Exoticism and Epistemic Resistance: Angela Carter’s (De)Colonial Journey

As a white female traveller and writer, Angela Carter occupies a complex positionality – both privileged and marginalised, simultaneously exoticised and exoticising during her foreign encounters. Hence, Carter’s self-proclaimed feminist radicalisation needs to be situated against this complex positionality, including the ways in which she effeminises her Japanese lover. This ambivalence finds wider expression in Carter’s depictions of non-Western Other(s), where she subverts but at times also reinforces a Eurocentric gaze that is coded as white and masculine. While previous scholarship has focused primarily on Carter’s Japanese experiences, this study self-consciously expands the scope to examine her cross-cultural engagements with Chinese philosophy, Indigeneity, and Black femininity in her construction of exoticism. By analysing her published works alongside private journals and correspondence archived at the British Library from feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives, it reassesses Carter’s writing of exoticism as a fragmented, non-linear and uneven (de)colonial journey. Thus, the project contributes to contemporary discussions on decoloniality, intersectionality, and exoticism as a fluid and reciprocal discourse. In doing so, it constitutes a decolonial act of reading – one that uproots static cultural and epistemological frameworks, engaging Carter’s work as a site of both critique and resistance.

The thesis is structured around Carter’s various (de)colonial journeys. Chapter 1 examines her literary traversal of the European past in Heroes and Villains (1969). Chapter 2 starts with an analysis of Carter’s intellectual commentaries on Japanese culture; then it focuses on her philosophical journey into ancient Chinese philosophy in her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). Chapter 3 delves into Carter’s evolving portrayal of Indigeneity in Doctor Hoffman, ‘Master’ (collected in Fireworks (1974)), and ‘Our Lady of the Massacre’ (collected in Black Venus (1985)), whereas chapter 4 investigates her rewriting of Black femininity in The Passion of New Eve (1977) and ‘Black Venus’ (1980).