Introduction: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism, and Fiction's Aesthetics of Diversity

During the years from 1904 to 1918, French writer Victor Segalen took a series of notes for an essay on "Exoticism as an Aesthetics of Diversity," an essay that remained unfinished when he died in 1919.¹ These notes reveal Segalen's desire to retrieve the concept of the exotic from the entwined discourses of imperialism and global capitalism in order to put it to new epistemological uses. "Strip it of all its cheap finery: palm tree and camel; tropical helmet; black skins and yellow sun," he writes. "Then, strip the word exoticism of its exclusively tropical, exclusively geographical meaning." The geographical images popularly associated with the exotic, he later observes, generate "a vulgarized Diversity" that reduces the "exotic" to an analogue for the "colonial." Only after releasing these concepts from colonial agendas might we rethink diversity as "the knowledge that something is other than one's self" and exoticism as constituting "the ability to conceive otherwise."²

A century later, colonial contexts continue to dominate our understanding of exoticism. This is, perhaps, owing to the ways in which postcolonial theory has enabled a trenchant critique of the vital role of the exotic in Western imperial culture. Eighteenth-century Europe has come under particular scrutiny for popularizing concepts of geographical "others" that eventually became staples of the imperial imagination. Collections such as G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter's Exoticism in the Enlightenment (1990)³ and Robert P. Maccubbin and Christa Knellwolf's special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, "Exoticism and the Culture of Exploration" (2002),⁴ have emphasized what Knellwolf and Iain McCalman call "a veritable eighteenth-century cult of the exotic"⁵ that attended European naval exploration and economic expansion. "A stock of fantasies that developed their own dynamics," eighteenth-century exoticism was not merely a set of fictional representations of the world derived from travellers' tales, but also a material culture of objects "isolated from their proper context before they were turned into sensations" for European audiences.⁶ Together, stories and things from abroad collaborated to generate an entire mythology of "the world" beyond Europe, which consistently reduced foreign peoples and cultures to objects for European consumption and political domination. "Exoticism," write Rousseau and Porter, "encompassed styles of being and behavior which defied normalcy ... indeed, defied humanity."⁷ Or, as Knellwolf and McCalman put it, "The exotic is a generic ploy. It frequently undercuts one's sense of realism and involves a dehumanizing process ... [Its decorative elements and images] portray what is pleasing and amusing and suppress everything else, reminding us that control over representation symbolizes dominion over the objects of representation."⁸ By passing for "knowledge of the world" in the eighteenth century, the commercial mythology of exoticism eventually authorizes imperial political, economic, and scientific institutions that deny human status to the world's non-European inhabitants.

This particular tradition of exoticism is powerful, even dominant, in Western culture of the past two centuries. Segalen struggled to imagine how twentieth-century subjects could free themselves conceptually from its legacy; this struggle continues in twenty-first century scholarship. Is it possible, as Segalen proposes, to theorize an exoticism that is not necessarily imperialist, Eurocentric, dehumanizing? One that does not reduce objects of knowledge to fetishes, and that does not aspire to pre serve culturally and racially specific forms of subjectivity through exclusionary regimes of representation? What other effects might the exotic generate?

This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction pursues these questions by situating the exotic in the context of the cosmopolitan in addition to the colonial. Cosmopolitanism has become a locus of recent attempts to unmoor eighteenth-century culture from teleological histories that posit nineteenth-century imperialism as its inevitable outcome. That Enlightenment thought and European participation in global commerce contributed to the rise of modern empires is well documented, but now we are beginning to ask whether, and in what ways, eighteenth-century interest in foreign "worlds" exceeds imperial ideology. In their introduction to The Postcolonial Enlightenment, Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey emphasize "the plurality of Enlightenment thought"⁹—a reminder that there was no single...