Readable and engaging, Inventing Exoticism explores the emergence of a distinctive form of world description during the second half of the seventeenth century and its ideological consequences. Benjamin Schmidt's focus is on large, costly, illustrated descriptions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia produced in the Netherlands. The author makes a compelling case that these books had a wide impact throughout Europe and situates them at the center of changing conceptions of global order. He provocatively redefines the exotic within its Dutch context by analyzing it beyond the realm of colonial power dynamics without obfuscating those dynamics.
Chapter 1, “Printing the World,” provides a close-grained look at Dutch book printing through the lens of Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs. Schmidt explores the production of illustrated travel narratives and compendia and elucidates a system within which authors, engravers, and commentators were subsumed under the authoritative “brand” of van Meurs geography. These books emerge not principally as texts but as syntheses of maps, travelogues, and descriptions that leant themselves as much to viewing, handling, and perusing as to reading, and they were instrumental in initiating the mode of assemblage we regard as exoticism.
Chapter 2, “Seeing the World,” turns to the visual qualities of these books, staking a claim for Dutch geography as a prodigiously image-rich means of organizing the world. Central is the notion of autopsia—terrestrial rather than corporeal—and Schmidt draws productively on recent important literature on natural history. Most distinctively, he charts a trajectory spanning the decades between 1650 and 1700 to shed light on “the paradox of pictures.” This paradox is the apparently contradictory necessity for images which vouched for the truth in the eyes of stay-at-home travelers yet attracted criticism as superfluous distractions from objective description.
A diverse selection of the printed images that comprised these geographies takes center stage in Chapter 3, “Exotic Bodies.” Frontispieces, map borders, and cartouches representing African, Asian, and American bodies are examined as components of the production of knowledge and fantasy. Through attention to extravagantly violent and sexualized imagery, Schmidt presents a compelling, if familiar, case for these printed bodies as sites for the exercise of power and as repositories for appetites that could be safely displaced from the European center.
Chapter 4, “Exotic Pleasures” inventories the appearance of marketable goods within such illustrations and traces the prevalent slippage between places and things for the European reader and viewer. Schmidt argues that the vagueness of exotic motifs—the possibility, for example, of the dislocation of American feather-work to representations of Africa or Asia—served as a necessary condition for their ubiquity within the decorative arts. The book concludes with an epilogue that examines the eighteenth-century bifurcation of rhetorically systematic geographies that avoided copious illustration from the assemblages of exotic delight that continued to proliferate within a decorative register.
Inventing Exoticism is a compelling study that will be regarded as required reading for scholars of the printed book industry, the representation of non-European bodies, and the intersections of commerce, travel, and image-making.
