The word "outrização", in Portuguese, causes an estrangement from the beginning, since it is not a word in the dictionary of our lusophone vernacular. In fact, "outrização" is the translation of
othering (SPIVAK, 1985) from English into Portuguese, made by Isaias Carvalho, in
Omeros-Walcott: productive othering; a semi-utopian poetics of cultural encounters (Master's Thesis; in Portuguese: "Omeros-Walcott: outrização produtiva; uma poética semi-utópica dos encontros culturais". Letters Institute; Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, 2003). From the single term "othering", Isaias Carvalho designed his characterization of the concept of "productive othering".
In both languages the word tends to sound like an unusual conceptual neologism. Maybe the author could have used, in Portuguese, the words "outridade" or "alteridade" as possible translations for
othering, but that would confuse this term with another one in English - otherness. However, while otherness is a process that all individuals experience in psychological and psychoanalytical terms, the processes of "othering" implies the ban, the disempowerment, the degradation, demonization, the silencing and the colonization of the Other. Othering is thus a process that includes discursive practices that enhance a positive identity of a group that stigmatizes and demeans, in a violent manner, the other. In contrast, "productive othering" is a counterpoint to mere othering because it proposes an approach that redefines the silenced memory in the context of current relations of symbolic exchanges among different cultures in a globalized world.
Productive othering, therefore, is not a
telos, but a metamorphic process of constant cultural negotiation. It is not mere nostalgia or a quest for lost time. It is not simple utopia - to achieve the real unreachable -, but a process of dealing with what we have available: the experience of living itself, without losing sight of a desire for the emancipation of humanity, and certain mourning for the silenced and the dead, who should not be forgotten so easily.
Reference
SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Rani of Sirmur: an essay in reading the archives. In:
History and theory. v. 24, n. 3, October, 1985. p. 247-72. Available at: <http://www.jstor.org/pss/ 2505169>.