Ethics and Aesthetics of Diversity: Rethinking Exoticism in a Global Age
We live in a world where everything seems familiar. No more white unknown area on geographical maps. The unknown has been mapped, digitized, streamed, and sold. Yet, somewhere beneath the constant connectivity, the human appetite for wonder persists, the need to look beyond the familiar and feel the thrill of otherness.
This, Gérald Mazzalovo argues, is the enduring pulse of exoticism. Not the cliché of palm trees and postcards you are familiar with, but the deeper ethics and aesthetics of difference.
From Curiosity to Consciousness
In EXOTICISM, Brands & Society, Mazzalovo reclaims a term long burdened by its colonial past. For him, exoticism is about perception: the awareness of difference and the emotional response that follows. It begins when we recognize that something, a place, a culture, an idea, stands apart from our own. That recognition can lead to fascination or fear, empathy or rejection. What matters is not the distance itself, but whether or how we choose to cross it.
He draws on the French thinker Victor Segalen, who more than a century ago called exoticism “the aesthetics of the Diverse.” Segalen believed that true beauty lies in the irreducible strangeness of others — that the goal is not to understand fully but to celebrate the impossibility of doing so. Mazzalovo extends this idea into our globalized age.
Brands, Desire, and the Modern Exotic
The book’s originality lies in showing how this dynamic of difference shapes the world of brands. From Cartier’s panther to luxury watch campaigns, Mazzalovo uncovers how companies stage or induce exoticism, how they play with distance, mystery, and fantasy to create desire. His framework of “staged, induced, latent, and absent” exoticism gives marketers a semiotic map of fascination and a tool to explore various communication tactics, while structuring the internal debates.
But this isn’t mere marketing analysis. Behind every image lies a question of ethics: when does fascination become fetishization? When does the appreciation of difference slip into appropriation? Mazzalovo doesn’t moralize; instead, he offers tools to think — to distinguish between curiosity that honors and consumption that commodifies and devalues.
The Return of Wonder
In the post-COVID world, as he notes, nostalgia and longing for “elsewhere” have resurged. Screens may have flattened the globe, but imagination keeps refilling it with distance. Even AI-generated imagery, used in Mazzalovo’s research, reveals how we project our fantasies of otherness — synthetic yet sincere, and authentic in their own way.
The book’s argument is subtle but revolutionary: wonder can be ethical. To look at what is different without claiming it, to resist the impulse to make the foreign familiar.
EXOTICISM, Brands & Society invites us to slow down and question how we look at people, products, ideas, and even ourselves. In an era where “diversity” risks becoming a slogan, Mazzalovo reminds us that difference still has the power to unsettle, seduce, and teach.
To rethink exoticism, then, is to recover an endangered human instinct: the capacity for wonder, the courage to be moved by what we don’t fully understand.
Grab your copy today and familiarize yourself with the term “exoticism.”