Western Colonial Representations of the Other: The Case of Exotica Tibet

Cultural representation of the non-Western Other lies at the core of Western colonial and neocolonial discourses. A critical political analysis of the Western imagination of the Other involves a recognition at two levels—the practices of essentializing and stereotyping that provide the backbone as well as various strategies (such as infantilization, eroticization, debasement, idealization, and self-affirmation) that put flesh to the imagined Other. The strategies are not fixed ahistorically but nevertheless remain stable over a period of time. In this article, I identify significant rhetorical strategies that characterize Western representations of the (non-Western) Other, focusing mainly on Western colonial representations, and substantiate it through the empirical study of Exotica Tibet (a shorthand for exoticized Western representations of Tibet).