The French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine traveled to the East—namely, Syria, Palestine, and parts of the Balkans—in 1832–33, with his wife and daughter. His account of these travels, the Voyage en Orient, was published in 1835 and went on to become one of the major Eastern travel-narratives of the nineteenth century. Edward Said was scathing about it in Orientalism: “What remains of the Orient in Lamartine's prose is not very substantial at all … the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations” (179). I would not dissent from this assessment. But Said was not the first to remark on the nature of Lamartine's representations of the Orient. In 1859, twenty-four years after the French poet's visit to the East, a young Beiruti poet and journalist, Khalīl al-Khūrī, made an Arabic translation and commentary, with some sharp criticisms, of one of the poems included in Voyage en Orient.

From its earliest literary representations in english, Cyprus has been associated with intersecting anxieties toward race, religion, and sexuality. Inaugurating this theme, Shakespeare's Othello appropriates the culturally hybrid setting among Africa, Asia, and Europe as a space of uneasy female autonomy and as a locus of dangerous political and sexual activity orchestrated by men: Venus's island is, for European Venice, a “business of some heat” (211; 1.2.47), a commercial hub degrading into a deathbed of intercultural, interfaith, interracial sex. On the cultural frontiers among Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, staged temporally between Western Europe's waning crusading past and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the island is an exoticized and effeminized space treated axiomatically as requiring the protection of Western paternalism. These themes pervade subsequent textual depictions of the space, a de facto British colony from 1878 to 1960, in works that venerate a reclaiming of the Ottoman possession by neo-Crusaders in the Orient. While academic scrutiny has addressed narratives such as Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons (1957), there has been little focus on the patriarchal structuring of empire in this oeuvre of colonial travel writing or on the “persistent gendering of the imperial unknown” during this period (McClintock 24).

The capacious first issue of ho! (), a prominent Israeli literary journal that debuted in 2005, included a seven-page questionnaire titled “Goldberg Variations” (), a pun on Bach's Goldberg Variations, a composition for the harpsichord. The purpose of the questionnaire was—and still is, if you choose to do it—to answer the question “Are you Leah Goldberg?” (), Goldberg being one of the major Hebrew poets of the twentieth century. The short epigraph that followed this question was two lines from the opening poem of her debut collection Smoke Rings (1935; ):

In 2002, the author of Katerina Brac (1985), Christopher Reid, commented on the reception of his book, concluding, “it has been translated only once—into Polish, to my intense pleasure, by Leszek Engelking and Jerzy Jarniewicz. A Polish friend tells me their version reads extremely well” (“Katerina and Her Kind” 93). This laconic statement, aimed to round off the discussion about the success in the world of Reid's collection of poems, in fact does not end the discussion but raises questions about how and why we should approach a pseudo-translation from the standpoint of its fictitious original. In this essay I argue that reclaiming one's exoticized identity through translation can constitute an act of critical autoexoticism.

That culture, diet, and epistemology are intertwined and formulate one another is a truism. But to see them as one living body inhabiting shifting perspectives that can be shed easily, like snakeskins, is an exotic view that invites further investigation. Such intriguing ideas are precisely what we find in the remarkable avant-garde writer Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). This essay traces the surprising connections between Artaud's idea of culture, the body, diet, and knowledge, arguing that Artaud outlines a notion of autoexoticism as throwing open the boundaries of one's subjectivity and culture to change and rupture.

The oeuvre of Julio CortÁzar contains many facets of autoexoticism. In this essay, I engage with a few of his works to examine the notion of autoexoticism in two main aspects: first, the transformation of the self into the other self as a form; second, autoexoticists as those whose notion of the self inhabits their own desirous gaze.

Textual examples in Cortázar's literature that illustrate the first aspect are ubiquitous. For instance, in his short story “Lejana” we observe the alteration of Alina Reyes into a beggar in Budapest as she envisages with increasing clarity in her diary, while living in Buenos Aires, another self in Budapest. Her obsession with and fervent desire for this other self culminates in a final metamorphosis into it. The metamorphosis is based on the narcissistic reduplication of her self. In other words, through the externalization and exoticization of her self, she assumes an autoexoticist one.

As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” () culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.

This collection of essays has threaded several lines of argument through and around the topic of autoexoticism. With Minyan Sun we saw how an exoticizing gaze can develop the feedback loop of autoexoticism when the self recognizes its investment in the other and subjects itself to its own desiring attention. Daniele Nunziata and Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa both traced further complexities of identity that cross the self-other boundary in colonial Cyprus and between Britain and Japan. Peter Hill, Kasia Szymanska, and Valentina Gosetti all explored the tactical potential of autoexotic elements in a politics of representation, in locations as diverse as Syria, Poland, and Flanders. With Adriana Jacobs we found autoexoticism in recent Hebrew poetry to be a “transcreative and relational” imaginative practice. Finally, Xiaofan Amy Li argued that autoexoticism opens “the boundaries of one's subjectivity and culture to change and rupture,” creating “a holistic field of intercultural experience” where “what is considered self and other are transient and plastic,” since they are drawn into an intercultural practice that “consciously selects and re-creates elements and aspects from disparate cultures and identities.” As these accounts reveal, there can be much that is attractive in autoexoticist styles of being, of self-representation, and of encounter. They are formally and linguistically mobile. They have a strong affective charge, provoking reactions of amusement, embarrassment, or outrage. They are courageous, since they run the risk of being dismissed as mere exoticism. And they can loosen established identities, opening them to change.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) chose an unconventional hobby to occupy his middle age when he devoted himself in the 1950s to the study of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. His efforts were made easier by his fluency in English. “Georgie” had grown up speaking English with his father and Staffordshire-born grandmother and reading English books in the family library (Williamson 34). He would later call the time spent in that library “the chief event of [his] life” (“Autobiographical Notes” 42). In the following essay, “Thorkelin y el Beowulf” (“Thorkelin and Beowulf”), Borges sympathizes with a fellow student of Anglo-Saxon whose own moment of bookish revelation would come to define him: Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), the first modern editor of Beowulf. This unpublished essay recounts Thorkelin's seemingly predestined attraction to the Beowulf manuscript and the catastrophic course of his long devotion.

In the mid-1960s, the United States witnessed increasing social unrest: students led protests against the Vietnam war, and many black Americans expressed disillusionment over piecemeal gains of the civil rights movement. Whereas history remembers the antiwar rallies mostly as protests, official records often code black demonstrations in Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo, and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles as riots. In response to two so-called riots in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, Chester Himes wrote “On the Use of Force” for the 24 July 1967 issue of the weekly Gaullist magazine Le nouveau Candide, where it was published in French translation (French version). The essay, never before published in English, offers timely thoughts concerning police brutality and is sure to be valuable for Himes scholarship, the story of black Americans in Europe, and the history of race and violence.