With the “Hear, Here” series, we aim to facilitate conversations around new research in the humanities. Faculty fellows at the Institute for the Humanities will discuss a part of their current project in a short talk followed by a Q & A session.

Today's talk explores U.S. media representations of the Third World, the global bloc of decolonizing nations in Asia and Africa during the Cold War, through the development of the mid-century music genre known as Exotica. Emerging after the Second World War, Exotica was a popular form of ersatz “world music” which, I argue, responded to anxieties around racial integration and the decolonizing world.

Manan Desai is a 2023-24 Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Associate Professor of American Culture and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies.