Meanings
- uncountableAn approach in postcolonial literary criticism that seeks to bypass orientalist or Eurocentric perspectives but, in foregrounding otherness, reproduces colonial ideas of the exotic.
What Ahmad calls Jameson's 'rhetoric of otherness', Suleri terms his 'alteritism'.
2004, Neil Lazarus, “Fredric Jameson on 'Third-World Literature': A Qualified Defence”, in Sean Homer, Douglas Kellner, Palgrave Macmillan, editors, Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, page 502 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.
1992, Sara Suleri Goodyear, The Rhetoric of English India, University of Chicago Press, page 121994/1995 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" ...
Origin
Coined by Sara Suleri Goodyear, from alterity + -ism
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
alteritism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/alteritism
“alteritism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/alteritism. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “alteritism,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/alteritism.
Source: alteritism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.