Offering a theoretical discussion of exoticism, alongside the closely related concepts of autoethnography and cultural translation, it proposes that the exotic gaze is a particular mode of aesthetic perception that is simultaneously anchored in the filmic text and elicited in the spectator in the process of transnational reception. The meaning of EXOTICISM is the quality or state of being exotic. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Preparing for your Cambridge English exam? 327. However, the limited scope of this essay and its focus on developing a model of transnational reception precluded me from pursuing these other lines of argument. The Assassin vibrant colours and painterly image compositions convey sensual pleasure. 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. If we concur with Chow, then world cinema can never give a true or authentic representation of China, India, Africa or other cultures, since centuries of European cultural hegemony have conditioned non-Western filmmakers to see themselves through Western eyes. Clarke, Roger (2016). Questions addressed include: Did Rembrandt really hire Van Vliet as his printmaker, like Rubens hired Vorster-man, Pontius and others? You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. 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? In: Sheldon, Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. For example, Mira Nairs films Salaam Bombay! Social and cultural differences exist between and amongst nations. 3. anything exotic, as a foreign word or idiom. Segalen, Victor (2002). 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. Said, Edward. Translating (human) gender German, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian are just a handful of the many languages which have rich grammatical gender. Not much Arctic exoticism. Segalens slim volume Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity was posthumously published and is an unfinished fragment that reflects his impressions of Tahiti and China whereto he travelled between 1902 and 1919. Pratt (1992: 4) defines contact zones as social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordinationlike colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today. She describes the intercultural encounters occurring in the contact zone as interactive, as the constitution of subjects in and by their relations to each other (Pratt, 1992: 7). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. 6}letBlT%kF6p. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. It really depends. Nevertheless, these films also rely on pictorialism, spectacle and visual pleasure for their transnational appeal. Racial Attitudes and Exoticism in the Old English 'Wonders of the East' The flare of recent racial tensions, especially in the wake of the Trump administration's xenophobic rhetoric, has had repercussions in Charlottesville and across the United States. noun. The fact that Tanna as well as Embrace of the Serpent, which is set in the Amazon, were made in collaboration with Indigenous communities, who are credited with being the chief creative impetus and co-creators of these films, makes them not only politically correct but, arguably, also examples of self-exoticisation. And secondly, because the idea of an original, authentic, or pure Other culture, uncontaminated by Western and other influences is an essentialist fallacy, especially in a world of global interconnectedness and hybridisation, in which the very notion of cultural purity has become a fantasy. Tanna invokes the exotic iconography of earlier South Sea films. B. Tauris, pp. The translation of items (words and phrases) which are specific to one culture from a Source Language expressing that culture (the Source Culture) into a Target Language expressing another. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. endobj Likewise, we only need to consider Apichatpong Weerasethakuls films, whose radical alterity makes them extremely enigmatic, if not utterly perplexing for global audiences, to appreciate that they lack two essential characteristics of exoticism: firstly, their extreme Otherness precludes domestication, that is, integration into a familiar system of aesthetic and conceptual reference points and, secondly, they are largely devoid of the visual and sensuous allure that is a hallmark of exotic cinema. In fact, Nichols compares the festivalgoers experience with that of an anthropological fieldworker (and tourist), who becomes submerged in an experience of difference, entering strange worlds, hearing unfamiliar languages, witnessing unusual styles (Nichols, 1994: 17). <> Taxonomy of a Translation Thank you! This is why I also think that Google Translate is not a perfect solution for translation at a professional level. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. relationship between foreignisation and exoticism, which will be based More than a century of ethnographic research profoundly supports the theory of cultural relativity, the theory that, Benedict, Ruth There are three of these: 1. A Closer Look at the Corpus Rubenianum and the Rembrandt Research Project.' In: Matthew, Bernstein and Gaylyn, Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Nagib, Lcia, Chris, Perriam and Rajinder, Dudrah (2012). endobj On the other hand, if one wanted to completely get rid of the origins of the text and make it as user-friendly for the reader as possible, one would remove all such exoticisms and replace them with colloquial terms that any American would readily understand. Connell, John (2003). Katrien Lichtert, Christopher D M Atkins, Erik Verroken, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Angela Jager, Martine Vanwelden. 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). 120. 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). Tracing global and local aspects of design as it appears in idealized representations and in early modern Dutch historical objects, I argue that embodied experiences play key roles in the domestication of goods from overseas. Exh.cat. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 285-304. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. 1. a tendency to adopt what is exotic. 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. According to David Damrosch (2003: 175), works become world literature by being received into the space of a foreign culture, a space defined in many ways by the host cultures national tradition and the present needs of its own writers. Rather than conceiving of world literature as a canon of foreign literary masterpieces, Damrosch describes it as a mode of transnational circulation and reception that gains in translation. 20 May. To be sure, this does not normally apply to popular genre films predominantly targeting domestic viewers, although these sometimes become art films when exhibited abroad (Galt and Schoonover, 2010: 7) or, as the case of the wuxia pian (Chinese swordplay film) illustrates, are adopted by world cinema auteurs like Wong Kar-wai (Yi Dai Zong Shi/The Grandmaster, Hong Kong/China, 2013) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Cike Nie Yin Niang/The Assassin, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong/France, 2015), who transform them into refined arthouse films. But at the same time, it is (like world cinema) a travelling concept that depends on mobility and the crossing of cultural boundaries to come into being. In. 295 0 obj Offering a theoretical discussion of exoticism, alongside the closely related concepts of autoethnography and cultural translation, the article proposes that exoticism is a particular mode of aesthetic perception that is simultaneously anchored in the filmic text and elicited in the spectator in the process of transnational reception. Much could be and has been written on this topic, which explains why exoticism is such a highly contested concept. When the concepts and structure of the source text can be easily translated into the target language, direct translation techniques are usually used. Chinese intellectuals are in a stupor, remain aphasic, and are unable to speak and pass judgment on the works of their own country. The term exoticism describes a cultural phenomenon that projects Western fantasies about profound cultural differences. <> In: Stephanie, Dennison and Song, Hwee Lim, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. 6588. . Exoticism functions like a hermeneutic circuit that relies on the appropriation and reworking of established iconographic conventions and narrative tropes in order to be recognised as such. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. . Direct translation techniques. New York: Columbia University Press. c}_i_3F)16=j. Accessed 1 May. These features jointly contribute to the films impenetrability which, in turn, engenders a sense of enigma that amplifies its exotic allure by confirming the belief that the Other can never be fully fathomed. Although exoticism is associated with notions of animality, it carefully distances itself from the violence and exploitation that characterize the related concept of barbarism. I knew there was some discretion in translating and it was more of an art than a science, but I didnt realize how much discretion is involved. However, to pursue this line of argument any further here is beyond the purview of my inquiry into the aesthetic characteristics of the exoticist paradigm. Revisiting Exoticism: From Colonialism to Postcolonialism. Notes on Painterly Narrative in the Early Work of Rembrandt, The Odalisque. Find a translation for the exoticism definition in other languages: Select another language: - Select - (Chinese - Simplified) (Chinese - Traditional) Espaol (Spanish) Your current browser may not support copying via this button. endobj 554581. 1839, in English. Cultural Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Void. 283 0 obj Arguably the most dynamic site of cultural translation is the film festival circuit since it is here where the first contact in this cross-cultural encounter usually occurs and where global art cinemas meaning and artistic value is negotiated. Exoticism in translation refers to using words or phrases which sound "exotic" in the translated language, because they are of foreign origin. a person, an institution, an animal, a plant etc.) One moose, two moose. These differences impede, in one way or the. 1997. 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. Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality. Prostitution and the exploitation of countless women, children, and some men are side effects of exoticisms tendency toward aesthetic abstraction and voyeuristic commodification of its participating actors. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, pp. Once associated with the exotic "Eastern" themes and styles of Eugene Delacroix's, James McNeill Whistler's, and John Singer Sargent's, Fantasy Translated and edited by Yal, Rachel Schlick. 1640. Typographic Calque This occurs when typographical conventions that exist only in the source language are transferred to the new language. Encompassing global art cinema as well as popular genre films and their transnational reception, world cinema is an amorphous and critically versatile concept that invites contestation and debate. Encyclopedia.com. Kabbani, Rana. EXOTICISM (foreignness ).1 A TT marked by exoticism is one which constantly uses grammatical and cultural features imported from the ST with minimal adaptation. 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). The Presence, Influence and Collection of Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art in Hungary, Bibliography to Sehnsucht Persien/The Fascination of Persia. endobj <> by Erik Hinterding and Jaco Rutgers, Rubens and the bird of paradise. 2. exotic quality or character. In: Rosalind, Galt and Karl, Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. 297 0 obj Keywords: modulation, naturalness, equivalence Introduction It has been understood by translators that translating a text is not just a matter of finding the correct words in the TL, and using the correct TL grammar. Lutz Bassmann went first and kept his mouth shut the whole time. 303319. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes, Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. This period also engendered a taste for the rich costumes of the Orient, the main geographic location of Enlightenment fantasies about the exotic. Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. exoticism in American English. Painting natural knowledge in the early seventeenth century, The History of the Dutch and Flemish Art Collection of the Szpmvszeti Mzeum. In this essay, I set out to demonstrate that world cinema and exoticism are both traveling concepts, constituted in and through transnational mobility and the process of traversing cultural boundaries and borders of various kinds. Within that early modern connected world, material culture played a key role.