ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of an important element within both colonialist ideology and critiques of colonialism, the 'literary and existential practice' called exoticism. Exoticism, as Bongie describes it, is 'intent on recovering 'elsewhere' values 'lost' with the modernization of European society'. 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. The distinction between innocence and corruption that provided the ground for Conrad's historicism gives way to the vision of a world in which such distinctions have no force: Conrad abandons narratives of ideological resolution, adopting instead an engaged form of nostalgia that continues to put into question a modernity to which it can no longer put an end.
