https://scienceij.com 47 Dimitrijovska-Jankulovska, & Denkovska, M. (2023). Postcolonial “otherness”, SCIENCE International journal, 2(1), 47-50. doi: 10.35120/sciencej020147d UDK: 316.734:325(4:5-11) 1. INTRODUCTION Edward Said In his capital work, Orientalism, carefully studied the postcolonial concept of Оtherness. In general, the goal of his study was to show what kind of ideas Europe and America constructed about Orientals. By observing and making a contrast between itself and the East, Europe managed to defne and defne itself against the Other. Describing the “Orient” as a Western cultural construct, Said claimed that it is a projection of those aspects of the West, which Westerners do not want to admit in themselves, such as cruelty, sensuality, etc. Said believed that all non-European countries were portrayed as exotic, mysterious and chaotic. They were seen as less developed and not so important, which led to the emergence of the concept of Otherness within the framework of postcolonial criticism. This term is used to describe the rest of the world, i.e., everything that does not fall within the scope of Europeans, as one homogeneous mass characterized by ugly features. Otherness in postcolonial criticism refers to colonized peoples who are marginalized by the imperial and identifed by their difference from the center. Any area that is not part of European soil is considered inferior, dangerous and less valuable. However, in the understanding of the Other, a duality is also noticeable, since he is sometimes considered wild, harmful and mysterious, and sometimes harmless. The image that the West forms of the Other is precisely what creates the deep gap between these two binary oppositions. Said believes that Orientalism captured the Orient, since it did not give it the opportunity to act and reason freely. The East was seen as an undefned and wild mass that needed to be regulated. It is precisely this thought that the West takes as a guide and justifcation for its colonialist aspirations, explaining that the violent appropriation of the Orient is necessary in order for that land to pass from uncivilized to civilized. What it all starts from is, we would say, the power relationship between the Orient and the Occident. Michel Foucault believed that one of the most important institutions of power is knowledge, and one can freely argue that it is the strongest weapon with which the West achieved hegemony over the East. Therefore, by building knowledge about the Orient, its management becomes easier for the West, and in this way, it attributes to the Oriental the description of inferior and subject to POSTCOLONIAL “OTHERNESS” Anita Dimitrijovska-Jankulovska 1* , Milica Denkovska 1 1 PhD Candidate, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, “Blazhe Koneski” Faculty of Philology – Skopje, R.N.Macedonia E-mail: adimitrijovska@gmail.com, milica.denkovska@gmail.com Abstract: In this paper the category of Otherness has been concerned for those who occupy the subordinate position in society, which have been presented as inferior in terms of knowledge and abilities, which implies that they need the leadership of those who are, by defnition, more capable, more educated, more advanced, more civilized, more merciful, etc. On this way, the hierarchy of representations is established, thus justifying the existing ones power relations in society as well as the unequal treatment of those who are represented as inferior. The concept of Otherness within the framework of postcolonial criticism is used to describe the rest of the world, i.e., everything that does not fall within the scope of Europeans, as one homogeneous mass characterized by ugly features. Otherness in postcolonial criticism refers to colonized peoples who are marginalized by the imperial and identifed by their difference from the center. Any area that is not part of European soil is considered inferior, dangerous and less valuable. However, in the understanding of the Other, a duality is also noticeable, since he is sometimes considered wild, harmful and mysterious, and sometimes harmless. Hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence are terms which are used in postcolonial analysis. The colonizers tried to categorize the colonized population, and the formation of hybrid patterns prevented that process, since new cultural forms were emerging that no longer corresponded to the descriptions of the colonizers. Colonizers have been the part of Occident and the colonized nations are the Orient or the Others or the category of Otherness. Sharing the same space, Orient and Occident infuenced each other, which resulted in the transfer of elements from one culture to another. The fruit of this is the emergence of an intermediate space and a hybrid identity, which is characterized as a simultaneous affection for two or more different and opposing identity patterns, but does not fully belong to any of them. Key words: Otherness, hybrid, Orient, Occident. © 2023 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). * Corresponding author: adimitrijovska@gmail.com