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This paper questions the extent to which current critical engagements with postcolonial realities may exhibit an exoticising tendency they simultaneously decry as colonialism’s orientalist reflex. Contemporary instances of the exoticization of the “other”, however, are not necessarily the result of a practice of cultural translation that becomes ‘the superimposition of a dominant way of seeing, speaking and thinking onto marginalised peoples and the cultural artefacts they produce’ (Huggan, A Postcolonial Exotic 24). Instead, it is proposed they result from a reaction to a localized political disenchantment that leads to an imagining of a postcolonial distanced “other” portrayed as the possibility of resistance to the hegemonic forces bemoaned by the postcolonial critic. Is it legitimate, therefore, to ask whether the exoticizing essence of the description of Portuguese Timor in the 1930s by the deportado Paulo Braga as ‘Um país onde é belo e doce viver’ survives as an undercurrent in analyses of postcolonial Timor-Leste?