ABSTRACT
Postmodern and postcolonial theories are especially sensitive to the question of otherness . They are intensely aware of their social, historical, institutional and geo-political formation and location, and express this refl exive awareness by taking an ethical stance towards otherness that can be described as anti-ethnocentric and anti-assimilative. The assimilative impulse that leads to the logic of identity and the ethnocentrism that can only see the Other in its own image are staunchly opposed by these theories which, instead, aim to value and preserve the Other as unbridgeable difference or absolute alterity. But I want to argue in this essay that in adopting an ethics of alterity, in showing sensitivity to otherness and in strongly opposing any aggressive appropriation of the Other, postmodern and postcolonial theories often encounter a problem in which their ethical approach to the Other ends up using the Other to prop up their own theoretical enterprise.
