Madagascar, 2008. Photograph by Bruno Barbey / Magnum

I was in Copenhagen last week, revelling in the exoticism. Mouse-blond hair, sea-glass eyes; tall Vikings cycling along, with their fresh complexions and stubby boots. Wearing stripes and eating shrimp on black bread. Looking patient, civilized, sturdy and weathered, with a touch of glorious paganism under the surface. Privy to the great magnetic secrets of the boreal realm. Sexy: so cold and well meaning and white. Mysterious: the real reason that I devour all that generally disappointing Scandinavian noir. While they were busy looking at me and savoring the imaginary fire under my swarthy skin and kinky hair, I was busy enjoying my fantasies about them.

It comes from the Greek exotikos, “foreign,” which in turn comes from the prefix exo, meaning “outside.” All dictionary definitions of “exotic” have two strands: “from a distant place,” and “striking and attractive because unfamiliar.” So, a simple conflation of strangeness and desire.

Google “exotic nature” and you will find an essential image: a coconut; a hammock; two palm trees.

A versatile concept, one would say, available for interpretation by all who notice differences. Yet anyone raised within the confines of the European canon knows that, in that context, “exotic” inevitably means “dark.” What I myself—a woman of African descent, domesticated by European rules—first envision, when I hear “exotic,” is an eye, black as a bottomless well. Darkness with a secret glitter in its depths, hinting at information both offered and withheld. But, for me, intense light—sun beating on rye fields, eyes like a bare Montana sky—can also evoke mystery and desire.

The writer and ethnologist Victor Segalen, drifting between Paris and China, Java and Tahiti, wrote his “Essay on Exoticism” in 1904. Oddly enough, with the passing years, Segalen has become somewhat exotic himself: French. An opium-addicted dreamer. An explorer. A tracker of dangerous themes through the forest of iconoclasm that was the early twentieth century.

In my childhood house in Philadelphia, a huge gold-framed painting hung in the dining room, an heirloom from a rich cousin of my father’s who had travelled all over the world and died senile in a house stuffed with mementos. Painted in the nineteen-twenties by a famous black woman artist, the painting depicted, in murky tints, what seemed to be a very stiffly rendered French marquise, complete with beauty patches, vapid rouged face, and powdered wig. But, if one looked closer, the subject proved to be a large French doll—and not alone, for almost invisible behind her stood another doll, a turbaned black mammy whose eyes and gold earrings and red lips shone with unsettling vividness out of the shadows.

The mammy doll was there in the immemorial tradition of the black servant, an intended touch of exoticism. Yet in the end—and certainly not by accident—the convention was upset. She dominated the scene, glowing with triumphant demonic life, as if she had sucked the blood out of her pale mistress and replaced it with sawdust. An example of the exotic spilling out of bounds, taking on a power that it isn’t supposed to have. This picture sat in the background of our middle-class colored Sunday dinners like a memento mori, and we made fun of it the way you joke about things that truly scare you.

When I was eleven, and one of the first black pupils at an expensive girls’ private school, I was excluded from many parties and other social activities. But I was given a small role in “The King and I,” as the Siamese noblewoman Lady Thiang. For this, I was unquestioningly costumed in a blue sari someone’s family had brought back from a tour of India. “Oh, how that color suits your skin!” the teachers and suburban mothers who made up the audience exclaimed. “How lovely! You look so exotic!”

I was flattered, but puzzled that I—invisible, untouchable to them in everyday life—could suddenly be beautiful in the identity of a fictional woman from the East.

This was the first of many times that white people—lovers, friends, complete strangers at parties—called me “exotic” as if they were giving me a wonderful present.

What else is “exotic”? It involves strangeness and desire, the desire for strangeness, with a sense of risk but no real threat of danger. There is always an element of ownership and control about “exotic”—because the dreamer controls the fantasy—which is the downfall of real contact. There is always something willfully stupid about “exotic”: two-dimensional, fundamentally dull, like all fetishism. Exoticism is built on limitation. It is exciting in the same amateur way as mild bondage in lovemaking, and as quickly forgotten.

“I’m feeling so exotic,” a Bollywood actress sings in a duet with a mediocre American hip-hop star. “Mumbai, Cuba, baby, let’s go / La-love me all the way to Rio.”

Segalen writes that it is “nothing other than the notion of difference, the perception of Diversity, the knowledge that something is other than one’s self.”

He omits the element of attraction, the human conflation of mystery and longing that leads circuitously toward the divine.

On another occasion at my school, the community-service club was appealing for volunteers. To the assembled rows of students in blue uniforms, the senior girl making the announcement described Philadelphia’s black neighborhoods in a dramatic voice, as if she were narrating an adventure story. “Have you ever visited the ghetto?” she asked. “Have you ever been to an African Baptist church?”

She could not have known that one neighborhood she described was where my mother taught elementary school. And that my father was the minister of the church whose name, on her lips, sounded so thrillingly savage. Alone in that sea of white girls, I sat frozen with the shock of worlds—entire dimensions of existence—colliding.

Recently, I asked my secretary, a young English woman, what springs to mind when she hears “exotic,” and she said “waxed”—she did not know why. Waxed like a tropical fruit, brought from too far away, and already stale inside? Waxed like a porn actress’s faux-childish vulva? I know she isn’t telling me everything.

On the island where I spend several months a year, off the northwestern coast of Madagascar, apples are exotic fruits. Shipped from France or New Zealand, they are bruised and mealy and cost a fortune in the supermarket where only the whites and rich Malagasy go.

I saw an old photograph commemorating the arrival of the first bananas in Norway. Bunches are displayed hanging before a warehouse, flanked by tall Norwegians in formal suits and hats, local merchants and dignitaries, posed ceremonially, as if welcoming royalty. What strange insects, what fantasies, arrived with that cargo?

When I first came to live in Italy, I was in Rome crossing Via Veneto one summer afternoon when two strolling Italian men, possibly tourists from a provincial town, turned to look at me. One said to the other, quite audibly, “That, my boy, is a mulatta from Cuba or Brazil!” He said it admiringly, with mock instructiveness but also with triumph, like a naturalist who has just sighted a rare specimen.

An art-historian friend, whose parents, years ago, moved from Mumbai to New York, tells me that what is exotic to her is golf. For me, too, growing up black in Philadelphia, golf—with its verdant country-manor acres and its association with the Scottish Highlands and other northern regions, where even dogs’ eyes are blue—was an activity of distant glamour. It belonged to the masters, who at that point in history were no longer officially masters but still clearly ran the world.