Cesar Aira and Exoticism

The present paper analyses one of the less commonly studied aspects of the poetics of Cesar Aira: exoticism, which in Aira stems from the unstable and paradoxical place proper of a post-modern writer from the Rio de la Plata facing traditional (and European) representations of exoticism in a period of cultural globalisation. The paper examines such a paradox and concludes that Aira's exoticism is manifest in the ethnographic simulation and in certain thoughts on the de-familiarisation of the mother tongue.