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EXOTICISM IN GERTRUDE BELL'S PERSIAN PICTURES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2014

Farah Ghaderi  and
Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya
Farah Ghaderi
Affiliation:
Urmia University, Iran
Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya
Affiliation:
Universiti Putra, Malaysia
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Extract

Victorian travelers in colonial contexts encountered differences in landscape, mores and manners, society, politics and culture, among other things, and registered their responses to the places visited in their published travel books for the home audience. Postcolonial critics contend that exoticism, i.e., a Western traveler's response to and description of the differences encountered in the context of travel, was deeply informed by the asymmetrical power relation between the representer/colonizer and the represented/colonized. As a result, these critics argue, exoticism in colonial travel writing was appropriative since it tended to construct the dichotomy of self/other in such a way as to justify imperial interventions in other countries (Forsdick, “Sa(L)Vaging Exoticism” 30–34; Said 1–28). As Graham Huggan rightly argues, difference of the colonial other in its various aspects was denigrated and dismissed as exotic when “translated into the master code of empire,” since it superimposed “a dominant way of seeing, speaking and thinking onto marginalised peoples” (24).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 123 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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