Quixotic exoticism: From modernism to multiculturalism (Michel Leiris, France, Alejo Carpentier, Cuba, Yambo Ouologuem, Mali, Rigoberta Menchu, Guatemala)

Exoticism at its most nefarious becomes stereotyping, while at its most receptive it remains a form of cultural aestheticism. The chapters in this dissertation examine how pivotal figures in twentieth-century ethnographic literature have attempted to transcend, to evade, to parody, or to (re-)appropriate the exoticisms that both torment and tantalize human relations. In the transition from Modernism to multiculturalism, when exoticism reaches its philosophical limits, the problematics of authorship, aesthetics, and intersubjectivity adumbrate questions of ontology and epistemology at the intersection of interdisciplinary ethnography, in the following five subjects: Michel Leiris' endless autobiographical project sets into motion not only the autopsychoanalysis of the exoticist but also the reflective turn in twentieth-century ethnography. Alejo Carpentier's writing emerges from the highly fetishized novela de la tierra [novel of the earth] and an essentialized conception of lo real maravilloso [marvelous realism] to parody his own ethnographic pretensions. Yambo Ouologuem's novel finds in Western exoticism the teleology and hermetic heresy of the simulacrum, playing with the limit-text of exoticism. Rigoberta Menchú's testimony tests the epistemology of realism and emerges, despite its critics, as a landmark challenge to Western representationalism. Charting a trajectory from text to image, the last chapter focuses on the theme of postcolonial cultural identity through a reading of “exotic” images of Africa in the Western media in an attempt to sketch the conflicts wrought by journalistic standards, by the forces of globalization and neocolonialism, and by interpretive practices. Critical readings of these ethnographic texts suggest that to ignore the existence of exoticism as a pervasive psychological phenomenon is to deny the present human condition—not to be confused with the fallacy of “human nature” that wreaks crosscultural havoc—and that to ignore the full ramifications of otherness is to deny the potential of multiculturalist thought.