Alteritism

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 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. uncountable

    "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."

Example

More 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."

Etymology

Coined by Sara Suleri Goodyear, from alterity + -ism

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.