Is anything ‘exotic’ anymore? I am surprised that I can even ask such a question. But seriously – can anything be ‘exotic’ in a globalised world of cheap travel, unprecedented interconnectedness, a daily tsunami of images on Instagram and Pinterest, sushi, hummus and haloumi sold in supermarkets, culinary fusions, yoga and capoeira classes and a surfeit of nicknacks, souvenirs and mementos from the four corners of a shrunken and shrivelled planet?

What is truly ‘exotic’ when Moroccan earthenware, Persian carpets, African masks, Chinese Buddhas and Indian deities are all available from Ikea and Amazon – and deliverable the same day? A world in which every home heaves with all this stuff and where what was once so alien and exciting is now – for better or worse – commonplace and ‘culturally appropriated’ in art and fashion and design and architecture and cuisine, and routinely served up with lager and chips and a side salad.

The truth is that ‘exotic’ is now completely meaningless and usurped by the more pedestrian ‘ethnic’. ‘Exotic’ = ‘ethnic’ + (rarity, magic and romance). ‘Exotic’ was tantalising when it was rare. But none of that is rare anymore in our globalised world, where the West has rebuilt the Tower of Babel as a skyscraping temple to monocultural fusion and consumerism, and dispelled all difference in its own mediocre marketing image. And sadly the magic and romance has also long since evaporated in a stale puff of opium smoke. It has suffocated in a flurry of consumerism, terrorism, immigration controls, resurgent nationalism and a cynically manufactured climate of fear and suspicion; in hateful mantras of ‘taking back control’, ‘send her back’ or ‘build that wall’.

Where we were once enthralled, we are now jaded. Jaded too by jade…. and coral and shells and artefacts and kimonos and joss sticks and avocados and palm trees and ceremonies and the ‘other’. So jaded in fact that when today we travel to distant lands, too many of us choose the familiar over the ‘exotic’, staying in anodyne Western-style corporate chains, that look more at home in Shepherds Bush than Shanghai. Even creatives, bohemians and hippies have given up on the ‘exotic’, and search out mid-century or brutalist chic ‘boutique hotels’ in tropical lands whose exoticism had lured them there in the first place. And you can understand their dilemma. If even the locals sell-out to a globalised mishmash of brands and technology, then might it not seem sclerotically out-of-step to be defending a disappearing host culture?

‘Exotic’ is one of those popular and overused words. An everyday throwaway word like ‘luxury’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘unique’ or ‘awesome’ – that through repetition has been stripped of meaning. Usually used in ironic contexts, in knowing acknowledgement that nothing is truly ‘exotic’ anymore. Familiarity – and fear – has bred contempt.

‘Exotic’ is dead and gone and meaningless – and all within my middle-aged lifetime. All we have left is a fading nostalgia-soaked memory of how we were once enraptured by other cultures and places. You probably have to be older to understand the change and loss. And that’s the point. ‘Exotic’ no longer resides in our perceptions of certain aspects of the foreign, but in memory and in the past. It is pithily summed up in L. P. Hartley’s wistful first line to The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’

That foreign country is beautifully documented and decoded in Judy Sund’s Exotic – A Fetish for the Foreign (published by Phaidon). Here, self-proclaimed exoticist Sund (professor of Modern European Art and Art of the Americas at City University of New York), introduces her book – and lets us dream.

Innumerable examples of the exotic can be found all over the world, from an Egyptian obelisk in a Roman piazza to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Mike Tyson’s Maori-inspired tattoo. The saga of any exotic thing begins with displacement: its removal from its context or culture, and its repositioning in another, where it is adulterated, commodified and/or repurposed. The processes and products of exoticism are so integral to Western visual culture that we often overlook the whys and wherefores of the exotic’s existence and enduring popularity. My book aims not only to showcase the exotic in all its wildly disparate, eye-catching forms, but also to explore ways in which it has been incorporated into projects ranging from the aesthetic and escapist to the ideological, entrepreneurial and erotic.

The word ‘exotic’ is rooted in the Greek word exo (‘outside’) and means, literally, ‘from outside’. It was coined during Europe’s Age of Discovery, when ‘outside’ seemed to grow larger each day, as Western ships sailed the world and dropped anchor off other continents.

The first definition of ‘exotic’ in most modern dictionaries is ‘foreign’, but while all things exotic are foreign, not everything foreign is exotic.

From the early seventeenth century, ‘exotic’ has denoted enticing strangeness – or, as one modern dictionary puts it, ‘the charm or fascination of the unfamiliar’. When used in that sense, it is a slippery term: what one generation considers outlandish (sushi, for example) may become so unexceptional to the next that it scarcely raises a (pierced) eyebrow. The palm tree, a long-lived icon of the faraway, still registers as such in Stockholm, though much less so in Dubai, where escapists are more likely thrilled by the snow in its mall-contained ski resort. Exoticism is in the eye of the beholder, the product of perception, and it may shift with time or place.

Moreover, not everything foreign is judged worthy of, or amenable to, transfer inside – ‘inside’ being not just a physical location, but a mental and cultural space shaped by experience and institutional indoctrination. Operating out of its own sense of identity, one culture selects those elements of another that can be effectively deployed in projects back home (commercially, ideologically, aesthetically).

Fortunes were likewise spent on seashells imported from tropical beaches (as opposed to North Sea shorelines), for display in European cabinets of curiosity – learned men’s collections of rarities, in which natural oddities like coral and dried seahorses mingled with artworks and ancient coins. In such displays, a prime shell might be set beside another lustrous collectible: the Chinese porcelain that Westerners cherished for its scarcity as well as its incomparable whiteness and glassy sheen.

Like the tulips it holds, the blue-and-white porcelain vase in Bosschaert’s still life was a recent import – but man-made rather than natural, and an example of what I will call an ‘enhanced exotic’: a curiosity that is not just brought in, but brought in line with the appropriating culture’s taste and usage by means of restyling, embellishment or exaggeration. In this case, a gilded European-made base has been added to a pear-shaped Chinese bottle vase that Bosschaert made more bulbous and wide-mouthed to accommodate the profuse floral arrangement. In the process of turning the merely foreign into the exotic, effect trumps authenticity. Such refinements are the means by which we make what we co-opt truly ours.

Holland had a surfeit of each, since that small republic had come to dominate the seas and global trade – thanks especially to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which brought back spices, tea, foreign ceramics and fabrics, as well as enslaved Africans for sale in northern Europe. Among its other live imports were parrots, lapdogs and monkeys, and the occasional large animal.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the captain of a VOC ship sailing the Indian Ocean acquired a juvenile rhinoceros in Bengal and loaded it onto his Rotterdam-bound vessel. Once there, he resigned his post and travelled around Europe showing a myth come to life: a ‘real unicorn’ that, for a small fee, one could view up close.

Admirers in Würzburg dubbed the rhino Miss Clara. In 1749, when the French king Louis XV admired her at Versailles, the Dutchman offered to sell his prize to the royal menagerie – but at an asking price so high that even that spend-thrift monarch baulked. In Paris, Clara’s display at the Saint-Germain fair provoked such rhinomania that the city’s fashionable women styled their hair à la rhinoceros, with a ‘horn’ in front and a tail dangling at the neck.

After Clara became so frustrated by captivity that she knocked off her horn, the undaunted Dutchman simply held it near her when she was displayed – as seen in a Venetian painting made in carnival season that not only shows the usual masked revellers but also the armoured beast with stubby snout.

The exotic as a concept is as old as civilization itself, dating to the earliest interactions between groups that perceived one another as unalike. Throughout history, people have been both fascinated and made uneasy by the Other – a broad term used here to denote both those who are not ‘us’ and that which is not ‘ours’ – and have deployed fantasy and humour to defuse anxieties.

A case in point exists in the Japanese namban screens that depict namban-jin, or ‘southern barbarians’ – Portuguese traders who arrived from the south. Namban screens typically show these European interlopers dressed in bombachas (puffy Portuguese pantaloons) and strutting through port towns under the suspicious or bemused gazes of sedate locals. Their entourages include Indian and Malayan servants and African slaves, as well as creatures new to Japanese eyes: horses, camels, elephants, hounds. Markers of Portuguese outlandishness – prominent noses, chins and facial hair; bow-legged, flat-footed gaits – contribute to a cartoonish construct that was persistently reiterated.

The screen painters’ namban-jin not only charmed and amused locals, but affirmed their collective sense of self (and superiority) by graphically embodying that which the Japanese were not: flamboyant, hairy, indecorous.

The divide between outside and in is emphasized by namban screens’ depictions of Portuguese confinement to public roadways, while the Japanese who observe them are ensconced in private homes. Ironically, however, the very objects that documented the foreigners’ exclusion were the agents of the Other’s transfer to the inside. As the protagonist in dozens of screen paintings, the clichéd namban-jin – a reality-based construct styled for Japanese consumers – not only entered but found proud display in spaces from which its human inspiration was barred.

Namban screens were produced in Japan amid a Western craze, during which choice elements of Portuguese language, custom and cuisine (for example, the fried foods that Japanese called tempura) were folded into indigenous culture, and wealthy Japanese put on bombachas and accessorized traditional garb with rosaries and crucifixes that were fashion statements rather than symbols of devotion. Though my book focuses on Western exoticisms, Japanese instances demonstrate that the practices of exoticism are universally found useful in negotiating the uneasy ambivalence provoked by perceptions of profound difference.

Europeans were, of course, more often intruders than intruded upon. Their expeditions to faraway places were usually followed by onslaughts of merchants and churchmen, and often armed forces – all intent on possession of one sort or another. Those who travelled brought back stories, specimens and saleable goods that stoked Westerners’ appetites for the outlandish.

In the seventeenth century, aristocrats and prosperous merchants began styling exotic retreats to which they could escape the humdrum world and dream of faraway lands; by the end of the nineteenth century, Parisian department stores stocked all manner of exotica. As foreign imports became more plentiful and affordable, and northern Europe and the Eastern seaboard of the United States became increasingly urban and industrialized, contemplation of the Other provided respite.

Today, when ordinary people as well as the wealthy jet about the world to explore distant places, evocations of the exotic remain conduits to escape.

Although the lyrics of Coldplay’s 2016 ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ – an invitation to leave the workaday world behind – makes no reference to a physical place, the video that accompanied its release was shot in and around Mumbai and brims with Indian clichés: peacocks, marigold garlands, a levitating holy man, a fire eater and a blue-painted child meant to evoke the Hindu god Shiva. Laughing children shower Coldplay frontman Chris Martin with coloured powder – as if Holi, the Hindu ‘festival of colours’, were a daily occurrence – and a sari-wearing Beyoncé with hennaed hands plays a Bollywood star (the real thing, Sonam Kapoor, has a cameo).

The video is an over-the-top homage to the Westerner’s drunken dream of India, and its release provoked much eye-rolling. Critics cried foul on several fronts: it was an example of offensive cultural appropriation, it promoted stereotypes, it locked India away in the past and trivialized Hindu traditions. Fans (some Indian) took to social media in its defence, declaring the visuals just as transportive as its makers intended. But whatever way you see it, the ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ video is a contemporary exotic.

Those confronted with potentially overwhelming difference often resort to fragmentation, picking choice morsels that are not only easier to swallow than the intact Other but are also more readily amalgamated and incorporated.

In a curiosity cabinet, a modern shelf of souvenirs, a decor or a single, quirky artwork, fragments of the foreign may be conjoined in a multifaceted Otherness that is mutually reinforcing. Alternatively, pieces of exotica may be domesticated, as when the tulip is incorporated into a bouquet of indigenous flora, a rhino is called Miss Clara, or a pair of bombachas is worn with a kimono.

But such incorporation can only go so far; the exotic, if it is to maintain its appeal and functionality, needs to register as extraordinary and to disrupt the normal order of things in ways consumers find exciting, droll or otherwise productive. Exotics that are widely embraced and consumed may be rendered trite by overuse (tulips, tattoos, tortilla chips), and become so deeply imbedded in their adoptive culture that they relinquish their former aura of oddity and their effectiveness as exotics.

Although it may seem doomed by the globalization that threatens to flatten difference, the exotic has proved so useful a tool that Western culture seems much more likely to refresh than to relinquish the processes by which it has, for centuries, been constructed – a history that my book aims to unfurl.

Rich with interludes of far-fetched fantasy and instances of captivating creativity, exoticism’s history also illuminates contentious issues that drive today’s news cycles. Its practitioners shaped still-powerful notions of race and its hierarchies, vilified Islam in vivid and enduring ways, and routinely celebrated powerful people’s subjugation and exploitation of those deemed lesser by virtue of ethnicity and/or gender.

While aiming for balance and scope, I have – like any good exoticist – combed a range of options and made choices that suit my own project, selecting the instances and objects that I find most telling, in the hope and expectation that readers will be reminded of many more.