South Asia and its Others: Reading the Exotic

The essays in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the Exotic reveal fresh perspectives on the notion of exoticism in South Asia, and also challenge and extend existing scholarship in the broader discourse of what constitutes South Asia. Significantly, the anthology considers how the phenomenon of exoticization may be interpreted as a strategic methodology utilized by writers of South Asian descent to examine critically both the post-colonialist ramifications of casteism, religious intolerance, and gender violence across differing cultural contexts within the region, and how current perceptions of native and diasporic South Asian subjects problematize ideologies of authenticity across Western-Eastern divides. The papers in this collection show how authors of South Asian ethnicity construct their own version of an exotic South Asia globally and the colonialist discourse of exocitism is employed as a discursive tool that uncovers the ambiguity that continues to mark the marginality of identities even today.