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.

Around the world, what it is to be a university is a matter of much debate. The range of ideas of the university in public circulation is, however, exceedingly narrow and is dominated by the idea of the entrepreneurial university. As a consequence, the debate is hopelessly impoverished. Lurking in the literature, there is a broad and even imaginative array of ideas of the university, but those ideas are seldom heard. We need, consequently, not just more ideas of the university but better ideas. Imagining the University forensically examines this situation, critically interrogating many of the current ideas of the university. Imagining the University argues for imaginative ideas that are critical, sensitive to the deep structures underlying universities and are yet optimistic, in short feasible utopias of the university. The case is pressed for one such idea, that of the ecological university. The book concludes by offering a vision of the imagining university, a university that has the capacity continually to re-imagine itself.

Who do “we” anthropologists think “we” are? And how do forms and notions of collective disciplinary identity shape the way we think, write, and do anthropology? This volume explores how the anthropological “we” has been construed, transformed, and deployed across history and the global anthropological landscape. Drawing together both reflections and ethnographic case studies, it interrogates the critical—yet poorly studied—roles played by myriad anthropological “we” ss in generating and influencing anthropological theory, method, and analysis. In the process, new spaces are opened for reimagining who “we” are – and what “we,” and indeed anthropology, could become.

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."

The focus of Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination is the (mostly Western) understanding, representation and self-critical appropriation of the "religious other" between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Mutually constitutive processes of selfing/othering are observed through the lenses of creedal Jews, a bhakti Brahmin, a widely translated Morisco historian, a collector of Western and Eastern singularia, Christian missionaries in Asia, critical converts, toleration theorists, and freethinkers: in other words, people dwelling in an 'in-between' space which undermines any binary conception of the Self and the Other. The genesis of the volume was in exchanges between eight international scholars and the two editors, intellectual historian Giovanni Tarantino and anthropologist Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, who share an interest in comparatism, debates over toleration, and history of emotions. Contributors are: Daniel Barbu, Vincent Carretta, Ananya Chakravarti, Talya Fishman, Rolando Minuti, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Paul Rule, Knut Martin Stünkel, Giovanni Tarantino, and Paola von Wyss-Giacosa.

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.

Recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation, Imagining the Middle East examines how Western perceptions of the Middle East were formed and how they have been used as a rationalization for setting policies and determining actions.

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.