The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.

No detailed description available for "Exotic Nations".

". . . a valuable and important book . . ." —The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory Representing Reality is the first book to offer a conceptual overview of documentary filmmaking practice. It addresses numerous social issues and how they are presented to the viewer by means of style, rhetoric, and narrative technique. The volume poses questions about the relationship of the documentary tradition to power, the body, authority, knowledge, and our experience of history. This study advances the pioneering work of Nichols's earlier book, Ideology and the Image. "[Nichols] has written a road-block of a book which reconfigures the debate on the documentary at a new level of sophistication and complexity which can only be ignored at the risk of ignoring the whole area of documentary film." —Sight and Sound " . . . the most important book on documentary film yet published." —Canadian Journal of Film Studies

In God of Justice, anthropologist William S. Sax offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of cursing, black magic, and ritual healing in the Central Himalayas of North India. Based on ten years' ethnographic fieldwork, God of Justice shows how these practices are part of a moral system based on the principle of family unity.

Nature is out of balance in the human kingdom. The sun hasn't shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. And the people's survival hangs in the balance. To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls' destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever. The exciting adventure prequel to Malinda Lo's highly acclaimed novel Ash is overflowing with lush Chinese influences and details inspired by the I Ching, and is filled with action and romance.

The jihad has been at the centre of the West's securitization discourse for more than a decade. Theorists constantly use the jihadist as a discursive tool to further their neoliberal, military and market agendas, perpetuating massive gaps of understanding between 'the West', Muslims and jihadists themselves. They are helped by Muslim interlocutors, who all too often play the role of 'good' Muslims explaining the motifs of the 'bad' Muslims. This timely book argues that Muslim theory and fiction has been significantly commodified to cater to the needs of western ideology. It skillfully critiques the ideological contradictions of the debate around the jihadist by offering a comprehensive analysis of Muslim and non-Muslim cultural critics. Ranging from Edward Said to Slavoj Zizek, from Don DeLillo to Orhan Pamuk and from Mohammed Siddique Khan to Osama bin Laden, this vastly heterogeneous discourse produces a multi-dimensional Muslim response. O'Rourke examines some of its critical fault lines in postcolonial theory and literary analysis. This groundbreaking book argues that the temptation to appropriate the figure of the jihadist offers a fertile area from which to launch a discussion about the limits of current theory.

As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivid example and persuasive detail, how Europeans came to see and understand the world at an especially critical juncture of imperial imagination. At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch—"Carryers of the World," as Defoe famously called them—in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers—and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation—Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.