Estrangement from one’s own culture enables genuine judgment of it and others

Evidence

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.” This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them.… A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.” These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilisations as if through vestiges and ruins. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14; Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351; The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 (+6 more)

Related

• Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning (similarity 0.84)
• The global novel both exposes and risks reproducing globalization’s assumptions (similarity 0.82)
• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity (similarity 0.82)
• Novel-empathy rhetoric can flatter Western readers while denigrating another culture (similarity 0.81)
• Unsourced universalizing verbs transform people into objects of a privileged observer. (similarity 0.80)
• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools (similarity 0.80)
• Encountering another as free alter ego shatters the taken-for-granted world (similarity 0.80)
• Other minds as alter egos intensify complexity, requiring language to reduce it (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial comforts concealed estrangement from local people and from oneself #exemplifies (0.80)
• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity #exemplifies (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32
• Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning #qualifies (0.72) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14
• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools #qualifies (0.72) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351