Test Your Knowledge of Alterity

Understanding Alterity: An Overview

• Alterity means "otherness" and is used to express something other than sameness, or something outside of tradition or convention in media.
• Within the phenomenological tradition, alterity is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed and implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self.
• Cornelius Castoriadis denotes radical alterity/otherness as the element of creativity in history.
• For Jean Baudrillard, alterity is a precious and transcendent element, and its loss would seriously impoverish a world culture of increasing sameness.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's theory of alterity challenges the masculine orthodoxy of history writing and emphasizes the need to uncover the histories and inherent historical behaviors to exercise an individual right to authentic experience, identity, and reality.
• Jeffrey Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as an inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other.
• Alterity is also being used in theology and in spiritual books meant for general readers.
• In anthropology, alterity has been used to refer to the construction of "cultural others."
• The term has gained further use in historical musicology.