Exoticization Quotes

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

For whatever reason, gay characters, or characters that deal with sexuality issues, who are black, in 'black films'... are typically not dealt with with any sort of complexity. They're exoticized: their being gay is sort of the point.

I have had strangers come up to me and attempt to mimic the Chinese language in a derogatory manner. I have been told countless times that I speak 'good' English. I have been asked why someone like me would be interested in watching NFL football. On any given day, if I walk around with a camera, I will be mistaken for a tourist from Asia.

When I left Haiti, I was eight. I went to the Congo where my father was working. The only images that I had were the images of Tarzan. That's what I thought Africa was. Of course, the first day I arrived there, I thought I would see a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac.

The Asian male has an interesting history as far as Western appropriation. At one point, we were completely sexless Chinamen building the railroads. Then, World War II came around, and it was like, Asian guys are coming after the white women. We became a menace for a second.

I also have a film coming up called Breaking Up, and my part in that was not written for a Latina, and my character is not particularly pretty or sexy or exotic.

I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

I do think that drugs and alcohol have been glorified and exoticized in such a way that it gets into the art world.

European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous.

There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.

Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head - because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.

When I first started, all the media I ever got was, 'Hey! There's this Indian girl. And even though she is Indian, she gets views and stuff.'

If you do a story about a British journalist rescuing a child from Sarajevo, then Sarajevo just becomes an exotic location, and the story's about this British journalist.

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls...The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find.

I have nothing but respect for people who travel the world to make art and put exotic Indians in front of linen backdrops, but it's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary.

When somebody else calls you exotic, exotic is a box - it's the stereotype of snake charmers and face jewelry. You're just that stereotype. But I don't get offended anymore. I used to get offended by things that were said to me, or how I was seen. Now I educate. If I get pissed off, I'll educate in a sassy way. Other times I educate in a Gandhi-like way. You know - I have my moods.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. Its not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people dont do what common sense demands.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. 'Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.' First of all, my girl is black: she's Jamaican.

The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.

When I'm in the Switzerland backcountry and nobody around looks like me, people were like, 'Can I touch your hair?'