I-Definition of otherness

Etymology: from the Latin alter, other.

In philosophy, otherness is the character, the quality of what is other. It is also the recognition of the
other in his or her difference, whether ethnic, social, cultural or religious.

The questioning of otherness leads us to question what is other (alter) than us (ego), our
relationships with it, the means of knowing it, the possibility of existing without it, whether it constitutes
a threat to our identity.

In everyday language, otherness is the acceptance of the other as a different being and the
recognition of his or her rights to be himself.

Otherness differs from tolerance because it implies an understanding of each person's

particularities, the ability to be open to different cultures and their mixing.

In the term "other" there is "other" and other, commonly opposed to "I". There is me and there is
the other and the other is not me, but someone other than me.

Otherness is the recognition of the other in his or her difference. This is an essential value of
secularism, which favours the mixing of cultures as a source of enrichment and peace. Obviously,
difference is not a value in itself. There are unacceptable differences, especially those that have the very
purpose or consequence of denying the other his or her own right to be different. Otherness is the value
that places man and woman as they are as the first subjects of law.

When we represent the absent person, the stranger and his or her culture, this relationship
becomes even more complicated because we can only experience it through productions of meaning
independent of this absent other. Most of us don't have the opportunity to experience each other's
culture from the inside. I build my representation of cultural difference by feeding my imagination with
definitions that are often produced and disseminated by and for my own culture. I meet the other in
films, on the Internet, in books, in political debates, on vacation or while talking in a café, but rarely by
sharing the environment of this other... Distance, whether geographical or cultural, is therefore a
problem. Thus, it is difficult for us to consider other cultures by adopting their categories of thought,
their internal coherence. We often think of otherness from our own imagination, our own values, our
own vision of the world that we use "naturally". In this sense, our understanding of non-Western
societies depends largely on the information conveyed by our media and our cultural productions.
Children's literature therefore occupies a special place in the construction of discourses on the other. It
allows us to read the consciousness of others as it is reconstructed in literary texts. When we are
interested in this question, it is important, in order to take a critical distance from our own conventions,
to first reflect on the dynamic links between the literary imagination and the history of our relationship
with others.

III- The history of the other and literature

To justify and spread the colonial idea, European societies represented the colonized world as "naturally"
inferior. For the human sciences of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the concept of
evolutionism that made it possible to place the other in an archaic and primitive nature. Within this
semantic framework, modern and developed metropolises thought they had to bring progress and
civilization to communities of savages. It was what was perceived as the barbarity or naivety of the other
that justified the paternalistic enterprise of the European "big brother". This imaginary, conveyed in
particular by the guarantors of objectivity and "truth" in the West – anthropologists (science) and
missionaries (religion), was also used in the literature of the time, which offered readers exotic
adventures in which the other appeared infantilized, primitive or irrational in the face of the civilized
passionate about science. At the end of the 1950s, following the two world wars and thanks to the
struggles led by the colonies for their independence and their right to be different, the human sciences
questioned themselves and partially replaced the concept of evolutionism with those of relativism and
culturalism. It is a question of recognizing that all cultures are worthy and that there is no hierarchy
between them. We try to go beyond ethnocentrism, this attitude that consists of judging the culture of
the other on the basis of our own cultural criteria and our own values. The idea that other people's
cultures must evolve to eventually resemble our own is rejected. We are campaigning for a form of
humanism where everyone has the right to exist and to be recognized in their specificity. But this new
trend sometimes seems to value above all the most exotic aspects of the other (nudity, rites, life in
nature, etc.). While the newly independent states seek to obtain rights at the international level
(political, economic), some currents value representations that tend to freeze the other in a backward-
looking image of the "noble savage".

Montaigne and Otherness:

When Montaigne depicts the Amerindians, in relation to his system of differences, the
European system, in the chapter "The Cannibals" of the "Essays", he makes reflections on the discovery
of the "new world", the "savages" are thus presented by a series of negative propositions. Montaigne's
discourse concerning this negation is organized around the opposition between civilization and savagery
and establishes the superiority of savage life over civilized life. Montaigne opens a reflection on the
colonial phenomenon.

He imagines that the meeting of the two worlds could have had a different form (European and
American) for Montaigne, accepting the otherness of the foreigner, the diversity of its uses implies that
we do not judge differences. Montaigne advises to "rub and file one's brains against those of others."
(Essays, III, 9)

The author of the Essays thus finds himself at the origin of the relativism that dominated the thought of
the seventeenth century. He has highlighted the diversity of ways of thinking and the richness of
differences.

The theme of otherness was also dealt with in the book Literature and Otherness, which is a collective
work under the direction of Assia Belhabib, in the fifth chapter Mustapha ben Cheikh intervenes, which
begins with the quote from J.J. Rousseau:

"To study man, you have to learn to see into the distance."

He emphasizes that just a quick exploration of literature through the centuries shows the difficulty that
men have in sharing their differences, in accepting each other, in dialogue outside the judgments of
discrimination.
We have seen above, in the example of Montaigne, that this author was able to question the first doubts
in Europe, he says in the Essays (I, 31 and III, 6): "Now I find, to return to my subject, that it is not of his
use"

Montaigne reversed the values of the time and made the "noble savage" a natural man and wiser than
the so-called civilized man.

Travel is introduced into literature, and writers will tell it in different forms of autobiography, adventure,
or stories, but whose sole purpose is to put the other at the center of their concerns. This literature will
not only note the existence of the other, but goes so far as to cherish him, bring him out of anonymity, or
even ennoble him, thus the Orient enters the European universe in a significant way, and comes to
inspire creation.

Bonaparte's Egyptian companion 1798-1801, Greece's struggle against the Turks who occupied it until
1830... let the idea of a splendid, magical, luxurious, fascinating Orient develop.

Mustapha ben Sheikh ends by emphasizing that neither science, nor philosophy, nor literature have been
able to definitively overcome the resentment of men towards men. thus Barthes quotes his books
mythologies: "science goes straight on its way, but collective representations do not follow, they are
centuries back, kept stagnant in error by power, the mainstream press and the values of order", he also
emphasizes that the notion of otherness remains ambiguous, it is not a neutral notion and does not
constitute a promise of justice and a truth in itself, Segalen wanted it to allow "not to be fooled by the
journey, or by the country, or by picturesque everyday life, or by oneself."

Identity is a place of paradox: it can be a shared wealth or a pretext for withdrawal and
fundamentalism. In Algeria, some use identity to refuse to open up to the world, while in the West, it is
sometimes used to reject diversity.

Otherness, illustrated by stories such as those of Abel and Cain, Meursault and the "Arab", or Friday and
Robinson, often presents encounters marked by mistrust, condescension or contempt. Colonialism and
love are examples of otherness, where the other becomes a distorted mirror of oneself.

Contemporary migration poses the question: "What to do with the Other?" Some in the West show
indifference to the tragedies of migrants. This compartmentalization of consciousness is often criticized
as a legacy of colonialism.

Jonah, the biblical prophet, refuses to save strangers, illustrating indifference towards those who are
different. This attitude is comparable to the West mourning a film like Titanic but remaining insensitive
to the migrants drowned in the Mediterranean.

The author also criticises his compatriots in the South who accuse the West of all their ills while refusing
to acknowledge their own responsibilities. The postcolonial discourse has become an ideological rent,
diverting from the need to take charge of their own failures.
For the author, it is crucial to address the reasons for migrants' departures rather than focusing solely on
welcoming them. He calls for a decompartmentalized awareness and an ethic of solidarity beyond
differences.

The West and the South share the guilt in their treatment of migrants. For the author, having white
hands is a condition for accusing the West, which he admits he cannot do without criticism of his own
responsibilities. Solidarity must be based on a shared ethic, not on the simple denunciation of others.

The compartmentalization of consciousness

The compartmentalization of consciousness is illustrated by Jonah, who mourns a dead tree but remains
insensitive to human suffering. The West is accused of indifference, crying for Titanic but not for the
migrants drowned in the Mediterranean. The author also criticises his compatriots for their hypocrisy,
accusing the West without assuming their own responsibilities.

In his country, he is criticized for his lucidity, often misinterpreted as self-hatred. He refuses to blame the
West alone and calls for shared responsibility and a decompartmentalized consciousness, beyond
postcolonial discourses.

He is concerned about the reasons for the departure of migrants rather than their reception conditions,
and criticizes the attitude of the elites of the South towards sub-Saharan migrants. To accuse the West,
one must first acknowledge one's own wrongdoing.

The author emphasizes the importance of an ethic of solidarity and personal responsibility, exemplified
by his willingness to go into exile to save his sick child, a necessity shared by thousands of people seeking
to save their lives or those of their children.

Postcolonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Ethnic Studies

Postcolonial studies have a culturalist dimension while being characterized by a particular way of reading
the world, a socio-political prism that aims to examine the aftermath of European colonialism, the power
relations and hegemony inscribed in discourses, and the socio-cultural interactions at work in the
colonial relationship. But they go beyond the framework of cultural studies because the postcolonial
includes a strictly literary production in the form of a vast corpus of literatures of European expression
from formerly colonized countries, conceived according to the now well-known process of "writing
back," [50] which also affirms the literary foundations of postcolonialism. Postcolonial studies found an
outlet in the field of comparative literature, even if Gayatri Spivak predicted the future death of the
discipline, [51] because of the competition from area studies, or precisely from cultural studies, which
risked absorbing it, and perhaps also because of its inability to break out of its original Eurocentrism. In
any case, there are a certain number of methodological similarities between postcolonial
studies/cultural studies and comparative literature insofar as these theoretical fields, sensitive to the
asymmetry of exchanges and situations, aim to decenter the gaze in order to adopt the point of view of
the other, to reconsider the relations between center and periphery and to scrutinize the forms of
cultural interactions. One of the founders of postcolonialism, Edward Said, was a comparatist, and in
Culture and Imperialism, he shows the close links between the development of comparative literature
and the emergence of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. The "postcolonial" interpretive
model has developed, particularly in the field of literary analysis, in a relationship that is both close and
critical to the comparative method. Postcolonialism has thus been able to take up questions not dealt
with by comparative literature, long attached to national literatures and their relations, to take an
interest in a larger, global system, including various linguistic areas, Euro-speaking or not. Above all, he
broke with a Eurocentric practice of comparative literature, in accordance with the wishes of Edward
Said [52] who wanted to rehabilitate the literatures of the margins and thwart the geographical
centrality of Europe

Postcolonial Studies, Subalternist Studies

Cultural studies join postcolonial and subalternist studies in their approach to culture as a relationship of
power, domination, subversion, delineating aspects obscured by hegemonic social discourses and
dismantling the hierarchies imposed by ideologies such as patriarchy, imperialism or the nation-state.
They bring to light the value systems conveyed by a culture while showing how "the representations they
conceal work to stimulate the processes of resistance or acceptance of the status quo" [59] among
popular groups, whether they succeed in building an active collective identity or sink into consensual
alienation. In India in the 1980s, a collective of Indian historians led by Ranajit Guha created subalternist
studies [60] , inspired in particular by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose analyses demonstrate
the ability of the ruling elite to retain power, not only by means of political repression, but also by
manipulating public opinion in order to obtain the organized acquiescence of the masses. Hegemony is
fully realized when the masses recognize as their own the ideas and values conveyed by certain cultural
productions, which in reality serve the interests of those who dominate them (Quaderni del carcere,
1947-1951). The target of the critical discourse of the Indian subalternists is the great normative
narrative of European history, ranging from the Ancien Régime to industrial capitalism and modernity, a
narrative imposed as the dominant paradigm of the social sciences and the implicit reference model of
academic historiography [61] . All peoples, regardless of their geographical and social diversity, would
obey this regime of historicity specific to Western modernity. Ranajit Guha seeks to demonstrate the
existence, in the Indian people, of an elementary political consciousness, prior to any influence of
discourses from the elite. To do this, he relies on the narrative of the history of movements that had
been neglected until then, such as the anti-colonial peasant revolts in India, which were not in his
opinion "pre-political", but responded to a deliberate political project. This study poses various
methodological problems related to the absence of direct archives from peasant communities and the
integration of written traces within official archives, which are necessarily suspect and therefore need to
be deconstructed according to Gayatri Spivak [62] . Colonial archives require, in fact, another mode of
reading, against the grain, "against the grain".