Feb 5
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The Japanese Fan by Eduard Veith (1856 - 1925)
there's a book called "the tatra eagle" which is based in 17th century poland and in addition to being very wrong about many aspects of polish culture/language, it also has a plot line where the main character sexually assaults a romani girl because she's "exotic", he regrets it because his children would be half g-word and at the end of the book she magically forgives him and they got engaged.
This is Anti-Romani sentiment, monoracism and exoticism
This is a pretty 18th century fashion plate, but I wonder if the artist has confused their exotic birds.
That's clearly supposed to be a parrot, but it bears a distinct family resemblance to a turkey, between that neck and the hint of a wattle.
Both parrots and turkeys were status symbols in Europe at the time, a sign of wealth and exotic foreign connections.
ALT text: 1780-1785 fashion plate number 23 from the French publication "Galerie des Modes et Costumes Français”. A woman in powdered hair and curls wears a bright orange jacket edged with transparent white frills and turquoise blue ribbon, over a skirt to match. She stands next to a sort of a wooden coat-rack of bird perches set into a manger or tray and with a bowl at the top, snuggling up to a very odd-looking bird. It is clearly intended to be a parrot, but seems rather overlarge with a more turkey-like neck than the sleek look of a parrot, and its coloration suggests a turkey’s wattle more than a parrot’s plumage.
“The definition of vampirism has been shaped, up to the present day, by an intersection of Enlightenment misunderstandings and misinterpretation from the Romantic period. Throughout all of this, negative stereotypes about Eastern Europe have continuously been reproduced. […] The vampire began his triumphal march into the learned debates of Western Europe in 1732 as the result of a ‘media event' on the Habsburg Military Frontier to the Ottoman Empire and then, initially through Heinrich August Ossenfelder's “Mein liebes Mägdchen” glaubet of 1748 and John William Polidori's “The Vampyre” of 1819, the prototype of the Gothic novel, found his way into the fashionable Western salons as a poetic figure.
In his adoption by the West European public, the [Eastern] vampire was robbed of his identity, but nevertheless continued to serve as a contrasting foil. […] As a result, vampirism, as the expression of superstition and popular folk traditions, was an unwelcome phenomenon for the elites of the European Great Powers, that is, Britain, France, Prussia, and the Habsburg and Tsarist Empires. […] The [literary vampire] animates their [victim’s] bodies to vampirism. This is already an implicit reference to the ‘threat from the East’ that was to be cultivated, at the latest, by Bram Stoker. In this way, entire communities in southern Hungary and northern Bosnia were condemned to a neverending existence as [vampires].
[…] the purpose of [Emily] Gerard's book [“Transylvanian Superstitions” (1885); which inspired “Dracula”] was not by any means to provide ethnological insights into a multicultural region, but rather to cater to the tastes of a broad readership who wanted to learn about the ‘hillbillies’ of Transylvania, which had been settled by German-speaking colonists since the Middle Ages. The bite of the revenant was contagious and meant eternal damnation [vampirism] claimed Gerard, in her portrayal of the region as an exotic realm.”
— Thomas M. Bohn; “The Vampire: Origins of a European Myth” (2019)
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Hot Take: Scholars Got Carmen Backwards
According to Wikipedia, scholars believe that Prosper Mérimée's Carmen (1845) made its main characters less sympathetic than Georges Bizet's opera (1875). They claim that Carmen was an "unmitigated and unconvincing monster" and that her character needed to be "simplified and deepened" on stage.
... Excuse me, what?!
The novella Carmen actually makes Don José and Carmen more complex and sympathetic, giving us:
José as a Basque exile, drawn to Carmen because they share outsider status in Spain—and because she actually speaks his native language (unlike most Spaniards).
José sparing the narrator's life out of gratitude for his hospitality and cigars—so much so that a monk is shocked he survived meeting José!
Carmen urging José in Basque to avoid a fight that nearly kills him.
Carmen nursing José back to health twice—including saving him from soldiers, hiding him in a cave for two weeks, and refusing to sleep until she gets him to safety.
Carmen disguising José and bringing him into her gang to save him from execution.
José trying to save another gang member, El Remendado, after he's shot.
Despite his possessiveness, José takes full responsibility for Carmen's death—burying her according to her wishes, turning himself in, and arranging prayers for her soul.
Compare this to the opera, where José is just a lovesick soldier who murders Carmen in a jealous rage. The novella gives us nuance, cultural identity, and moral complexity, and yet scholars still call it "unconvincing" because it doesn't fit a neat, romanticized tragedy.
It's wild how Carmen went from being a story about identity, marginalization, and human contradictions to being flattened into a nationalist melodrama of "fiery seductress vs. obsessed soldier."
More Dorne posting: It's interesting to me that Dorne is very much an Orientalist fantasy, but because it's the older type of Orientalist fantasy about the Middle East/North Africa (and broader Islamic World, especially since the main historical inspiration seems to be Moorish Spain, including the choices of filming locations for a lot of the Dorne scenes in GOT) that's in many ways the opposite of the kind of Orientalist stereotypes of the region that became more common post-9/11 (and the first major encounter with Dorne in the series, A Feast for Crows, came out after that in 2005), a lot of people in the Song of Ice and Fire fandom don't seem to recognize it as such. And so you instead get a lot of people thinking that Dorne is somehow "subverting" those stereotypes. And you just want to say, uh, I hate to break it to you Mr. TVTropes but the idea of a fantasy version of the Middle East that is much more open-minded about sexuality and gender than Europe, and whose people have strong sexual appetites is not, in fact, a thing that George R.R. Martin dreamed up. Far from it, this was the predominant view of the region among Western Europeans for centuries....
Queen of Darkness 🔮🌙
One of cinema’s first sex symbols and femme fatales, Theda Bara, was famously known as “The Vamp.” She captivated audiences with her roles, popularized exoticism, and embraced the allure of darkness