ABSTRACT
The word exotic technically means "foreign," and biologists speak of an exotic plant or species without the word immediately suggesting the fascination and ambivalence it evokes in a cultural context. The specific forms or tropes of exoticism that function in the West have particular histories and employ particular narrative structures; for instance, the sacrificial death of the Asian woman in the opera Madame Butterfly and, more recently, in the musical Miss Saigon. The sex tour industry in Bangkok and Manila explicitly uses exoticism as a selling point in the flyers circulated in Western Europe; the industry also mixes exoticism with an evocation of what is forbidden in the West by promising access to extremely young women and boys. David Henry Hwang's depiction of Rene Gallimard in M. Butterfly reveals what in the long run is the key failure of colonial thinking and the failure of exoticism, as it has been constructed in some streams of Western thinking.
