BURGH-WOODMAN - 2014 - Homogeneity, "Glocalism" or Somewhere in Between

European Journal of Marketing
Homogeneity, “glocalism” or somewhere in between?: A literary interpretation of identity in the era of

globalization
Cecilia de Burgh-Woodman Helene
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Cecilia de Burgh-Woodman Helene , (2014),"Homogeneity, “glocalism” or somewhere in between?", European Journal of
Marketing, Vol. 48 Iss 1/2 pp. 288 - 313
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EJM
48,1/2 Homogeneity, “glocalism” or
somewhere in between?
A literary interpretation of identity in the
288 era of globalization
Received 11 March 2011 Helene Cecilia de Burgh-Woodman
Revised 5 December 2011 Business, The University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, Australia
10 September 2012
Accepted 1 November 2012
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to expand current theories of globalisation to a consideration of its
impact on the individual. Much work has been done on the impact of globalisation on social, political
and economic structures. In this paper, globalisation, for the individual, reflects a re-conceptualisation
of the Self/Other encounter. In order to explore this Self/Other dimension, the paper analyses the
literary work of nineteenth-century writer Pierre Loti since his work begins to problematise this
important motif. His work also provides insight into the effect on the individual when encountering the
Other in a globalised context.
Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from literary criticism, the paper adopts an
interpretive approach. Using the fiction and non-fiction work of Pierre Loti, an integrated
psychoanalytical, postcolonial analysis is conducted to draw out possible insights into how Loti
conceptualises the Other and is thus transformed himself.
Findings – The paper finds that the Self/Other encounter shifts in the era of globalisation. The
blurring of the Self/Other is part of the impact of globalisation on the individual. Further, the paper
argues that Loti was the first to problematise Self/Other at a point in history where the distinction
seemed clear. Loti’s work is instructive for tracing the dissolution of the Self/Other encounter since the
themes and issues raised in his early work foreshadow our contemporary experience of globalisation.
Research limitations/implications – This paper takes a specific view of globalisation through an
interpretive lens. It also uses one specific body of work to answer the research question of what impact
globalisation has on the individual. A broader sampling and application of theoretical strains out of
the literary criticism canon would expand the parameters of this study.
Originality/value – This paper makes an original contribution to current theorisations of
globalisation in that it re-conceptualises classical understandings of the Self/Other divide. The finding
that the Self/Other divide is altered in the current era of globalisation has impact for cultural and
marketing theory since it re-focuses attention on the shifting nature of identity and how we encounter
the Other in our daily existence.
Keywords Globalization, Consumption, Glocalism, Literary criticism, Self/Other
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
In our era of globalisation, with its concomitant global marketplace where goods,
services and information gets circulated and consumed on a worldwide basis (Alon and
Higgins, 2005; Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Belk, 1996; Burton, 2009; Lury, 1996;
European Journal of Marketing Ritzer, 2004), various responses to globalisation have been identified (Cochrane and
Vol. 48 No. 1/2, 2014
pp. 288-313 Pain, 2000). From globalists and traditionalists through to transformationalists
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited (El-Ojeili and Hayden, 2006 cited in Held, 2000), each of these perspectives focuses on
0309-0566
DOI 10.1108/EJM-03-2011-0132 the impact of globalisation at the collective level. Adding to this extensive opus, the
present paper aims to contribute further to our understanding of globalisation from the Homogeneity, or
vantage point of how the individual encounters globalisation. somewhere in
In order to do this, this paper re-evaluates the significance of the Self/Other divide.
Nineteenth-century globalisation experiences, brought about largely by colonialism, between?
manifested a rigid expression of a Self/Other encounter between coloniser and
colonised (Said, 1978). By contrast, it is suggested here that modern globalisation
signals a blurring of this rigid divide. Despite the enduring theoretical importance of 289
the Self/Other binary as a way of constructing identity (Bettany and Belk, 2011), a
re-conceptualisation of the Self/Other trope is prompted by the specific conditions of
twenty-first century globalisation. It is the aim of this paper to re-evaluate the nature of
the Self/Other motif, arguing that its blurring in the twenty/twenty-first century can be
traced back to its earliest contestation in the work of nineteenth-century author and
colonial navy captain Julien Viaud, or Pierre Loti (nom de plume). As such, a reading of
Loti’s work is presented here as a foundation for discussion of more contemporary
challenges to self-identity in our own age of globalisation. This paper aims to make a
theoretical contribution to our understanding of globalisation as a phenomenon
experienced at the individual level and to challenge the classical boundaries of the
Self/Other binary.
Current theories of globalisation have generally focused on the broad impact on
economies and societies. Prominent among these is what might be termed the
homogenising effect (Friedman, 2000; Lane and Husemann, 2008). This position
suggests that through a global exchange or systemisation of information (Georgantzas
et al., 2010) and an intractable participation in the global marketplace, people are
brought into closer economic proximity by relying on the same global forces for their
wellbeing, livelihood and structural context. Giddens (2002) speaks of this unavoidable
globality where our collective fate is more inextricably linked than ever before. This is
perhaps seen most visibly in the rise of supra-national structures (Beck, 2008;
O’Donnell and Jeong, 2000; Witkowski, 2005) and the multi-national corporation (Alon
and Herbert, 2009; Applebaum, 2000; Varman and Belk, 2008) as the anchor for
“market forces” where those who can afford to (Chakravarti, 2006; Migone, 2007; Wilk,
2002) consume from a common global marketplace, populated by a finite number of
producers (Giddens, 1991; Wensley, 2010). This view of globalisation emphasises
over-arching social, political and economic structures; a smoothing out of the
specificities of place and people at the structural level (Ritzer, 2004).
Further theory has traced the “glocal” response (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard,
2006; Kjeldgaard and Storgaard Nielsen, 2010; Robertson, 1992; Thompson and
Arsel, 2004) where these global trends or forces are appropriated by or rolled into
local cultures, habits and lives (Thompson and Troester, 2002) to “establish”
identities (Kjeldgaard and Storgaard Nielsen, 2010). This response inscribes
consumption as negotiation, a meaning-making act that adopts strains of the global
and contextualises them within the local (Wilk, 1995). This response ranges from
active resistance (Cherrier, 2005; Kingsnorth, 2003; Peñaloza and Price, 2003;
Tomolillo and Shaw, 2003) through to appropriated acceptance (Kjeldgaard and
Askegaard, 2006; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). The glocal represents a form of
active negotiation (Liechty, 1995) at the community level (Bekin et al., 2003; Varman
and Vikas, 2007a). This view of the global/local interface emphasises an enduring
sense of the local, often expressed through consumption, preserved in the face of
EJM globalisation. While these two conceptualisations identify different aspects of
48,1/2 globalisation (perhaps, following Giddens (1979), captured as structure versus
agency), they share in a common perspective on the marketplace or consumption as
the main site of contestation and experience (Appadurai, 1996; Luedicke and Gesler,
2008; Varman and Belk, 2008).
A consideration of the Self/Other encounter is valuable for understanding the
290 individual response to globalisation as national, cultural and social boundaries are
challenged. The Self/Other binary has been long established theoretical mechanism,
influenced by philosophical (Hegel, 1977) and psychoanalytical tropes (Lacan, 1956,
1966, 1973), to inform inter-cultural boundaries (Memmi, 1957; Fanon, 1961; Spivak,
1988) that mark discursive territory and preserve identity. We can see this motif
lingering in current theories of globalisation where, for instance, glocalism practiced by
individuals (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006; Robertson, 1992; Thompson and Arsel,
2004) assumes a collective sense of self as its central locus. This sense of self is
contrasted with the homogenising effect as Other in the form of forces that operate
across a global context and external to the self. This movement between a macro focus
on the structural aspects of globalisation and its appropriation by glocal communities

points towards an interpretation of globalisation as a Self/Other encounter.
But, in his contestation of binary oppositions, Derrida (1967) problematises the
Self/Other construction, showing that its positioning as a strict divide is no longer
possible – if it ever was. There has been a groundswell in disciplinary perspectives,
some of which are used here, such as postcolonialism (Gunew, 1990: Spivak, 1988:
Young, 1995), queer theory (Hocquenhem, 1972: Rustom-Jagose, 1996),
psychoanalytical adaptions (Jaanus, 1997: Widmer, 1997: Winnubst, 1999: gender
studies (Butler, 1993: Garber, 1992, Nye, 1999), feminism (Bodribb, 1992: Felski, 1990:
Yeatman, 1991), post-marxism (Callinicos, 1985: Gorz, 1993) and race studies
(Pellegrini, 1997). All of these perspectives promote a challenge to traditional Western
social structures, argued through the Self/Other binary. In doing so, the space between
these two poles is neglected yet, as suggested in this paper, it is the movement or drift
(Barthes, 1977) between contexts, identities and Selves/Others that characterises our
experience of contemporary globalisation. This interstitial “in between” or drift
dissolves the classical rigidity of Self/Other and more aptly reflects the specific
conditions of globalisation in the twenty-first century. The movement of people,
cultures, ideas, goods and commodities across geographical boundaries suggests a
constant drift and re-encountering of Otherness in daily life to the point where
Self/Other are effectively blurred.
Taking the contestation of the Self/Other binary (Buchanan-Oliver et al., 2010) and
the possibility of an “in between” as its point of departure, the present paper proposes a
conceptualisation of globalisation as a context in which merging of Self and Other and
transformation of Self (Hermans and Hermans-Konopka, 2010) takes place. The
confrontation with a global reality is an inevitable consequence of the technologies,
media information flows and consumption practices underpinned by the globalising
impulse (Wilk, 2002). This transformed self is characterised by a liminality
(Buchanan-Oliver et al., 2010), and drift (or the somewhere in between) that goes to
the core of who we (potentially) become in a globalised world.
Drawing from postcolonial and psychoanalytical perspectives, this paper performs
a literary interpretation of nineteenth-century French colonial naval captain and
bestselling author Pierre Loti’s (1850-1923) works. Loti’s work is used because his is the Homogeneity, or
one of the first œuvres to challenge the Self/Other divide in a transnational context. At a somewhere in
point in time where exotic literature was a well-established genre, the “orientalist”
writers of the nineteenth century frequently relied on their social, moral and intellectual between?
distance from their colonial subject (thus creating Self/Other) to describe their exotic
encounters (Figueira, 1991; Julliard, 1996; André-Pallois, 1997). Loti, by contrast,
described his own drift between identities and moralities in his many travels. The 291
conditions of Loti’s era of colonial expansion and those of twenty-first century
globalisation are vastly different – though comparisons have been drawn between
colonial history and modern policies among Western countries ( Johnson, 2004;
McAlister, 2001; Morrison, 2007), giving rise to the term neo-colonialism (Morrison,
2007; Sartre, 2001). However, Loti’s re-action to his encounter with the world starts to
challenge the Self/Other construct (through which most nineteenth-century exotic
artefacts have been interpreted) enabling us to trace this drift through to our own
encounter with globalisation where Self/Other is blurred. Loti’s writings start to
challenge the binarism of Self/Other and evoke a transformative effect on the Self. In
this respect, his early work sows the seed for the intense re-conceptualisation of
Self/Other prompted by the current age of globalisation.
A brief overview of globalisation

A brief overview of the different definitions and perspectives on globalisation and its
historical context is intended to draw out the specificity of our contemporary context
and to show the complexity of perspectives to which this phenomenon gives rise.
That being said, our era of globalisation is not without some precedent. While the
specific technologies, information flow and structures of late modernity are
representative of our contemporary world (Cameron et al., 2010; Giddens, 1991;
Heaphy, 2007; Postman, 1993), the global economy and marketplace are
long-established fixtures (Chakravarti, 2006; Varman and Belk, 2008; Varman and
Vikas, 2007a, b). From the early era of global trade in the Byzantine era (Mack, 2001;
Mundell-Mango, 2009) to the Renaissance (Parry, 2007) and the early modern era
(Chaudhury and Morineau, 2007), and the establishment of a global trading market
(Swan, 2000), the global circulation and consumption of goods is not unique to the
contemporary epoch. Given impetus by colonial expansion, the realisation of the
politically envisaged civilising mission (Apter, 1999: Conklin, 1997; Spurr, 1993) of the
colonial era heralded a significantly expanded global marketplace, the advent of the
first true multi-nationals (Bown, 2010; Bowen, 2008; Robins, 2006) and laid the
foundations for what we now call a consumer culture (Arnould and Thompson, 2005;
Belk, 1988; Featherstone, 1991). The bourgeoisie of the eighteenth (Kwass, 2003;
Sassatelli, 1997) and nineteenth-centuries (Hahn, 2009; Rigby, 1993; Watson, 1999) with
their newfound taste for exotic delicacies to furnish a newly acquired leisure lifestyle
(Benjamin, 2002; Cate and Shaw, 1996; Hahn, 2009; Veblen, 1912), drove a consumer
culture voracious for glamorous exoticisms and dalliances with the Other through the
mediating experience of consumption (Hahn, 2009; Morton, 2000). In the same way that
Greenblatt (1991) describes the wonder of the New World with its newly discovered
cultures, communication techniques and rituals, the old world of Europe found itself in
awe of an Other that loomed large in the cultural, economic and political imagination.
Therefore, many of the consumer behaviours we consider to be endemic of the modern
EJM world are found in the nineteenth-century and beyond. Just as marketing looks towards
48,1/2 its own history as momentum for disciplinary reflection (Brown et al., 2001;
Tadajewski, 2008; Tadajewski and Saren, 2008), understanding the past as a window
to interpreting contemporary practices and intersections (Lavin and Archdeacon, 1989;
Schroeder and Borgerson, 2002; Smith and Lux, 1993) is part of our discussion of
globalisation here.
292 More contemporary considerations of globalisation have emerged and give rise to
differing accounts and definitions of the contemporary phenomenon. As mentioned,
the three main schools of thought, globalist, traditionalist and transformationalist,
focus primarily on economics and the impact at the national level. Table I summarises
these three positions:
These three positions trace the differing economic, political views of globalisation,
drawing out the degrees to which globalisation affects the status of the nation-state,
financial flows and market forces. Underpinning these positions is an emphasis on
capitalism and its flow-through effect to economic, social and political spheres. In this
respect, these strains of thought focus on the over-arching impact of globalisation.
Alternative views of globalisation focus on the cultural uses of globalisation and its
impact on communities, labour and culture. Linked to the key concept of modernity
(Giddens, 1991), this view focuses on the social change occurring in the industrial and
Globalist There is a fully developed global economy that has supplanted previous
forms of the international economy
This global economy is driven by uncontrollable market forces, which have
led to unprecedented cross-national networks of interdependency and
integration
National borders have dissolved so that the category of a national economy
is now redundant
All economic agents have to conform to the criteria of being internationally
competitive
This position is advocated by economic neoliberals but condemned by neo-
Marxists
Traditionalist The international economy has not progressed to the stage of a global
economy to the extent claimed by the globalists
Separate national economies remain a salient category
It is still possible to organize co-operation between national authorities to
challenge market forces and manage domestic economies and govern the
international economy
The preservation of entitlements to welfare benefits, for instance, can still
be secured at the national level
Transformationalist New forms of intense interdependence and integration are sweeping the
international economic system
These place added constraints on the conduct of national economic policy-
making
They also make the formation of international public policy to govern and
Table I. manage the system very difficult
The Globalist, This position sees the present era as another step in a long evolutionary
Traditionalist and process in which closed local and national economies disintegrate into more
Transformationalist mixed, interdependent and integrated “cosmopolitan” societies. Held (2000,
positions pp. 90-1) taken from El-Ojeili and Hayden (2006)
post-industrial eras and the impact on the individual. Characterised by an evolution of Homogeneity, or
communication technology, connectedness across the globe, greater access to and use somewhere in
of information and thus a primacy of knowledge (Bell, 1999), this re-evaluation of
modernity identifies intellectual capital as the basis for a new social and labour order. between?
Bell (1999) identifies five major factors that underpin this transition to a “modern”
perspective: movement from a production economy to a service economy; the emerging
dominance of a professional and technical class; a new ‘axial principle’, from private 293
property to the pivotal importance of theoretical knowledge as source of information
and policy formulation; a future orientation centred on the control of technology and
technological assessment; and changes in decision-making with the creation of a new
intellectual technology. The rise of the knowledge worker and the specialisation of
labour have gone hand in hand with this larger social emphasis on technology,
intellectual capital and communication (Kumar, 1995).
A further view of globalisation has emerged from the postmodern viewpoint, which
distinguishes itself from a modern perspective – although, as Huyssen (1986) and
Fornäs (1995) point out, the postmodern might be seen as “an intensified and
accelerated reflexive ultra-, super- or late phase of modernity” (Fornäs, 1995, p. 35). The
postmodern suggests that meta-narratives, or “far-reaching stories about the world
and about social transformation” no longer order our lives (Lyotard, 1984). The
complications and limitations of modernity stem from a post-industrial mass market
and the modernist inscription of the individual into a rigid social and economic order.
Postmodernity, by contrast, is posited as a reactionary cultural paradigm (Heaphy,
2007) that promotes emancipator consumer acts through an absence of dominant
cultural or economic narrative to guide individuals. The flow-on effect of the so-called
obliteration of meta-narratives is that consumers are free to construct their own
perspective, using the global context, technology and information to create their own
lifestyles. As Giddens notes (2000), this reading of globalisation also enables the
re-discovery of local cultural identities.
The literary criticism method

The approach adopted to interpret Loti’s writing borrows broadly from the literary
criticism arena. Consumer research has identified the importance of narrative
(Holbrook and Grayson, 1986; Epp and Price, 2010; Shankar et al., 2009; Thompson
et al., 1998) as a way of embodying the metaphoric or symbolic meaning of
consumption, giving rise to continuing interest in a literary approach as an interpretive
mode (Holbrook, 2009; Stern, 1996, 1992, 1990; Stern and Schroeder, 1994). Equally,
Holt (2003) suggests:
knowledge doesn’t come from focus groups or ethnography or trend reports-the marketer’s
usual means for “getting close to the customer.” Rather, it comes from a cultural historian’s
understanding of ideology as it waxes and wanes [. . .] and a literary critic’s expedition into
the culture that engages these contradictions (p. 49).
Using these insights, the present paper utilises a literary approach to apprehend the
historical, metaphoric and thematic value of Loti’s work. All of Loti’s novels, journaux
intimes, letters, media pieces and Viaud’s naval records (including the unpublished
records held at the Service maritime archives in Vincennes and at the Maison de Pierre
Loti, Rochefort) were consulted. Following Stern’s (1989) illustrative case wherein
EJM several strains of literary interpretation are integrated to analyse advertising text, a
48,1/2 similar approach is adopted here. The literary approach includes a range of
perspectives and methods for the analysis of texts in an effort to draw out “the
relationship between language, meaning, and consumption” (Stern, 1989, p. 323). It is
precisely this relationship that the present paper seeks to illuminate in Loti’s work
thereby making the literary approach the most relevant for the purpose of this paper.
294 Noting its impact on the relevance of historical text and consumer experience, Stern
(1989) makes the point that “Literary analysis becomes increasingly important as
consumer history recedes in time and fragmentary written records yield the only data
available to scholars” (p. 332).
In this paper, the literary approach enables us to capture Loti’s insights as he moves
across a series of “Otherings” (self/other, East/West, gay/straight,
pro-colonialist/anti-colonialist) and his protagonists are transformed by the
experience of encountering the exotic and the unfamiliar. The theoretical
perspectives used here to interpret this movement are feminist, queer and
postcolonial approaches. Feminist and queer theory, draw from the psychoanalytical
strain of literary criticism. Postmodern feminism essentially asserts that gender; sex
roles and many other social roles are performances complicit with a mythical social
order (Butler, 1993: Garber, 1992: Pellegrini, 1997). The acknowledgement of gender as
performance leads feminist critique away from classical objections to gender
inequality towards a more polymorphous critique of the social order as a whole.
Certain scholars have urged a feminist perspective in marketing (Hirschmann, 1993),
and others have begun to probe the post-structural feminist position (Drummond,
2004). This strain of thought is applied to Loti’s work as a way of understanding his
use of feminine figures as symbolic of the exotic Other.
Equally, the queer problematisation of sexual identity (Freccero, 2006) has become
an important facet of literary criticism. Connected to feminism and gender studies,
queer theory emerged out of French post-structuralism as a textual strategy to include
gay and lesbian interpretation (Hocquenhem, 1972). As theoretical perspective, its use
resides in its illumination of alternative sexualities (leading to “queer” readings of text)
that challenge conventional textual readings. Queer theory apprehends the
transgressive power of sexual identity (Bloodsworth-Lugo, 2007) and offers a more
open way of reading text. Queer interpretation of Loti’s work (De Burgh, 2005)
illuminates his (bi)sexual drift (De Burgh, 2005; Berrong, 1998) and the movement
between sexual identities made possible by the encounter with the exotic world. This
sexual drift also allegorises Loti’s identity drift. Treat (1999) suggests that
cross-cultural homosexual encounter re-appropriates Western sexual norms (or
expectations of the gay male) and establishes an alternate dynamic of social
engagement (Ungar, 1983). As a result of this different mode of engagement, the
Western male’s perception is radically altered. Traditionally, “it is the Western critic’s
privilege of questioning his/her cultural Other without being questioned by them”
(Hayes, 2000, p. 20). However, as Hayes (2000) points out “’We’ do not have a monopoly
on queering [. . .] ‘we’ might also, in turn, be queered . . . ”(p. 20). This combination of
postcolonial and queer perspectives (a project commenced by Barthes’ and Kristeva’s
Tel quel ) offers an insightful frame through which to read Loti’s work.
The inclusion of a postcolonial perspective sheds light on the historically grounded
racial and cross-cultural issues that underpin Loti’s work. Postcolonialism cultivates a
theoretical underpinning for the understanding of the interaction between the coloniser Homogeneity, or
and the colonised. The postcolonial perspective is effectively integrated into other somewhere in
lenses such as psychoanalytical and queer analyses since all of these strains of literary
interpretation concentrate on seeing the Other in the text. It allows an interlaced between?
reading of multivalent threads of social, historical, cultural and personal experience
from the perspective of both the coloniser and the colonised.
295
Who is Pierre Loti?
Pierre Loti was the nom de plume of French naval captain Julien Viaud (1850-1923).
Celebrated in his day as a “master” and “genius” in France and England (James, 1893;
Doumie, 1899; Gosse, 1905; Stephens Whale, 1908; Giraud, 1913; Harris, 1919; Lemaitre,
1921), Loti’s legacy has been largely eclipsed by the giants of nineteenth-century
French literature such as Proust – an admirer of Loti who modelled his own
autobiographical fiction on Loti’s (De Robert, 1928; Costil, 1960) – and Flaubert.
However, as an early blueprint for the transformative effects of global encounter, his
opus is instructive. Although cynical of his “worn-out civilisation, curious of new
sensations, and yet bored by them; tired of others, and still more of himself, and
longing for eternal nothingness” (Doumie, 1899, p. 89), Loti nonetheless enjoyed
success in the salons of Paris. Friends with luminaries such as Sarah Bernhardt, Ernest
Renan, Juliette Adam and Judith Gautier (Blanch, 1983), his genius for evocative word
imagery outweighed his lack of literary form (James, 1893; Gosse, 1905). Loti himself
claimed to read little and to simply write his experiences and impressions as he saw
them. His raw writing style, evocative imagery and pathos distinguished him from his
lofty peers, leading to his standing as “the most sensitive writer now living” (Gosse,
1905, p 228. See also Lemaı̂tre and Stephens Whale for similar critique).
Loti published anonymously his first autobiographical novel Aziyadé in 1878 with
little attention. Le Mariage de Loti (1880), however, launched his literary career. His
ensuing novels Roman d’un Spahi (1881), Mon Frère Yves (1883), Pechêur d’Islande
(1886), Madame Chrysanthème (1887), Matelot (1892), Ramuntcho (1897) and Les
Désenchantées (1906) were consumed by a French public eager to experience Loti’s
remarkable “charm outside the rules” (James, 1893, p. 177). His travel writings from
Egypt (1908), Angkor (1911), India (1903) and other equally “exotic” places
complemented his novels and enjoyed further popularity with the armchair
travellers of France (Dunwoodie, 1998). Alongside earlier popular accounts such as
Condor’s The Modern Traveller published in 1827 (Mazower, 2002), Flaubert’s
Salammbo (1862) and Nerval’s 1851 Voyage en Orient, Loti’s literature joined a large
opus of works about the colonies which may account for the generic treatment of his
writing as yet another oriental writer.
Yet, Loti’s work always reflects ambivalence about his own role in the colonial
project and a drive to protect local cultures for “he sees the tide of European vulgarity
already assailing and submerging them”. Writing for Le Figaro and L’Illustration from
the 1880s onwards, Loti often staged controversial criticism of French colonial policy
particularly during the Tonkin campaign and first world war. Critics of the day
recognised his anti-colonial sentiments, where “in all Loti’s oriental books one is struck
by the growing universality of western culture and customs, and the prevalence of that
social mill in which “we grind each other’s angles down” (Stephens Whale, 1908, p. 309).
Loti’s wariness of the homogenising effect of his own era anticipates some views on
EJM modern globalisation. For a European public accustomed to a discourse lauding the
48,1/2 virtues of the civilising mission (Conklin, 1997), Loti’s criticism of the “rising tide of
Western commercialism” came as an unfamiliar, and confronting, perspective.
In his lifetime, Loti was a celebrated author, political commentator and naval
captain. Yet, after early biographies appeared (Serban, 1920; Kermadec, 1927;
D’Auvergne, 1953), it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that a small group of critics
296 turned their attention in earnest to the opus (Blanch, 1983; Hargreaves, 1981; Lerner,
1974; Quella-Villéger, 1998; Wake, 1974). This might have been propelled by Barthes’
(1977) essay Aziyadé that concluded Loti’s Turkish novel of the same name was “ truly
modern” (and arguably postmodern). Barthes (1977) writes “Aziyadé is the novel of
drift [. . .] Curiously, Loti himself speaks of the drift (a rare, truly symbolic moment in
this discourse without secrets): [. . .] the bed in which Aziyadé and he make their
amorous excursions is a ’floating bed,’ a bed that drifts (p. 119). This motif of drift is of
central importance to understanding the Lotian opus and underpins the use of the term
“drift” used in our discussion here.
There are two general trends in Lotian scholarship. One is distinguished by a struggle
with the apparent contradictions of Loti’s life and work as colonialist and critic
(Hargreaves, 1981; Bongie, 1991; Quella-Villéger, 1998; Hartman, 1994; Dunwoodie,
1998). Informed by Said’s Orientalism (1978), this strain of scholarship sees Loti as
representative of a Western ideology that served its own political-economic ends and
imposed its own fantasies on indigenous cultures. This approach finds its parallel in the
view of globalisation as a drive towards a form of economic colonisation resulting in
cultural homogenisation and a prevailing of a Western viewpoint (Beck, 2008) under the
guise of such terms as “development” (Böhm and Brei, 2008; Lauderdale, 2008; Schor in
Holt, 2005) or “civilising mission” as it was coined in Loti’s era.
The second approach weaves a range of theoretical views into the interpretation of
Loti’s work. Taken from a more “postmodern” vantagepoint (Bardin, 1994; De Burgh,
2005; Vercier and Quella-Villéger, 2001), Loti has been read from postcolonial (Hughes,
2001; Lowe, 1991; Pratt, 1992), psychoanalytic (Buisine, 1998), feminist (Szyliowicz,
1988) and queer perspectives (Berrong, 1998; Gundermann, 1993). These approaches
demonstrate the differing views of his work and conflict in their assessment of his
worth. In this paper, we draw on these psychoanalytic, queer and postcolonial
interpretations of Loti’s work.
Transformative effects in Aziyadé and Roman d’un Spahi

Narrative, as represented in the novels of the era, was central to nineteenth-century
Western colonial discourse (Said, 1993). While Loti’s letters, journals and press
writings are available and provide adequate account of his conflicted approach to
colonialism, his autobiographical novels are fascinating for their evocation of place and
sentiment. The novels are where we see Loti’s many facets thinly veiled by the veneer
of “fiction”. The novels give as much insight into Loti’s emotional response to the
conditions of his day as his formal autobiographies in that “all the books of Loti are in a
sense leaves from his diary” such that “it is almost impossible to separate fiction from
autobiography” (Vital, 2004, p. 43). Contradictory to Flaubert’s view that any work is to
be condemned if the author is seen (Barry, 1904), Loti merged autobiography with
fiction in his novels and his so-called autobiographies. The autobiography Roman d’un
Enfant is as compelling as the novel Aziyadé for its fantastical events, remarkable
prose and plaintive sentiments – so much so that consensus is yet to be achieved on Homogeneity, or
whether it is a novel or autobiography (Berrong, 1998). Loti himself always declared it somewhere in
to be an autobiography. Likewise, the security of “fiction” often provided Loti with
scope for expression of his most sincere thoughts. As with so much of Loti’s life, his between?
drift between fiction/non-fiction and the constant play of identities means that his
novels are, in a sense, just as genuine as his non-fiction writings with as many insights
to be found embedded in them. 297
The Lotian opus is large and therefore only two of his main works Aziyadé (1878)
and Roman d’un Spahi (1881) are discussed at length although the themes captured
underpin much of his work. For instance, the narrative structure of Madame
Chrysanthème, Le Mariage de Loti, and Les Désenchantées follow the same path, using
the heroine as a metaphor and gateway to a local culture thereby creating the pole
against which the drift between identities is experienced by the protagonist. Similarly,
the heroines in Pécheur d’Islande, Ramuntcho and Mon frère Yves symbolise their
Basque or Breton culture. “Loti” as the main character of Aziyadé also features
throughout many of the works. Equally, in his journal intime, Loti frequently speaks of
his shifting sense of self as he travels between worlds and identities. Loti moves across
a series of “Otherings” (self/other, East/West, gay/straight, colonialist/anti-colonialist)
in most of his writing. The first novel Aziyadé illustrates this movement as liberating
while Roman d’un Spahi speaks to the anxieties that potentially result. Both novels,
however, problematise the Self/Other encounter.
Aziyadé
The Turkish novel Aziyadé (1878) provides one of the best examples of the drifts and
slippages that characterise Loti’s œuvre. Henry James (1893) points to these drifts,
remarking “the desire to change his skin is frequent with M. Loti, and it has this oddity
that his preference is almost always for a dusky one” (p. 176). Blending autobiography
and fiction, the novel mirrors Loti’s own stay in Istanbul and his relationship with a
local woman Hadikje who he subsequently attempted unsuccessfully to bring to
France. His journal at the time recounts his efforts and his intention to marry her.
Hadikje, who died in Turkey, remained a lost love for Loti who returned to Turkey to
visit her grave in the autobiography Fantôme d’Orient (1892).
The novel starts with a series of correspondence describing unrest among Istanbul
locals and the measures taken by European authorities to put down dissenting voices,
demanding “simultaneous executions, as a reprisal for that massacre of consuls, which
had shocked Europe . . . ” (1878, pp. 7-8). This mise en scene signals the framing politica
and cultural tensions within which the ensuing narratives take place. It is significant to
note that the protagonist Loti is British, not French, in a deepening identity play that
moves between colonial personae – even the protagonist’s “Western” identity is
de-stabilised at the outset. Loti, as a master of Othering, constantly creates
opportunities to transgress and this is one of many times where he steps into
alternative identities.
The story then moves to the events of Loti’s stay in the city. Loti’s first encounter
with Aziyadé situates a classic Self/Other boundary between the two characters in
readiness for Loti’s (1878), unfolding drift, writing “she would have hidden herself from
a Turk. But a giaour hardly counts as a man. At the most he is a curiosity to be
examined at leisure” (p. 11). Loti’s first encounter with Aziaydeis reminiscent of
EJM Braun-Wiesbaden’s first encounter with the women of Greece. In the same vein that
Loti is struck by Aziyadé’s beauty, Braun-Wiesbden notes the beauty of Greek women
48,1/2 (Braun-Wiebaden in Mazower, 2002). Likewise, Flaubert is struck by the beauty of
Salammbo. Loti’s account deviates from this classical representation of the exotic
woman as aesthetic object in that when he is confronted with the unfamiliar sight of a
woman in a veil, he, in turn, is gazed on by her. From a postcolonial perspective, this
298 scene is significant in that not only constructs the East as symbolised by Aziyadé as
the Other but also implicates Loti in Aziyadé’s gaze – Loti is Other too.
However, Aziyadé does not remain the locus of Loti’s desire since “it is Aziyadé’s
metaphoric affinity with Turkey that forms the foundation for the novel and the
ensuing drama of Loti’s adventure” (De Burgh, 2005, p. 46). Loti’s stories are charged
with often unspoken, and indeed unfocused desire that, in Aziyadé, is left to seep into
the city of Stamboul as the necessary scene of Loti’s encounter with the Other where “
the city contributes in its own active way in the game of seduction (secrets,
exhibitionism, troubled nights, forbidden places, etc.)” (Vercier and Quella-Villéger,
2001, p. 95). Loti (1878) suffuses sexuality onto Stamboul itself, constructing desire as a
simultaneous site of consumption and denial. He comments that “the near East still
keeps its charm; it has remained more essentially Oriental than one would have
imagined” (p. 32) The use of the term “charm” here is ambiguous and the meaning of
what the Orient should be also goes unclarified. Loti’s experience of Stamboul only
goes some way towards resolving what is intended by “the essential Orient” since the
scenes that might reveal the hidden secret inevitably slip away at the critical moment
of explanation. The consumption of desire is made accessible through “young boys of
Asiatic race, dressed as nautch girls, perform[ing] unseemly dances to an audience
composed of all the sweepings of the Ottoman jails” (p. 36). Yet this consumption of
sexual spectacle remains deliberately unarticulated and desire remains a lack (Lacan,
1956) to be fulfilled. Desire drives the entire narrative spilling out into these strange
events but with no resolution.
A pschyoanalytical reading of Loti’s construction of desire invites two simultaneous
interpretations – one of loss and one of resisted desire. As a child, Loti suffered the
death of his older brother Gustave in the colonies. It is perhaps no co-incidence that
Loti sought to live his brother’s lost life and attempted to re-create his close
relationship with his brother in his adult relationships with men (Buisine, 1998). Loti
experienced several close relationships with men. The physicality of his companion
Joseph Bernard, and later Pierre Le Cor, was reflected in Loti’s protagonists in Matelot
and Roman d’un Spahi. The relationship with Bernard lasted over the course of Loti’s
early naval life and, in their correspondence, Loti always started his letters to Bernard
with “brother”:
I am writing from your room in the Hôtel du Nord which, in an hour, I shall leave sadly, for it
is still full of you (although there is none of that disorder which proclaims your presence!)
Since you left, I have been very busy, which is a good thing, for then I do not have time to
think ( June 1874).
The conflation of romantic, if not explicitly sexual, content of Loti’s letters with his use
of the term brother signals the ambivalence of desire and of identification that we see
played out in Aziyadé. Drifting between brother and lover constructions, desire is
suffused for Loti since its source lies in the recesses of his childhood. This accounts for
the homoerotic energy that pervades several of Loti’s works, but most strikingly in
Aziyadé. Samuel and Achmet, As Berrong (1998) notes, Loti’s relationship with Samuel Homogeneity, or
is suffused with sensual tension while the relationship with Achmet appears more somewhere in
fraternal. Nonetheless, both of Loti’s relationships are refracted through the lens of his
own lack (in the Lacanian sense) and his desire to recover a lost brother. between?
A reading of resisted desire as a suffused confrontation with memory, loss and
sexuality represents another layer of drift. In his memoirs, written a decade after
leaving Turkey, Loti (1914 [1892]), reflects on “those unfathomable undercurrents of 299
my life, of my love of that time” (p. 7 emphasis in original) that remain unarticulated
even years after his original trip to Turkey. While the protagonists of the novel may
have been killed, Loti (1914 [1892]) (Viaud) is left to ponder the memories of “the
transitory period of my life, when, all at once, I gave myself up to headlong passion” (p.
151). Stamboul, with its silent alleys and hidden doors, permits Loti a space to drift
between his unarticulated memories and desires while Aziyadé acts as the symbolic
veil that masks his drift.
Just as Loti drifts between sexual identities, he moves between his structured life as
a British officer and the freedom of life as Effendi. This tension between his national
identities is captured in Loti’s constant movement between his house with Aziyadé and
his ship (which returns from Britain and lies at port for the majority of the story). Wake
(1974) suggests that Loti “builds around him a world which will be totally independent
of the one from which he comes” in order to escape from “his old self, his real self, the
tormented, clumsy tainted Julien Viaud” (p. 55). Wake conflates here the real Loti (1878)
(Viaud) with the Loti of Aziyadé seeking to escape the structure of his British existence.
In this respect, the ship performs a symbolically and psychologically disruptive
function. For instance, he writes “I suddenly received orders to leave the corvette and
Salonica [. . .] A party of seamen descended on my cabin, tore down the hangings and
packed the boxes” (p. 26). One world cuts across the other, leaving Loti somewhere
between them. He then maintains this movement between worlds on board. He
furnishes his quarters with “closely woven red silk tapestry patterned with fantastic
flowers. Weapons, odds and ends of pottery, old knick-knacks, newly gilded, shone out
against this dark background (p. 27). Loti again expresses the polarity of his identities
through consumption. The symbolic strength of the goods around him builds
signifying bridges between his old and new identities. His transformed “den” full of
“Moroccan trash”, as Barthes jibes, symbolically contests the rest of the ship, decorated
with signs of his drift between Self and Other. His Turkish ornaments oppose the “dark
background” of the ship’s interior. The scene marks Loti as foreign to both
environments, spilling forth the world of the colonised into that of the coloniser and
back again, leaving him somewhere in between . . .
Roman d’un Spahi

While the Turkish novel represents Loti’s ambiguous identity, Roman d’un Spahi
signals identity transgression as a source of anxiety. The protagonist of Roman d’un
Spahi, Jean Peyral, is an unwilling participant in his own transformation. As such, the
novel captures some of the more troubling aspects of the globalising effect as people
seek to maintain their individual identity in the face of a global world.
Roman d’un Spahi narrates the experiences of the young French soldier Peyral who
is deployed to Dakar and Chad. As in Aziyadé, he commences a relationship with a
young local girl Fatou after a disastrous relationship with a married woman – an event
EJM that mirrored Loti’s own life at the time. Peyral divides his time between life with Fatou
48,1/2 and his military obligations where “Jean only put in at the Spahi’s barracks the amount
of time strictly necessary for the performance of military duties [. . .] His officers shut
their eyes to these little accommodations, which enabled him to spend nearly all his
days at his home quarters” (Lotti, 1881, p. 314). This double life sets the scene for
Peyral’s paradoxical existence. Just as the early scenes of Aziyadé set up boundaries to
300 be destroyed, the movement between his two lives anticipates a crisis in which Peyral
confronts his increasingly fragmented identity. Peyral sets up a double life (Buisine,
1998) living with Fatou but occasionally returning to his colonial duties where “he had
made for himself a place apart [. . .] He had learned the secret of being at one and the
same time a punctual trooper and next door to a free agent “(1881, p. 315). But as the
narrative unfolds, Peyral’s movement between worlds creates a crisis. Unlike Loti, who
enjoys the movement between his two worlds, Peyral cannot reconcile to either his
Africa or to his French military identities. He is pulled from both sides and finds
himself trapped between his worlds.
Peyral’s identity crisis is played out through the narrative frame of consumption.
When Fatou trades his watch (a sentimental trinket from home) for amulets, he fails to
“realise how strong he was when he was really angry” (1881, p. 333) and erupts with
“something of the wild, uncontrollable passions of children reared in the woods” (1881,
p. 333). He also begins to drink too much “found every night at one or another den of
dissipation, a drunkard and roisterer of the first water, essaying a fine assumption of
the airs of the cynic and finished libertine” (1881, p. 280). His demise is signified by the
loss of goods charged with the symbolic representation of “home” and his destructive
consumption of alcohol. Peyral’s crisis takes place in the “abnormal conditions of
existence on the high seas or in far-away tropical lands, amidst unnatural deprivations
and morbid cravings and unfamiliar influences” (1881, p. 280). Loti repeatedly
emphasises how the “abnormal conditions” confront Peyral, forcing him to abandon
Self. He succumbs to alcoholism and general malaise as a result of his ambiguous
identity, an identity under siege or cut adrift. Loti demonstrates the vulnerability of the
in between status of the Spahi, embodied in “all the young fellows that are torn from
their homes to expend their lives in far-off countries or on the high seas . . . ” (1881,
p. 313).
This theme of lives lost in the colonies surfaces in Loti’s writing and carried through
to his non-fiction commentaries. In September and October 1883, Loti wrote a series of
articles for Le Figaro in which he denounced the French army for unnecessarily killing
young, French soldiers during the Annam campaign:
Those who had their chest torn open cried in a profound, morbid manner, vomiting their
blood in the sand. One, who had a sailor’s bayonet in his mouth, bit at the point, clenching it
with all his strength, his bleeding teeth screeching against the iron – to prevent it entering his
throat and tearing it open [. . .] They were all killed, almost merrily, already drunk on the
shouts, the rush, the colour of blood (October 13, 1883).
Loti’s articles offered an uncharacteristically graphic account of war that finds parallel
with the end of Roman d’un Spahi where Peyral is slaughtered in battle.
Roman d’un Spahi represents identity formed in the interstices of a postcolonial Self
and Other interpretation. While the postcolonial frame draws on a strong Self/Other
opposition, Roman d’un Spahi gives us an in-between. As Peyral’s identity
degenerates, the local culture signified by the figure of Fatou becomes the space
onto which Peyral projects his guilt and anxiety. However, Peyral’s rapport with Fatou Homogeneity, or
reflects his ambivalences, guilt and uncertainty towards his new identity too where somewhere in
“softer his heart grows at the thought of home, the more pity, and even something of
tenderness, he feels for poor Fatou” (1881, p. 317). His affection for Fatou is juxtaposed between?
with a longing for home, revealing his shifting identity. When Peyral experiences
feelings of entrapment in Africa, his frustration and restlessness are directed at Fatou.
However when Peyral has the option to leave, he is reluctant to dismiss her and gives 301
up the chance to return to France. This is ultimately the decision that results in his
death as though his decision to stay is a decision to kill his French identity. Peyral’s
conflicted position symbolises the struggle to establish or maintain a stable identity as
French soldier or a “native” in the colony. The fluidity between the two positions is
inevitable, endemic of existing in the limbo between Self and Other.
Fragmentation and schizophrenia (Lacan, 1973) ultimately consume the
protagonist. Peyral remains in Africa on a second tour rather than return home to
France. The decision to stay represents an affirmation of Peyral’s now-splintered
identity, where it is not possible to return to a French life. Barry (1904) best captures
Peyral’s state in commenting “he is no longer the peasant of Central France, but
something hybrid and indescribable” (p. 258). Still, he laments the loss of his former
self, where “there he sits and pictures the thatched cottage at home at this same hour on
summer evenings, and his old mother and his sweet heart. Everything seems at an end
for him; he dreams he is dead, and will never see any of these things any more (1881,
p.321). At once the anti-hero and the victim, Peyral’s experience personifies the fissure
between his former and future selves. Peyral’s decision to stay in Africa foregrounds
one of the key elements of our own encounter with modern globalisation – a sense of
hybridity and the inability to be “as we were before”.
Loti as a window to the contemporary world

Loti’s representation of colonial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries defies many of the conventions of the era. His willingness to acknowledge his
own identity drift, his problematisation of the Other as a rigid category and his early
identification of the homogenising effect of the West distinguish him from his peers.
These elements in his early writing also lay the foundations for the contemporary era
of globalisation. Just as he situates his own identity in the interstices between
Self/Other in his writing, Loti’s themes lie at the in-between of his era and our own.
Table II draws comparison between nineteenth-century colonial globality, Loti’s work
and contemporary globalisation. In doing so, it traces the interstitial position of Loti’s
work and the key differences that underpin the two eras.
The nineteenth-century perspective on the East reflected a clear Self/Other divide
between East/West, based on the assumption articulated through the civilising mission
that Western culture was essentially superior. Loti’s opus challenges the polarities of
this divide, showing that Self/Other, East/West are permeable and that Western
superiority is little more than myth. His use of spatial, narrative and identity “drift”
(Barthes, 1977) foregrounds the blurring of the Self/Other binary in contemporary
globalisation. Although contemporary theory continues to utilise Self/Other (for
instance in postcolonial, gender and cultural theory), our constant engagement with a
global reality means that our engagement with the Other is endemic to our daily lives.
The consumption of media imagery (for instance, images of the Iraq War, the fall of the
EJM
Globalisation in the
48,1/2 nineteenth-century Loti’s work (1850-1923) Contemporary globalisation
Self/Other as rigidly defined Self/Other as permeable Self/Other as blurred

East/West as rigidly defined East/West as mutually engaged East/West as interactive
The exotic Other as The exotic Other as worthy Dissolution of the exotic Other
302 confronting
West as socially and morally East as under siege from the Neither East or West as
superior West superior
Westerners remaining Westerners deeply transformed Everyone deeply transformed
essentially unaffected by their by their travels by their travels and
travels interactions via media
Strong maintenance of Some maintenance of national Blurring of national identities
national identities identities
Global activities driven by Global activities driven by Global activities driven by
political/national interests personal desire markets and trade
Goods and commodities Goods and commodities Goods and commodities

mainly flowing from East to flowing from East to West flowing both ways
West
The East as a commodity for The East as a commodity for Creation of a global market
Western consumption consumption but also a living
space in need of comprehension
Some westerners travelling to Westerners travelling to the People travelling in both
Table II. the East East directions
World Trade Towers or the Japanese tsunami), alternative narratives (stories from
diverse cultures either at home or abroad), goods that enter our local marketplace and
our constant interaction with diverse cultures in daily life do not leave us untouched
nor unchanged. Equally, as people move around the world at accelerated rates (Costa
and Bamossey, 1995), our encounters with Otherness become more commonplace.
Encounters with Otherness are not the sole privilege of Western travellers to “exotic”
locations. The movement of people and cultures throughout the world opens up the
opportunity for everyone to encounter “otherness” both at home and abroad. This
constant encountering of Otherness irrevocably shifts our own identity (Hermans and
Hermans-Konopka, 2010) and brings the Other into close proximity.
The role of consumption in the merging of the Self/Other is significant and the
importance of marketing as facilitator of the drift between Self and Other in the
contemporary era is profound. Loti’s transformation takes place through the
consumption of clothes, language and artefacts while Peyral’s transformation occurs
through the sacrifice of ritualised goods and his consumption of African space and
culture in the symbolic figure of Fatou. More broadly, in Loti’s era, the flow of goods
circulated as mainly into the West as exotic goods and artefacts accompanied
travellers back to Europe (Hahn, 2009; Morton, 2000) although Western companies in
this era started to expand their markets into in the East (Köse, 2007) and North Africa.
In our contemporary global marketplace, marketing facilitates the merging of
identities and the formation of new communities (De Mooij, 2009; Hassan and Craft,
2005; Luqmani et al., 1994) Equally, goods circulate around the world rather than a
dominant flow into the West. Marketing is pivotal to this exchange of meanings and Homogeneity, or
symbolisms as much as the goods themselves. While Loti simply used commodities to somewhere in
facilitate his own drift between identities, the contemporary building of transnational
brands (Cayla and Eckhardt, 2008), the rise of international marketing (De Mooij, 2009) between?
and the distribution of goods across international markets build connections among
people that go beyond local or national boundaries (Bouchet, 1995). With the advent of
social media and more refined communication technology, marketing will be presented 303
with even greater opportunity to reach and connect diverse consumers across the
globe. Given the blurring of Self/Other is played out on the terrain of consumption,
marketers have a major role to play in bringing the Other closer by facilitating
individual connections to the global context.
While Giddens (1991) sees lifestyle-building and identity-making as part of the late
globalised condition and glocalism emphasises the appropriation of global trends by
individuals as a means of “establishing” (Kjeldgaard and Storgaard Nielsen, 2010)
identities, both of these responses infer some form of stability. These approaches share
in a tacit agreement that globalisation affects identity (capable of change and
appropriation but stable at its core) but do not problematise identity in the first
instance. The layering of lifestyle and consumption choices as constitutive of identity
building sidesteps the insight offered by Loti that identity itself is a moveable,
transgressive entity that drifts or loses its footing in a global encounter – if it ever had
any footing at all. This is the most important contribution that Loti’s early work makes
to our understanding of the impact of contemporary globalisation.
This radicalisation of a foundational Self is key to our understanding of
contemporary globalisation. While Loti flags the idea of transgressive identity, it is in
our own era that the blurring of national, cultural, commodity and personal boundaries
truly occurs. Globalisation is a force that impacts at the fundamental identity and
perceptual levels. It compels transformation as new worlds, images and knowledge
confront us, creating continual rupture in our perception of world and Self. Through
the intervention and consumption of media, new information, new technologies, new
goods, we are unable to return to former selves. While we might embrace this rupture
(Aziyadé) or experience crisis (Roman d’un Spahi ), we are in a constant state of being
transformed. Consumption certainly represents identity-making practices, as
understood through glocalism for instance, but it is more than that. The
consumption of a global reality also signifies crisis, transgression and drift, a raft
on which we travel “in between” the poles of Self/Other.
Conclusion and future research

This paper focuses our attention on the shifts in the Self/Other motif as a way of
theorising the individual experience of contemporary globalisation. In our
contemporary era, the seeds sown by Loti have manifested in a blurring of the
Self/Other trope such that it has become impossible to discern where and when the
Other appears – to this extent, can we say the Other in its classical form has dissolved
or altered at the very least? When we contrast the nineteenth-century rigidity, a
re-evaluation of Self/Other in the early twenty-first century is required, especially in
light of the fact that this trope remains central to cultural theory and underpins most
perspectives on the modern world – glocalism and the homogenising effect among
them.
EJM Secondly, this paper aims to establish a trajectory from which this necessary
48,1/2 re-evaluation of Self/Other stems. Cast against the background of nineteenth-century
colonial expansion and orientalism, Loti is one of the first writers to problematise the
rigid divide between Self/Other through his identity play. Loti is essentially a forgotten
character in French literary history. Despite his popularity in his lifetime, his legacy
has not perpetuated. This is disappointing in light of the remarkably modern, or even
304 postmodern, quality of his writing and the degree of sophistication he brings to how
identities and meanings are negotiated, contingent and malleable. From a theoretical
vantage point, his apprehension of Self/Other renders some of the first insights into
how national, cultural and personal boundaries slip or drift and shows that identity is
forged in the “in between” rather than from a position of certainty.
Finally, this paper affirms the view that marketing works as a vital conduit in
bringing the Other closer and that this central role for marketing is particular to the
twenty-first century’s form of globalisation. Consumer research has long shown how
consumption creates communities, provides spaces in which individuals negotiate,
alter and challenge their identities and appropriate a world of symbolisms, rituals and
meanings. This role of cultural producer or agent is essential in the contemporary era
of globalisation. Marketing allows us to re-imagine ourselves against a backdrop of
competing Others, thereby challenging the assumption of a stable identity by
constantly providing us with more possibilities taken from the global terrain.
For future study, it would be fruitful to reflect on the resonance of Loti’s (and other)
works for our own identity construction in this era of globalisation. While narrative
was central to nineteenth-century colonial expansion, conveying the images of the
colonies to readers in the West (Said, 1993), to what extent do these narratives reflect
our experience and indeed what is the role of narrative in twenty-first century
globalisation? Denzin and Lincoln (2005) make the point that the interpretive
researcher or bricoleur brings together a “set of fluid, interconnected images and
representations” (p. 7). In one respect, the present paper brings together such
representations, situating them in their historical context but also pointing to their
enduring relevance as the foundations of contemporary globalisation. Loti’s work
responds to his own era but if, as suggested here, his response foreshadows our own
era of globalisation, a greater personal consideration of how his work folds into the
contours of one’s own experience of contemporary globalisation would be valuable.
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Corresponding author
Helene Cecilia de Burgh-Woodman can be contacted at: Helene.Deburgh-Woodman@nd.edu.au
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BURGH-WOODMAN - 2014 - Homogeneity, "Glocalism" or Somewhere in Between

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European Journal of Marketing

Homogeneity, “glocalism” or somewhere in between?: A literary interpretation of identity in the era of

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on the structural aspects of globalisation and its appropriation by glocal communities

A brief overview of globalisation

The literary criticism method

Transformative effects in Aziyadé and Roman d’un Spahi

Roman d’un Spahi

Loti as a window to the contemporary world

Self/Other as rigidly defined Self/Other as permeable Self/Other as blurred

Goods and commodities Goods and commodities Goods and commodities

Conclusion and future research

Morrison, K. (2007), “Indigenous entrepreneurship in Samoa in the face of neo-colonialism and

Spivak, G. (1988), In Other Worlds, Routledge, London.

systemic constraints for subaltern consumers in a capitalist society”, Consumption,

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