Meaning of alteritism | Babel Free

Definitions

An approach in postcolonial literary criticism that seeks to bypass orientalist or Eurocentric perspectives but, in foregrounding otherness, reproduces colonial ideas of the exotic.

uncountable

Examples

“While alteritism begins as a critical and theoretical revision of a Eurocentric or Orientalist study of the literatures of colonialism, its indiscriminate reliance on the centrality of otherness tends to replicate what in the context of imperialist discourse was the familiar category of the exotic.”

“1994/1995 Amina Jamal, "Identity, Community and the Post-colonial Experience of Migrancy", Resources for Feminist Research, vol. 23, no. 4. Suleri, for instance, points to the danger of conceptualizing alteritism, as colonial discourse has done and continues to do, in a manner where difference is reified and otherness becomes "simply a conceptual vessel for the anxiety that overtakes quests for origins" ...”

“What Ahmad calls Jameson's 'rhetoric of otherness', Suleri terms his 'alteritism'.”

CEFR level