This study explores the work of Western avant-garde writers who traveled to and wrote about
Asia and North Africa. Though exoticist in outlook many of these writers were also
anti-colonialist and thus avoided some of the pitfalls of academic orientalism by assuming an
aesthetics of diversity while employing strategies of provocation and reciprocity. As a survey
of works on travel (including essays novels poems and plays) the book challenges or
modifies many postcolonial assumptions about Western writers on the Orient: from the French
Surrealists to the American Beats and even transnational authors of the new millennium. Through
a synthesis of avant-garde postcolonial and travel literature theories Avant-garde
Orientalism works in the best tradition of comparative literary study to identify and analyze a
distinct category of world literature.
