While researching imperial travelogues, Arya Rani, a scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas, came across my book Exotic Cinema. She found it interesting enough and invited me for an interview, which has just been published as a forty-minute podcast on the New Books Network website. Just click on this link and listen…

I feel immensely honoured to have been awarded not just one but two prizes for my book Exotic Cinema: The Janovics Center Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre and the Author of the Year 2024 in African Studies Award by The African Studies Centre, both at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. I have just returned from a wonderful Awards Colloquium, hosted by Constantin Pârvulescu and Miruna Runcan at the Janovics Center, which is part of the Faculty of Theatre and Film.

When we ambled along the streets of the beautiful town of Galle in southwest Sri Lanka earlier this year, I was often more intrigued by the texture of distressed surfaces, of walls whose crumbling plaster was covered in moss and mould, than by the architectural sights. Capturing these natural, yet artful, compositions of green and pink and grey with the lens of my iPhone was not enough to take in their beauty. I felt a great desire to touch them with my fingertips, feel the moisture of the weather-beaten plaster, the soft, squidgy texture of the green mosses and explore whether the thick grey mould would rub off on my hands. It instantly made me think of Laura Marks’ influential theorisation of ‘haptic visuality’, which refers to a particular type of embodied perception that invokes memories of touch but represents them visually on screen. 

I am absolutely thrilled that my book Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film has won the Janovics Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre. Here’s what the international jury says about my book:

It would probably be an exaggeration to claim that during our recent holiday in Sri Lanka I undertook serious fieldwork on exoticism. Nevertheless, the encounter with such an indisputably exotic culture gave rise to many reflections on the topic that has preoccupied me for several years now.  This was not only triggered by the exotic flora (coconut palm trees, rice paddies, banana, spice plantations and flowers as temple offerings) and fauna (elephants, monkeys and even the elusive leopard), the overall sense of lushness and abundance, the tangible legacies of Sri Lanka’s colonial past (Dutch, Portuguese and British) but also by the fact that our Sri Lankan driver and guide kept using the word ‘exotic’ quite lot. Predictably,  what appeared exotic to him in his home country, was not what I would have described as exotic. While this confirmed my argument that the perception of the exotic is relative, depending on the positionality and specific cultural background of the perceiving subject, our guide Harindu’s description of the Horton Plains (see the first photo) in Sri Lanka’s central highlands as an ‘exotic landscape’ led me to reflect upon my argument about the reversal of the exotic gaze, as outlined in my book. 

Currently as hardback and e-book (hope you’ll order Exotic Cinema for your university library) and next year as paperback (for your own library…)

Edinburgh University Press has just published a brief interview with me about my forthcoming book Exotic Cinema – what inspired me, what surprised me and why I enjoyed the project as much as I did!

Last weekend, I went to see the Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The very first exhibit is Queen Victoria’s black silk mourning dress, which has shaped our conception of the Victorian era — but wrongly so! This is the interesting premise of the exhibition which aims to dispel the commonly held idea that the Victorian era was monochrome. Instead, we are invited to ‘rediscover Victorian society as a vibrant colour-filled era – from dazzling dyes used in chic corsets, bold experiments by avant-garde painters, and the flamboyant use of nature’s beauty in jewellery’. 

Edinburgh University Press has just announced the publication of my forthcoming book: Exotic Cinema is the first systematic analysis of decentred exoticism in contemporary transnational and world cinema. By critically examining regimes of visuality such as the imperial, the ethnographic and the exotic gaze, which have colonised our minds and ways of looking, Daniela Berghahn makes an important contribution to the urgent agenda of decolonising film studies.

The other day, I spent a night in the LaLit London Hotel, located in a Grade II listed building that was once St. Olave’s Grammar School. It’s a beautiful hotel that spoke to my penchant for the exotic and allowed me to experience first-hand one of the key structural principles of exoticism – what Arjan Appadurai has termed the ‘aesthetics of decontexualisation’. At the LaLit hotel, which is owned by a luxury Indian hotel chain, it manifests itself in the successful combination of an old English boarding school atmosphere with South Asian flamboyance. The once austere wood-panelled assembly hall of the former grammar school was transformed by Archer Humphreys architects and interior designers into the hotel’s dining hall and Baluchi restaurant. The walls and high ceiling are a deep cobalt blue, as are the ornate chandeliers. Both the inspiration for the LaLit London Hotel’s lavish design and many of the exotic objects (silk tapestries in the bedrooms, filigree wooden screens, the chandeliers and star-shaped lamps and much of the furniture) were made in and imported from India. It is precisely this juxtaposition of Indian opulence and English heritage which lends the hotel its exotic allure. 

Can we watch any film set in the Saharan desert without instantly thinking of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1952)? In my forthcoming book Exotic Cinema I do not devote much space to films set in the desert, despite the fact that they feature prominently in contemporary global art cinema, including films such as Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar, 2014), Timbuktu Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014), Queen of the Desert (Werner Herzog, 2015), The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990) and The Forgiven (John Michael McDonagh, 2022). The spectacular qualities of these sublime North African desert landscapes invite us to marvel at the immensity of the undulating sand dunes in shades of yellow, gold and red, the infinite skies and firmament of stars, the scorching heat, the dazzling bright light and the harsh barrenness of the landscape. 

Tonight I have finally submitted my book manuscript Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Transnational Film to Edinburgh University Press. It‘s been quite a long journey but the discoveries I have made along the way have been truly fascinating and I have really enjoyed researching and writing the book. I hope that my readers will feel the same, when it’s published in September.

Contemporary Western societies’ fascination with exotic food and the knowledge of the senses is typically projected onto Other cultures. It is a nostalgia tinged by neo-colonialism that recalls the import of exotic spices and scents during the age of European empires. For example, the coffee company Nespresso uses this strategy, describing one of its flavours with the following evocative words: ‘As in the age of sailing ships, Indian Malabar Arabica beans are exposed to monsoon winds after harvest to reveal a distinguished aromatic profile, rich with cereal notes’. 

One of the issues I try to explore in this research project is how exoticism, understood as a mode of aesthetic perception and representation, can contribute to decolonising the gaze. The gigantic panorama (22.5 metres wide) ‘in Pursuit of Venus [infected]’ by Māori artist Lisa Reihana, which was the grand finale of the Oceania exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of the Arts in 2018, illustrates how appropriating the visual and narrative tropes of exoticism can give rise to critical dialogue and even decolonise the gaze.