Posthumously published in the collection The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972), the story “The Other Boat” (began in 1913 and completed in 1957–8) has long been considered “a worthy finale to Forster’s fiction” (Stallybrass 1987, xvii). This essay explores the foregrounding of alterity in “The Other Boat” within the context of imperialist politics. The significant use of the term “other” in the story problematizes hierarchies and interrogates binaries of inclusion/exclusion. Highlighting alterity, “The Other Boat” engages with the colonizer/colonized dichotomy in ways suggestive of postcolonial conceptualizations of otherness. Thus, the story explores ideologies predicated upon what Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) terms the Orient’s “foreignness” and illustrates the conditions which preserve the Orient’s “permanent estrangement from the West” (Said 1978, 244).