Rereading Exoticism: Race, Gender, and Intersectionality in Angela Carter

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My PhD project will shed light on Carter's feminist and racial politics by examining the construction of exoticism in her writing. The recent revival on Carter scholarship has addressed intertextual and interdisciplinary possibilities, as in Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips' Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (2012) and Marie Mulvey Roberts' The Arts of Angela Carter (2019), yet critics have failed to consider Carter's evolving racial politics. Hence, my research will act as a corrective to this critical neglect by drawing on theories of intersectionality in feminist and race studies. It aims to give due recognition to Carter's proto-intersectional thoughts on identity by focusing on her evolving construction of literary exoticism.Chapt. 1 begins by focusing on Carter's comments on Japanese culture in the essays collected in Nothing Sacred (1982) and Shaking a Leg (1997), as well as in the British Library archives. How does Carter's exoticism reflect her struggle to understand intersectionality within identity, especially when set against a Eurocentric feminist context? On the one hand, her writing reasserts an imperial fantasy of desire and power towards the exoticized other. On the other hand, her years in Japan forced her to confront the reality of the Orient. This chapter maintains that Carter's exoticism consists of three stages, during which Carter is torn between the traditional Orientalist version of the other and her destabilizing personal experience of being "the other of the other" (Croft 87).Chapt. 2 analyses Carter's The Fireworks (1974) through the lens of contemporary visual theory and Lisa Lowe's Critical Terrains: French & British Orientalisms (1991). The Fireworks presents a slow transitional process of how Carter perceives otherness. By focusing on the complex nexus between presence and representation, and between gaze and countergaze in Japan, the chapter examines Carter's eventual disillusionment at European "solipsistic arrogance" (79), particularly its imperialist enterprise of objectifying representation through an orientalist gaze. Chapt. 3 employs Patricia Hill Collins' theorisation of intersectionality to examine how exoticized femininity uncovers intersections among power relations (patriarchal and imperial) in Carter's early work The Magic Toyshop (1967) and those written in Japan such as The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972). This chapter challenges the oversimplification that reads Carter's exoticism as an imperial project to objectify the racial other. Instead, it presents an analysis of exoticized femininity as a productive trope that opens up alternative readings.Chapt. 4 considers how Carter's reinvention of exoticism within Gothic and surrealist generic contexts allows for empowerment of the exoticized other (e.g., the black prostitute Leilah in The Passion of New Eve). From Carter's "Master" and The Passion of New Eve (1977) to The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Black Venus (1985), Carter's use of exoticism interrogates otherness in various categories ranging from persons of colour to human-animal hybrids. It shows how the exoticized other ironically takes advantage of Orientalist beliefs around dangerous & animalized femininity to achieve self-liberation, which ultimately challenges interlocking systems of subordination (phallocentrism, Eurocentrism, and anthropocentrism) and Eurocentric feminism.This project will not only contribute to the limited scholarship on the racial politics of Carter's work but also help other scholars who work on race & gender by highlighting intersectionality from a 'worlded', cross-cultural perspective. Analysing Carter's construction of exoticism as an evolving project avoids totalisation and opens up discussions about the relationship between women's writing, genre, and literary exoticism. It widens critical interests in revisiting texts from the 1960s-1980s in the context of a reinvigorated intersectional critical discourse.