Translating (human) gender German, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian are just a handful of the many languages which have rich grammatical gender. Thus, the kind of world cinema under consideration here is also known as global art cinema and conceived with global cinephiles rather than local mainstream audiences in mind.1, This raises the question of how global art cinema squares the circle of conveying a sense of local authenticity (one of the main attractions world cinema holds in store) while being simultaneously intelligible and appealing across different cultures. ), The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, London 2016, pp. More than a century of ethnographic research profoundly supports the theory of cultural relativity, the theory that, Benedict, Ruth Close-ups of sizzling pans, steam rising from pots, the mixing of colourful herbs and spices seduce the spectator to experience with all of their senses the pleasures of Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Mexican or Indian cuisine and not just that but a whole way of life that inverts the current cultural terms of food preparation and consumption by returning anachronistically to an era before mass production in which we imagine that the food we eat is not only home-cooked but also reflects an emotional commitment of nurture and care, family values perceived to be rapidly disappearing in the West (Negra, 2002: 64) (Figure 2). Yet rather than challenging the unequal power hierarchies implied in the ethnographers act of looking, in which non-Western cultures are invariably the object of the gaze, Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers actively replicate the state of being looked at in their films (Chow, 1995: 180). Preparing for your Cambridge English exam? 'Cataloguing Rubens and Rembrandt. The different flora and fauna of their habitats the object of the exotic gaze, with all the inequities of power and agency this entails.2. ." Click on the arrows to change the translation direction. xviixxii. Against this background, contemporary world cinema and the global film festival circuit, its prime site of exhibition, can be understood as a new type of contact zone, which Mary Louise Pratt has famously theorised in the colonial context as the intercultural space of symbolic exchange and transculturation, catering for cosmopolitan cinephiles and their interest in cultural difference. Whereas the agency implied in the act of seeing is a form of power, being looked at is disempowering (a point also made by Laura Mulvey (1975) in her seminal essay on visual pleasure and the gendered scopic regimes of classical Hollywood cinema). Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Khoo, Olivia (2007). endobj Clarke, Roger (2016). Framegrab. It is not suitable for many language pairs . 0 && stateHdr.searchDesk ? A Recently Discovered Painting by Willlem de Poorter, From Painting Performances to Performing Paintings. In most contemporary exotic films, visual pleasure is combined with haptic visuality (Marks, 2000), denoting a particular type of embodied perception that invokes memories of touch, with other forms of synaesthesia (the perception of one sensation by another modality) and intermodality (the linking of sensations from different domains) in order to reproduce the multi-sensory pleasure that has conventionally been associated with exoticism. It is used to give the reader a sense of something "exotic" and "unusual". Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. The emphasis exoticism places on sumptuous images and visual splendour shifts the attention from the films deeper meaning (such as specific historical events, social conventions and interactions articulated in the narrative) to the surface which not only shines but glosses, which looks, stares, and speaks (Chow, 1995: 150).5 Nowhere is this shift from the semantic core to surface appearance more apparent than in the films of Zhang Yimou which literally burst with bold saturated colours, a hallmark of his voluptuous visual style that is also emphasised in the titles of his films Hong Gao Liang (Red Sorghum, Zhang Yimou, China, 1987) and Raise the Red Lantern, and carefully composed painterly tableaus that invite audiences to feast their eyes on opulent interiors as well as on the enchanting beauty of Gong Li, the poster girl of Fifth Generation Chinese films (Khoo, 2007: 1) and first actress in the post-Maoist period to gain global recognition. For some words, like "table", gender is fixed. Experience the exoticism of the Medina of Marrakech. Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-Cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema. In fact, Nichols compares the festivalgoers experience with that of an anthropological fieldworker (and tourist), who becomes submerged in an experience of difference, entering strange worlds, hearing unfamiliar languages, witnessing unusual styles (Nichols, 1994: 17). Taking our cue from Al-Najjar (1989), the paper shows that employing Arabicisation can be through (1) loanword in which traits of exoticism are observed in Arabic; (2) loanblend: a hybrid form of the translated item consisting of two parts, one belongs to the Source Language (SL) and another belongs to the Target Language (TL); (3) translation . Although the dynamics of globalisation have profoundly changed the configurations of Self and Other and challenged the Western ethnographers authority to interpret the signifying systems of supposedly subordinate societies, according to Rey Chow (1995: 177), we still cannot write/think/talk the non-West in the academy without in some sense anthropologizing it. This explains why non-Western filmmakers are often expected to act as native informants and interpreters whose role it is to provide authentic accounts of their cultures of origin. Shapiro, Ron (2000). Like world cinema, exoticism is a travelling concept that depends on mobility and the crossing of cultural boundaries to come into existence. 1995. Heung, Maria (1997). Reading Formations and Chen Kaiges Farewell My Concubine. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. In fact, as Charles Forsdick (2001: 21) has persuasively argued, the exotic gaze is a perspective from the other side, from outside and across geographical [or cultural] boundaries. It depends on the maintenance of boundaries, lest cultural difference and the sense of astonishment and wonder it evokes in the beholder, be preserved. During the nineteenth century exotic gained the connotation of a stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic could be (safely) spiced. Ebert, Roger (1992). Vermeers Robe: Costume, Commerce, and Fantasy in the Early Modern Netherlands. Dutch Crossing 35 (2011), 17795. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. Learn a new word every day. This paper reassesses the working relationship between Jan van Vliet and Rembrandt in the context of printmaking practices in seventeenth-century Holland. Segalen, Victor (2002). Dennison, Stephanie and Song Hwee, Lim (2006). When letters make sounds that aren't associated w One goose, two geese. endobj What they find [] is what they already knew they would find, images predigested by certain platitudes and commonplaces. Ronys observation goes a long way in explaining why exotic forms of cultural representation often seem clichd and stereotypical. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. Berghahn, Daniela (2017). La Isla de Borneo evoca un poderoso exotismo. He was following in the footsteps of the painter Paul Gauguin, whose colourful paintings of semi-nude Polynesian women against the backdrop of lush tropical scenery have shaped the Western imagination of the Polynesian islands. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. But needless to say, the individual human decision will not be made to use exoticisms and be in the -1 to -2 range. Commenting on the films captivating beauty, film critic Roger Ebert (1992) notes: There is a sense in which Raise the Red Lantern exists solely for the eyes. endobj Find out the translation of exoticism to 25 languages with our English multilingual translator. This usually takes two forms: either discovering a common humanity that transcends cultural differences or recognising aesthetic forms and patterns familiar from European art cinema in world cinema. 295 0 obj That, and not just its film-music exoticisms, is what keeps it alive today. Huggan, Graham (2001). Racial Attitudes and Exoticism in the Old English 'Wonders of the East' The flare of recent racial tensions, especially in the wake of the Trump administration's xenophobic rhetoric, has had repercussions in Charlottesville and across the United States. Translation Studies 4 (1), pp. Exoticism, as a cultural phenomenon, has mainly been examined via related critical concepts. In other words, the transnational dimension inherent in the concept of world cinema is constituted in the process of reception, as a film moves outside its own national sphere into another one. Goethe was particularly interested in the European reception of the foreign, which points towards the Eurocentric perspective underpinning world literature. To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds toupgrade your browser. ." The translation of items (words and phrases) which are specific to one culture from a Source Language expressing that culture (the Source Culture) into a Target Language expressing another. Iconography and Identity in Frederick Rihel's Equestrian Portrait, Kuretsky "Worldly Creation in Rembrandt Three Trees" Artibus et Historiae 1994.pdf, Govert Flinck and the Houses of Orange and Brandenburg: network and influence, India Ink: Imagery of the Subcontinent in Early Modern Europe, Shalom Sabar, Between Calvinists and Jews: Hebrew Script in Rembrandts Art, in Mitchell B. Merback, ed., Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early European Modern Visual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 371-404, 559-573, Thoughts on the Market for Rembrandt's Portrait Etchings by Stephanie S. Dickey, Review of The New Hollstein: Rembrandt (7 vols.) Berghahn, 2017: 29). Revisiting Exoticism: From Colonialism to Postcolonialism. It adopts a cultural perspective that is firmly entrenched in the conventions and belief systems of Western civilization and therefore constructs the East as the archetypical location of otherness. The standard taxonomy in translation looks like this: -2 = Exoticism (very strong elements of source language + culture left in), -1 = Cultural borrowing (minor source elements left in), 0 = Calque (a balanced translation that tries to tow a line between both cultures and languages), +1 = Communicative translation (more toward the target language), +2 = Cultural transplantation (source elements removed and complete loyalty to the target language; as if never translated, with no hints of source language or culture). Finally, a more general consideration concerns the author's choice not to talk expressly about the question of, The final chapters are devoted to a critical examination of, This is especially regrettable, as it is of great interest with regard to musical, This article considers the 'pastoral mode' as a particular subspecies of musical. I think it depends on the context and situation. The male protagonists crown of fern fronds and the young womans garland of leaves and bark skirt recall the almost identical natural attire of Matahi and Reri in Tabu and are a staple of visual representations of the South Pacific (Figure 1). 1839, in English. Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur. Film Quarterly,47 (3), pp. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. v1f@1Nk8>{00U@]8>Y{Zl+ bD0 fi:N^o|CB9%F!6 .>.y8LWv Connell, John (2003). Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). ), Rembrandt and his Circle. This is, however, not to say that all exotic films substitute glossy surfaces for deep meaning, thereby effectively compensating for the hermeneutic deficit that may arise when world cinema travels. It constantly signals the exotic source culture and its cultural strangeness. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Berghahn, 2017), contemporary world cinema offers numerous examples of how exoticism is harnessed to new ethico-political agendas and a diverse range of humanitarian and ecological issues that have nothing in common with exoticisms tainted colonial legacy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. <> Identifying one of the most prevalent iconographic conventions of exoticism, Victor Segalen (2002: 13), one of the chief commentators on exoticism, writes: Exoticism is willingly tropical. (April 27, 2023). An abundance of colors, sounds, smells, and tactile experiences promise to gratify the senses within an economy that gives free rein to consumption, unrestrained by political responsibility and ethical commitment to the real actors of exotic fantasies: that is, it disregards the role of disadvantaged people, coming mainly from third-world nations, who make a meager living from appearing in the dramatized fantasies staged in tropical holiday resorts and nightclubs. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Forsdick, Charles (2003). On the film festival circuit, Hou won the award for Best Director at Cannes, amongst numerous other awards, and The Assassin was voted Best Film of 2015 in Sight & Sound magazines film critics poll. This is assessed in light of criticism of his approach from other translation . 268-284, "Introduction: Global Art History and the Netherlands". 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Although her martial arts skills are unsurpassed, on several occasions, her heart blocks her from completing her deadly assignments. Mark Lee Pin Bins cinematography has been praised for its matchless compositional artistry (Bradshaw, 2016) and Wen-Ying Huangs production design for the visual extravagance of Oriental fantasies illuminated by brightly colored silk robes [] and sensual atmosphere (Young, 2015) (Figure 3). These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'exoticism.' exoticism noun [ U ] uk / zt..s.z m / us / z.t.s.z m / the quality of being unusual and exciting because of coming (or seeming to come) from far away, especially a tropical country the exoticism of the East Want to learn more? Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity. . Ever since Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (in 1768) and other European explorers travelled to Polynesia and perceived the islanders as the incarnation of Rousseaus ideal of the natural man, untouched by the corrupting influence of Western civilisation, the South Pacific islands have come to epitomise paradise on earth (Childs, 2013; Connell, 2003). 1. Previously, it was the role of China specialists to translate and introduce artistic works from China to the Western audience. Nevertheless, these films also rely on pictorialism, spectacle and visual pleasure for their transnational appeal. The fashionable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, had her portrait painted in a Turkish costume; the dissemination of stereotypes about the supposedly effeminate Orientals allowed her to appropriate the male garment of the turban without this being viewed as an act of cross-dressing. Offering a theoretical discussion of exoticism, alongside the closely related concepts of autoethnography and cultural translation, it proposes that the exotic gaze is a particular mode of aesthetic perception that is simultaneously anchored in the filmic text and elicited in the spectator in the process of transnational reception. This article evaluates whether Lawrence Venuti's translation approach of "foreignisation" is likely to achieve his stated go al: translations that can resist cultural dominance. The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity. Literal translation. 327. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chinese Cinemas (18961996) and Transnational Film Studies. Now, in a remarkable reversal of fortune, it is the West that points out what is outstanding and characteristically Chinese in artworks from China. Translated texts using exoticism often use cultural and grammatical aspects taken straight from source texts. In: Rosalind, Galt and Karl, Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. 1640. Galt and Schoonover, 2010: 327. Add exoticism to one of your lists below, or create a new one. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Encyclopedia.com. Eine historische Vergegenwrtigung. A Subaltern Studies Reader: 19861995. Such a translation would emphasize that the text was written in German and would use such exoticisms lavishly. They expect world cinema filmmakers to continue the tradition of Third Cinema and use their films as platforms of postcolonial resistance, instead of becoming complicit in exoticising their own culture, even if this entails potentially forsaking critical or commercial success. The Hollywood Reporter. The Persian-European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art & Contemporary Art of Teheran, Rembrandt and everyday life: the fusion of genre and history, in Arthur J. DiFuria, ed., Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge: An Ashgate Book, 2016, 161-182. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. While world cinema includes popular genre films like Bollywood and Nollywood melodrama or Hong Kong action films, global art cinema does not. Nichols, Bill (1994). The term world cinema has been coined in analogy to Goethes conceptualisation of Weltliteratur (world literature) by which he meant not only foreign literature, but also the reception of domestic literature abroad as well as his own literary translations (Birus, 2004). London and New York: Routledge. Methodologically, this essay combines a close reading of the idealized representations of things in domestic spaces we encounter in paintings with an analysis of the materiality, design and historical trajectories of the things themselves. London and New York: Routledge. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin. To try and prevent the disjunctures arising when cultural outsiders attempt to understand and analyse world cinema is impossible. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. You can download the paper by clicking the button above. 4655. When I was studying at university in Germany (Germersheim), my professors often emphasized this point. In: Rosalind, Galt and Karl, Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Within that early modern connected world, material culture played a key role. Encounters with Cultural Difference: Cosmopolitanism and Exoticism in Tanna (Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, 2015) and Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015). Young, Robert J. In A. Langer (Ed. 4149. The term exoticism describes a cultural phenomenon that projects Western fantasies about profound cultural differences. (USA/India/France/UK, 1988) and Monsoon Wedding (USA/India/Italy/Germany/France/UK, 2001) blend a documentary realist aesthetic (in the street scenes) with the exotic spectacle of vibrant colours (inside the Bombay brothel and at the Hindu wedding) and other exotic visual and narrative tropes, such as Indian poverty. Exoticisms multi-sensory appeal is especially evident in ethnic food films such as The Scent of Green Papaya, Yin Shi Nan Nu (Eat Drink Man Woman, Ang Lee, Taiwan/USA, 1994), Like Water for Chocolate, Politiki Kouzina (A Touch of Spice, Tassos Boulmetis, Greece/Turkey, 2003) and The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, India/France/Germany/USA/Canada, 2013), to mention but a few titles of this prolific genre. For these languages a sentence can only be correct if its words have consistent grammatical gender. Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti, Berkeley: University of California Press. 'pa pdd chac-sb tc-bd bw hbr-20 hbss lpt-25' : 'hdn'">. Spaces set aside for expatriate consumption in international four- and five-star hotel chains (such as the Safari Bar in the Hyatt in Muscat, Oman) promise a sanitized encounter with a non-European subject that guarantees the absence of emotional involvement. Vibrant colours, ancient rituals and traditions (both real or invented), a sense of pastness or primitive backwardness in relation to the progressive West, iconic costumes like the loincloth, the sari or the cheongsam that essentialise cultural identities, topographies like the South Sea islands or the Amazonian rainforest, waterscapes covered in carpets of floating lotus flowers or bustling street markets, sensuality, lushness and abundance and a sense of enigma and mystery are all, in varying degrees and combinations, essential ingredients of exoticism. 1630. Zeischtrift fr Interdisziplinre Hungarologie. 303319. According to David Damrosch (2003: 175), works become world literature by being received into the space of a foreign culture, a space defined in many ways by the host cultures national tradition and the present needs of its own writers. Rather than conceiving of world literature as a canon of foreign literary masterpieces, Damrosch describes it as a mode of transnational circulation and reception that gains in translation. The fact that Tanna as well as Embrace of the Serpent, which is set in the Amazon, were made in collaboration with Indigenous communities, who are credited with being the chief creative impetus and co-creators of these films, makes them not only politically correct but, arguably, also examples of self-exoticisation. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. Although exoticism is associated with notions of animality, it carefully distances itself from the violence and exploitation that characterize the related concept of barbarism. It also applies to the various mechanisms of transnational film funding and co-production, circulation and distribution, since the selection procedures involved tend to privilege a particular type of global art cinema that promises to appeal to (metropolitan) cinephiles (cf. Similarly, exoticism, though a prevalent interpretative model in the transnational reception of world cinema, competes with other ones, such as those which, indebted to Fredric Jamesons influential but controversial essay Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (1986), conceive of world cinema in terms of national (or political) allegory. There are three of these: 1. Europes Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. Arguably the most dynamic site of cultural translation is the film festival circuit since it is here where the first contact in this cross-cultural encounter usually occurs and where global art cinemas meaning and artistic value is negotiated. This essay is based on the notion that the early modern world was shaped by connections that stretched across geographical, political and cultural boundaries. But at the same time, it is (like world cinema) a travelling concept that depends on mobility and the crossing of cultural boundaries to come into being. Cultural Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Void. To be sure, in addition to their visual allure, the exoticism of Raise the Red Lantern and several other of Zhangs films also rests on established narrative tropes, notably that of the exotic-erotic-enigmatic Asian woman, frequently represented as a concubine, geisha, prostitute or simply the suffering wife of a much older oppressive husband. Dennison and Lim, 2006: 2; Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah, 2012: xix). While the term exotic denotes the imaginary qualities or essence of difference that are projected on to cultures as well as natural environments that are radically different from ones own, exoticism describes a particular representational strategy or, as Graham Huggan (2001: 13) writes in The Postcolonial Exotic, a mode of aesthetic perception [] which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery. In order for exoticism to enable the kind of imaginative investment that replaces cultural authenticity with the construction of an idealised (or, conversely, threatening) form of alterity, it needs to traverse spatial (and frequently also temporal) distances, as well as cultural and/or national borders. Such easily affordable, popular publications, in their turn, further reduced cultural otherness to a matter of costume, which, among other things, suggested that supposedly primitive natives of, for example, Australia could be forced to abjure their traditional identity merely by donning the clothes of a European gentleman. <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF /Text]>>/Type/Page>> Structural or Syntactic Calque This is the product of an erroneous connection between the elements of a phrase or a sentence: it introduces a new construction into the language. Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 66 (2016), Rembrandt and the Emergence of the Leiden Art Market, Tracing a Pose: Govert Flinck and the Emergence of the Van Dyckian Mode of Portraiture in Amsterdam, SWAN Review CAA Netherlandish Art in Its Global Context and Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India 20191218, Netherlandish Art and the World: A Conference on Global Art History, Utrecht, 25-27 October 2018, Allegory as Historical Method, or the Similarities between Amsterdam and Albania Reading Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Rembrandt's Religious Paintings from 1630s, The Speelman Fellowship and Netherlandish Art in Cambridge, 'Defenders of the Image. It results in creative reconfigurations that occur when the state of boundedness is disturbed by the forces of mobility (Papastergiadis, 2011: 2). Taxonomy of a Translation Thank you! In fact, the dogmatic insistence on cultural fidelity is incompatible with the multiple processes of cultural translation that shape world cinema. Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. 2. exotic quality or character. endobj Learn more in the Cambridge English-Chinese simplified Dictionary. The study of world cinema is one of the most vibrant and fastest growing areas in film studies. The films narrative thwarts a long list of (Western) spectators expectations such as the one-to-one match of actor and character, expository detail on the character constellations and their backstories, as well as wuxias generic conventions. <> Films like Tanna, Embrace of the Serpent, Three Seasons, The Scent of Green Papaya and numerous other exotic films referenced in this essay are easily accessible in terms of their narrative and historical background to transnational audiences. The Island of Borneo evokes a powerful exoticism. The fascinating story behind many people's favori Test your vocabulary with our 10-question quiz! The meaning of EXOTICISM is the quality or state of being exotic. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Entirely apart from the plot, there is the sensuous pleasure of the architecture, the fabrics, the color contrasts, the faces of the actresses.. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press. cat. 48 0 obj London: Routledge. 6}letBlT%kF6p. Lost in Translation: Exoticism in Early Modern Holland Claudia Swan Art History Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Overview APA . In the meantime, the domestic audience dismisses the same films as misrepresentations and mystifications of China.. Nagib, Lcia (2011). In: Lcia, Nagib, Chris, Perriam and Rajinder, Dudrah, eds., Theorizing World Cinema. When the concepts and structure of the source text can be easily translated into the target language, direct translation techniques are usually used. Exotismus in den Niederlanden der Fruhen Neuzeit, Exotica on the Move: Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland, Domesticating Goods from Overseas: Global Material Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands, Rembrandt and his Time - through Hungarian Eyes. London and New York: I. Moreover, its transnational appeal is usually part of a deliberate strategy which non-Western filmmakers deploy to pander to the tastes and expectations of Western critics and audiences. It is precisely these perceived Oriental qualities [] that separate Chinese and Western audience preferences for Zhangs films and Gong Lis images (Reynaud cited in Lu, 1997: 126). However, the relationship between realist and exoticist modes of representation is more complicated and they are not mutually exclusive. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes, Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Offering a theoretical discussion of exoticism, alongside the closely related concepts of autoethnography and cultural translation, it proposes that the exotic gaze is a particular mode of aesthetic perception that is simultaneously anchored in the filmic text and elicited in the spectator in the process of transnational reception.