ABSTRACT
Chris Bongie's book is a study, not of colonialist literature in general, but of an important element within both colonialist ideology and critiques of colonialism, the 'literary and existential practice' (p. 125) called exoticism. Exoticism, as Bongie describes it, is 'intent on recovering "elsewhere" values "lost" with the modernization of European society' (Bongie, p. 5). His use of quotation marks here signals his sense of the strong element of fantasy in such an intention. Exoticism has an ambivalent relationship to colonialism, because the impulse to seek out a place beyond or before modernity can fuel the exploration and conquest that builds an empire, but can also prompt a lament over the loss of difference and separation which conquest and control produce. So Bongie distinguishes two forms of exoticism: 'imperialist exoticism', which assumes 'the superiority of civilization over savagery' and 'exoticizing exoticism' which privileges 'savagery' over 'civilization' and is dominated by desire for the Other (p. 134). His other key distinction is between an Old Imperialism of adventure, exploration and discovery and a New Imperialism which takes the form of a race to control and exploit lands already mapped out. Bongie sees Conrad as one of the late-nineteenth-century writers who, faced with the reality of the New Imperialism, could not sustain their belief (evident in Conrad's early work) in the reality of exotic places, peoples and values, supposedly untouched by mass communications and global capitalism.
