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

我的博士项目将通过研究卡特作品中异国情调的建构来揭示她的女权主义和种族政治。最近卡特研究的复兴讨论了互文和跨学科的可能性，如索尼娅·安德玛和劳伦斯·菲利普斯的《安吉拉·卡特：新的批判性阅读》（2012年）和玛丽·穆尔维·罗伯茨的《安吉拉·卡特的艺术》（2019年），但评论家们没有考虑到卡特不断演变的种族政治。因此，我的研究将通过借鉴女权主义和种族研究中的交叉性理论来纠正这种批判性的忽视。本文旨在通过关注卡特对文学异域主义的演变构建，对她关于身份的原始交叉思想给予应有的认可。我首先关注卡特在《虚无神圣》（1982）和《抖腿》（1997）以及大英图书馆档案中收录的文章中对日本文化的评论。卡特的异国情调如何反映出她在理解身份交织性方面的挣扎，尤其是在欧洲中心女权主义背景下？一方面，她的作品重申了对异国他乡的欲望和权力的帝国幻想。另一方面，她在日本的岁月迫使她面对东方的现实。本章认为，卡特的异国情调包括三个阶段，在此期间，卡特在传统的东方主义版本的他者和她不稳定的“他者的他者”的个人经历之间摇摆不定（Croft 87）。2通过当代视觉理论的视角分析了卡特的《烟花》（1974）和丽莎·洛的《批判地形：法国和英国的东方主义》（1991）。《烟花》呈现了卡特如何感知他人的一个缓慢的过渡过程。通过关注日本存在与再现之间、凝视与反凝视之间的复杂联系，本章考察了卡特最终对欧洲“唯我主义傲慢”（79）的幻灭，尤其是其通过东方主义凝视将再现物化的帝国主义事业。第三章采用帕特丽夏·希尔·柯林斯的交叉性理论，考察卡特早期作品《魔法玩具店》（1967）和日本作品《霍夫曼博士的地狱欲望机器》（1972）中异域化的女性气质是如何揭示权力关系（父权和帝国）之间的交叉点的。这一章挑战了将卡特的异国情调解读为将种族他者物化的帝国计划的过度简单化。相反，它呈现了一种对异国情调的女性气质的分析，作为一种富有成效的比喻，开辟了另一种阅读方式。第4章考虑了卡特如何在哥特和超现实主义的一般语境中重新创造异国情调，从而赋予异国情调化的他人以权力（例如，《新夏娃的激情》中的黑人妓女莱拉）。从卡特的《大师》和《新夜的激情》（1977）到《血腥密室》（1979）和《黑金星》（1985），卡特运用异国情调，从有色人种到人类与动物的杂交，对不同类别的差异性进行了拷问。它展示了异国化的他者如何讽刺地利用东方主义关于危险和动物化的女性气质的信仰来实现自我解放，最终挑战了相互关联的从属体系（阴茎中心主义、欧洲中心主义和人类中心主义）和欧洲中心主义女权主义。这个项目不仅有助于卡特作品中种族政治的有限学术研究，而且还有助于其他研究种族和性别的学者从“世界”和跨文化的角度强调交叉性。将卡特对异国情调的构建作为一个不断发展的项目进行分析，避免了整体化，并开启了关于女性写作、体裁和文学异国情调之间关系的讨论。它扩大了在重新振兴的交叉批评话语的背景下重新审视20世纪60年代至80年代的文本的批评兴趣。

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.