![]() ![]() Only by attending to the cultural politics of the exotic, I want to suggest, can we open up discourses of race and gender to productive and transformative cultural critique.īuilding on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, Dangerous Writing outlines a political economic theory of composition. MacDonald’s novel thus deserves renewed attention precisely because it traces critically the historical continuum along which exoticist constructions of race and gender have shaped the experiences of many immigrants in North America. It is in fact this underlying exoticism that has persistently structured the experiences of several generations of racial and sexual minorities in North America and relegated those minorities to the margins of social life. Focusing on Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald’s critically acclaimed Fall on Your Knees (1996), this essay argues that the figure of the Arab in the novel represents an ethnic otherness whose strategic exoticization exposes a highly racialized and gendered early twentieth-century North American culture, one that has historically been informed by a latent, economically motivated exoticism. ![]()
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