Word.ws English Dictionary

alteritism

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

Noun

alteritism (uncountable)

  1. An approach in postcolonial literary criticism that seeks to bypass orientalist or Eurocentric perspectives but, in foregrounding otherness, reproduces colonial ideas of the exotic.
    • 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.1992, Sara Suleri Goodyear, The Rhetoric of English India, University of Chicago Press, page 12
    • 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...

Origin of alteritism

Coined by Sara Suleri Goodyear, from alterity + -ism

Questions about alteritism

What does alteritism mean?
Alteritism means an approach in postcolonial literary criticism that seeks to bypass orientalist or Eurocentric perspectives but, in foregrounding otherness, reproduces colonial ideas of the exotic.
What part of speech is alteritism?
Alteritism is a noun.

Words near alteritism in the dictionary

  1. alteringly
  2. alterings
  3. alteriority
  4. alterite
  5. alterities
  6. alteritism
  7. alterity
  8. altermagnetism
  9. Alterman
  10. Altermans
  11. altermatic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: alteritism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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