Perhaps the greatest paradox of contemporary notions of our differences -- racial, cultural, sexual or otherwise -- is that they are often celebrated alongside an equal stress on their incommensurability.  In other words, we have become habituated to the idea that even when acknowledged, differences are psychically and experientially, if not socially and sexually, insurmountable.  So though our cultural lives may be infinitely plural, our inner lives become increasingly singular, privatized even.  It is in this way that a healthy respect for others can often seem indistinguishable from disdain, the incommensurable shading easily into the incompatible.  As an awareness of other peoples expands exponentially across a globalized and mediatized landscape, the borders between self and those others have certainly become more and more porous; yet it often seems that the desire to understand those unlike us or the very notion that we could understand them becomes the greatest casualty of those differences.
        Indeed, the desire to understand the perspectives and experiences of others has been so often demonized that attempts to bridge differences become reduced to hackneyed moral optimism and cringe-worthy sentimentality.  Or they are unconvincingly or insultingly farcical.  We are left with a crippling fear of even trying to imagine the life of others for fear of being accused of naiveté, racism, voyeurism or "cultural imperialism."  No, this is not an essay about James Cameron's Avatar, Precious, The Blind Side or any number of recent films that have done their best (or worst) to render the lives of others in such a way as to create sympathy or to assert that now incredibly unfashionable phrase, ‘common humanity.’  It is, however, an essay about fiction and the legacy of what are still called "the culture wars," where terms like "cultural imperialism," "colonial voyeurism" or "Orientalism" -- now as sanctified by misuse as "racism" -- began to gain widespread cultural cache despite their origins in largely academic debates.
        These debates, it is so often forgotten, were erected on a longer legacy of cultural and political activism rooted as much in a sense of social injustice as in the utopian sensibilities of radical literature and thought.  Yet the willed incommensurability of much minority politics -- i.e. you cannot possibly know us because your knowing is tainted with racism, sexism, imperial bias, etc. -- has become for many in literary and cultural studies either the primary political gesture or a melodramatic replacement for politics.
        Perhaps slightly updating these scholarly debates and postures is Shameem Black's Fiction Across Borders: Imagining The Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010).  It is a work littered with such border-defending nuggets such as "discursive domination," "representational violence," and the "invasive imagination."  As she rightly points out, these terms emerged largely from "the chastening critiques of postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, and ethnic-minority studies."  Though these modes of criticism were themselves shot through with the utopianism of mid-20th century global cultural and political resistance movements -- a spirit that animates Black's critical lens if not her prose -- by the millennium the belief in the possibility of cross-cultural communion had become victim to the worst kind of cynicism: the kind that gets institutionalized.