The oeuvre of Julio CortÁzar contains many facets of autoexoticism. In this essay, I engage with a few of his works to examine the notion of autoexoticism in two main aspects: first, the transformation of the self into the other self as a form; second, autoexoticists as those whose notion of the self inhabits their own desirous gaze.

Textual examples in Cortázar's literature that illustrate the first aspect are ubiquitous. For instance, in his short story “Lejana” we observe the alteration of Alina Reyes into a beggar in Budapest as she envisages with increasing clarity in her diary, while living in Buenos Aires, another self in Budapest. Her obsession with and fervent desire for this other self culminates in a final metamorphosis into it. The metamorphosis is based on the narcissistic reduplication of her self. In other words, through the externalization and exoticization of her self, she assumes an autoexoticist one.

As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” () culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.

This collection of essays has threaded several lines of argument through and around the topic of autoexoticism. With Minyan Sun we saw how an exoticizing gaze can develop the feedback loop of autoexoticism when the self recognizes its investment in the other and subjects itself to its own desiring attention. Daniele Nunziata and Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa both traced further complexities of identity that cross the self-other boundary in colonial Cyprus and between Britain and Japan. Peter Hill, Kasia Szymanska, and Valentina Gosetti all explored the tactical potential of autoexotic elements in a politics of representation, in locations as diverse as Syria, Poland, and Flanders. With Adriana Jacobs we found autoexoticism in recent Hebrew poetry to be a “transcreative and relational” imaginative practice. Finally, Xiaofan Amy Li argued that autoexoticism opens “the boundaries of one's subjectivity and culture to change and rupture,” creating “a holistic field of intercultural experience” where “what is considered self and other are transient and plastic,” since they are drawn into an intercultural practice that “consciously selects and re-creates elements and aspects from disparate cultures and identities.” As these accounts reveal, there can be much that is attractive in autoexoticist styles of being, of self-representation, and of encounter. They are formally and linguistically mobile. They have a strong affective charge, provoking reactions of amusement, embarrassment, or outrage. They are courageous, since they run the risk of being dismissed as mere exoticism. And they can loosen established identities, opening them to change.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) chose an unconventional hobby to occupy his middle age when he devoted himself in the 1950s to the study of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. His efforts were made easier by his fluency in English. “Georgie” had grown up speaking English with his father and Staffordshire-born grandmother and reading English books in the family library (Williamson 34). He would later call the time spent in that library “the chief event of [his] life” (“Autobiographical Notes” 42). In the following essay, “Thorkelin y el Beowulf” (“Thorkelin and Beowulf”), Borges sympathizes with a fellow student of Anglo-Saxon whose own moment of bookish revelation would come to define him: Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), the first modern editor of Beowulf. This unpublished essay recounts Thorkelin's seemingly predestined attraction to the Beowulf manuscript and the catastrophic course of his long devotion.

In the mid-1960s, the United States witnessed increasing social unrest: students led protests against the Vietnam war, and many black Americans expressed disillusionment over piecemeal gains of the civil rights movement. Whereas history remembers the antiwar rallies mostly as protests, official records often code black demonstrations in Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo, and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles as riots. In response to two so-called riots in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, Chester Himes wrote “On the Use of Force” for the 24 July 1967 issue of the weekly Gaullist magazine Le nouveau Candide, where it was published in French translation (French version). The essay, never before published in English, offers timely thoughts concerning police brutality and is sure to be valuable for Himes scholarship, the story of black Americans in Europe, and the history of race and violence.