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Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic. By Peter Mason. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1998. xiii + 255 pp., figures, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth.)
Combining art historical and critical literary modes of analysis, Peter Mason defines and illustrates the "exotic" in a variety of European art forms from 1500-1920 in Infelicities. Unlike the "other," who is an actual persons) with another voice to "talk back" to its representations, the "exotic" is purely the work of the imagination. Whereas the Other exists in an identifiable geographic place, the exotic lacks geographic specificity. The image is often created piecemeal with iconographic symbols pointing to a multitude of peoples and places. The exotic is the product of a process of exoticization that removes signs and objects from their original context and fancifully rearranges them.
Mason demonstrates a vast knowledge of European visual representations of the period. Landscape paintings, "ethnographic" portraits, "cabinets of curiosities," allegorical frontispieces, drama, photography, and museum objects are all considered, although he gives preference to Dutch and French representations and to representations of the Americas. Perhaps most representative of the exotic genre are the "presentations of the exotic" in the "cabinets of curiosities" (Kunstkammern, Wunderkammern) as...