In 1959 René Ménil published a short article entitled ‘De l'exotisme colonial’, in which he claimed that Antillean writers and artists practised an ‘abnormal’ type of exoticism applied to their own society: ‘que l'Antillais a de lui-même une vision exotique et qu'il propose de lui-même une expression exotique’ (p. 21). Seeing oneself through the eyes of the metropolitan Other results in superficial, picturesque self-representations; and it is a kind of bad faith or ‘tricherie’: evoking aspects of one's life as though they were ‘strange’ and as though they belong to ‘des “pays lointains”’ implies that one is cheating the metropolitan reader, ‘puisque le propre pays de l'artiste colonial n'est ni lointain ni étrange pour lui’ (p. 24, italics original).

It is a form of the all-pervasive colonial alienation that Fanon had analysed seven years earlier in his Peau noire, masques blancs. Ménil calls it the ‘exotique-pour-moi’ complex, and explains it as follows:

This phenomenon, in other words, is not so much a literary genre that a writer might or might not choose to adopt, as it is a kind of socialpsychological perversion – which I am therefore going to designate as auto-exoticism. As such, it is not limited to a fixed set of topics or literary styles, but is rather ‘un ensemble de déterminations actives et multiples (psychologiques et sociales) tel que, même quand le poète est prémuni contre lui, il n'est pas rare qu’évitant tel ou tel de ses aspects, il tombe cependant dans l'une ou l'autre de ses formes insidieuses’ (p. 23).

This implies both that auto-exoticism is an almost inevitable and universal consequence of colonial alienation – indeed, Ménil claims that it will be overcome only by the overthrow of colonialism itself – and also that its literary manifestations are constantly evolving.