ABSTRACT
The image of the “exotic” is an important aspect of cultural representation, which is usually associated with the notion of cross-cultural encounter, and implies change, transformation and appropriation of a culture in different sociopolitical and historical contexts. As a consequence of the encounter between different systems of social signification, cultural exoticization takes on special significance in the transnational space that provides common ground for conducting debates over the representation of cultural otherness. The cultural images of Oriental women, for example, have long been circulated in the West and their irresistible exotic features have obtained a symbolic order of cultural otherness. As Cathy Song describes in her poem about Kitagawa Utamaro’s paintings of Japanese women:
For many years, the exquisite images of the lovely “paper women” have traversed beyond the boundaries of their original cultural territories, acquiring fetishistic meanings under the Western gaze. “The traditional imagery of the Other,” as Zhang Longxi observes, “has an aura of mystery, exotic beauty” (52). The Orient, in other words, has become a diasporic signifier, deterritorialized, translated and disseminated in the West, expressing the West’s desires and interests. However, the Orient never acquires a position of “a free subject of thought.” As Rey Chow notes, if the Orient were not “a free subject,” then it could not itself be an “object” either, since it is “a mere ‘signifier’ of something further” (12). In such circumstances, cultural exoticization produces a disjunction between the signifier and the signified that causes cultural mistranslation between the East and the West. As Marilyn Chin writes:
The poem, in an ironic sense, helps us perceive the internal politics of cultural exoticization and recognize the complexity associated with representation of the Other or otherness across different cultures. Since the early years of colonialism, cultural exoticization has been a common
practice of Western opinion-makers. The mysterious “Oriental” of Marco Polo, the “noble savage” of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the romantic “South Sea Islanders” of Paul Gauguin are only a few examples. To a certain degree, exoticization implicates a process of cross-cultural domination, for the signification of Asian exotic cultures, according to Edward Said, suggests “a Western style for dominating, restructing, and having authority over the Orient” (3). By means of rendering the Orient into discursive constructions, Western culture “gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self ” (3). Cultural exoticism, therefore, is permeated with Western viewpoints and ideological influences, and moreover, as Rey Chow observes, it implicates a kind of “mentalism, the tendency that treats the world as a result of ideas, which in turn are construed as the products of the human mind” (1998, xx). Referring to Jacques Derrida’s reading of “the inscrutable Chinese,” Chow says: “The face of the Chinese person and the face of Chinese writing thus converge in what must now be seen as a composite visual stereotype-theother-as-face-that stigmatizes another culture as at once corporeally and linguistically intractable” (2002, 64-65).
