Imagining The Alterity

From its inception, the capitalist system has been mainly oriented to the economic and limitary expansion. The adventures -if not challenges- to index over-seas territories was not only fraught of dangers and mysteries but also by the needs of colonizing other cultures, landscapes and territories (economies) to legitimate the European order inside and outside. The colonial authority, which was cemented on a much deeper technological revolution, developed, adopted and imposed ideological discourses for the local native to internalize the so-called inferiority. The importance of the figure of alterity in social science occupied a central position for the colonial expansion, without mentioning the decolonization process. For West, the figure of the "Other", above all the Non-Western Other" was an object of curiosity, entertainment and fear. This book deals with 6 chapters which are organized in two parts. The first part deals with the problem of the "Other" from the lens of sociology (in the ink of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and William Thomas) while the second focuses on the problems of anthropology to situate the natives as a mirror of pre-modern Europe (in Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss & Marc Auge). In a moment when the world goes through a sentiment of extreme radicalization, where the "Other" is considered an enemy -or at the best as "an undesired guest" living within-, the present editorial project, at least it is the main objective of the authors, interrogates furtherly on the conflictive figure of "Otherness" in the epistemological pillars of Western humanism and social sciences. Each chapter may be read independently but -once lumped together- they share a common-thread argumentation which traces back on the problem of alterity for the Western rationality -from colonialism to the post-modern capitalism-. Doubtless, the founding parents of anthropology and sociology offer a fertile ground to expand the current understanding of past and present times.

Alison Denham examines the parallels between moral and metaphorical discourse, and the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs.

Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville’s novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville’s fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville’s most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville’s solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.

The global consensus in academic, specialist and public realms is that North Korea is a problem: its nuclear ambitions pose a threat to international security, its levels of poverty indicate a humanitarian crisis and its political repression signals a failed state. This book examines the cultural dimensions of the international problem of North Korea through contemporary South Korean and Western popular imagination’s engagement with North Korea. Building on works by feminist-postcolonial thinkers, in particular Trinh Minh-ha, Rey Chow and Gayatri Spivak, it examines novels, films, photography and memoirs for how they engage with issues of security, human rights, humanitarianism and political agency from an intercultural perspective. By doing so the author challenges the key assumptions that underpin the prevailing realist and liberal approaches to North Korea. This research attends not only to alternative framings, narratives and images of North Korea but also to alternative modes of knowing, loving and responding and will be of interest to students of critical international relations, Korean studies, cultural studies and Asian studies.

A Planetary Avant-Garde explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world. The book examines avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929. Ignacio Infante critically traces the hegemony and resistance to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal across particular avant-garde networks, expanding our understanding of Western colonial and imperial ideologies of the early twentieth century. The book extends geopolitical dimensions of the historical avant-garde into a wider transnational and planetary framework, including divergent experiences of modernity, forms of experimental poetics, and understandings of history. It sheds light on topics, such as the relation between Portuguese futurism and European colonialism in West Africa, the Latin American avant-garde’s critique of European historicism, the development of Brazilian modernism in relation to the European avant-garde, the comparative poetics of modernism in the Philippines, and the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair. Grounded in extensive archival research, A Planetary Avant-Garde provides a new understanding of the historical avant-garde from a global and multilingual perspective.

This volume focuses on language and ethics in literary genres, such as dystopia, science fiction, and fantasy, that depict encounters with alterity. Indeed, so-called “genre literature” embodies a heuristic model that dramatizes and exacerbates these encounters by featuring exotic, subhuman or post-human beings that defy human knowledge, elements particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. These genres have often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting its scope to a hollow and servile repetition of genre codes. This volume shows unequivocally that this field does lend itself to such reflections. The contributors to this book highlight genre literature’s defamiliarising power, through which things can be “seen”. In meta-conceptualising the relationship between language and reality, it problematises and enhances this relation by making it more easily perceivable. The book shows that, rather than contenting itself with merely questioning the mechanism of estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and the boundary between the readerly and the writerly. In their desire to represent the Other in all its complexity, writers are indeed confronted with an ethical and poetical aporia: how can what escapes humanity be described in human language? How can human language represent things that have no known referent in the reader’s world of experience? This collection of essays reveals that the most prototypical traits of genre literature lie in the encounter with otherness and the linguistic issues this raises.

Drawing from the fields of rhetoric, cultural studies, literature, and folkloristics, Kathleen Glenister Roberts argues that identity and the history of alterity in the West can be understood more clearly through narrative motifs. She provides analyses of these motifs including infanticide, universalism, the Tower of Babel, the warrior Other, the noble savage, entropology, and the trickster. With current intellectual conflict as its subtext, this book posits that identity is always negotiated toward Otherness. Roberts interrogates narrative constructions of Western biases toward non-Western Others, with each chapter addressing a Western historical moment through an exemplary narrative. This process shows that by imagining and objectifying Others, Western cultures were creating their own Selves. In confronting the ethnocentrism of past historical moments, Roberts invites us to recognize it in the present—in a new way. Alterity and Narrative asks that we afford Others the ability to transcend their own ethnocentrism, and therefore avoid well-meaning but naïve calls for "cultural sensitivity."