the editors have forged links between usually compartmentalized fields (especially media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and critical anthropology) and areas of inquiry—particularly postcolonial and diasporic studies and a diverse set of ethnic and area studies. This book, which links all these issues in suggestive ways, provides an indispensable guide for students and scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Essays in this groundbreaking volume include Julianne Burton-Carvajal on ethnic identity in Lone Star; Manthia Diawara on diasporic documentary; Hamid Naficy on independent transnational film genres; Robyn Wiegman on whiteness studies; Faye Ginsburg on indigenous media; and Jennifer Gonzáles on race in cyberspace; Ana M. López on modernity and Latin American cinema; and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan on Warrior Marks and multiculturalism and globalization..
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Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture.
 Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future..
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Thinking Orientals is a groundbreaking study of Asian Americans and the racial formation of twentieth-century American society. It reveals the influential role Asian Americans played in constructing the understandings of Asian American identity. It examines the unique role played by sociologists, particularly sociologists at the University of Chicago, in the study of the "Oriental Problem" before World War II and also analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and the subsequent "model minority" profile..
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The island nation of Indonesia -- the largest and most populous country in Southeast Asia -- balances equal parts of custom and change. As gleaming skyscrapers rise in major cities, traditional design and ways of living remain extremely important. This visual paean to Indonesia's visual and artistic culture is both a wonderful source of design inspiration and a fascinating armchair tour of the multifaceted nation. Lavish new color photography of houses and interiors, bazaars and markets, mosques and temples, festivals and celebrations, shadow puppet theater and masked dance, gives the reader a sense of daily life in Indonesia.

The book is divided into four major island regions: Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Bali. At the heart of each is a presentation of houses, more than twenty in all. The house in Indonesia, as in many other countries, is considered a complete environment. The many faces of residential design shown in the book, from humble cottages in agricultural areas to royal palaces, evoke personal stylistic sensibilities, encompassing both age-old local traditions and contemporary trends with a Southeast Asian flair. Furnishings, fabrics, objects -- all are featured as part of these remarkable works. Interviews with the owners and detailed commentary offer a comprehensive insider's tour of the principles of Indonesian design..
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When European travelers went overseas in the sixteenth century, they encountered unfamiliar lands, peoples, and sights. These travelers had to re-present these encounters to Europeans for whom they stood for the unfamiliar -- the "exotic." But the exotic, according to Peter Mason, is not something that exists prior to its "discovery." Rather, he points out, it is the very act of "discovery" that produces the exotic as such.

In Infelicities Peter Mason explores the texts, paintings, drawings, photographs, and museum displays in which the exotic has been represented from the early modern period to the present. He describes the unique iconography that Europeans developed to represent the exotic and the means they employed to display it once artifacts were brought to Europe. In both instances, the exotic object is taken out of its original context and given a meaning and significance it never had; this new meaning and significance, Mason argues, are derived from the imposition of European cultural values and the need to recontextualize the object in a European setting.

To differentiate the "exotic" from the "other," Mason says that in understanding the "other" there is engagement and interchange; in encountering the "exotic" it is a one-sided effort at understanding: the exotic object never gives up its meaning. The title of the book, Infelicities, comes from philosopher J. L. Austin, who used the term to refer to what happens when something goes wrong on the occasion of an act of utterance. For Mason, this "doctrine of infelicities" seems applicable to European encounters with the exotic and the efforts to represent thoseencounters.

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