alteritism
English
Etymology
Coined by Sara Suleri Goodyear, from alterity + -ism
Noun
alteritism (uncountable)
- An approach in postcolonial literary criticism that seeks to bypass orientalist or Eurocentric perspectives but, in foregrounding otherness, reproduces colonial ideas of the exotic.
- 1992 Sara Suleri Goodyear, The Rhetoric of English India, University of Chicago Press, p. 12.
- 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" ...
- 2004 Neil Lazarus, "Fredric Jameson on 'Third-World Literature': A Qualified Defence", in Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 50.
- What Ahmad calls Jameson's 'rhetoric of otherness', Suleri terms his 'alteritism'.
- 1992 Sara Suleri Goodyear, The Rhetoric of English India, University of Chicago Press, p. 12.