He argued that most of them tended towards what Ryle called the "tropical baroque", in which everything becomes more exotic, wild, savage, extreme and, dare we say, oriental.
It ignored non-white Americans and showed different groups as exotic or savage, propagating "every type of cliché", editor Susan Goldberg said.
Late in his brief composing career, Griffes repudiated "the reputation of an Orientalist and nothing more" and forged a mature idiom applying the exotic with a savage intensity new to him.
Dickens captured how those apprentices, as homegrown victims, lacked the exotic appeal of "savages".
Portraits of Māori were also common, with early painters often portraying them as "noble savages", exotic beauties or friendly natives.
Indeed, he is downright rude about Sybil Thorndike's Jocasta and Eileen Herlie's Medea, of which he says "she looks about as savage and exotic as the advertisement in which the lady discovers blood on her toothbrush".
Exploring his view of life as an endless struggle for survival, Quiroga depicted the primitive and the savage with exotic imagery in such collections as Cuentos de la selva (1918; Stories of the Jungle) and La gallina degollada y otras cuentos (1925; The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories).
And where the Crosby-Hope romps into exotic climes flaunted a benighted Yanks-among-savages attitude toward non-North Americans, "The Road to El Dorado" bends over backward not to offend.
"I don't want to be seen as an exotic — the strange woman who lives with the savages," she said.
And it is borne out in the eruptive nature of the music, with hushed passages of exotic colorations and expectant mystery repeatedly cast aside by brutal, pounding rhythms or savage, brassy whoops.
