The Spirit of Multi-Culti


A Response to Xu Xi's Multi-Culti Literati:

There is multi-cultural and then there is multi-culti or “moolti-koolti,” as a German arts promoter said it. According to Xu Xi, the first is PC (politically correct) and clouds understanding by the illusion of universality. While trying to be inclusive and reach out to different people in the PC way, universality or a false sense of universality is ruling over our differences. She claims that this PC idea of multi-cultural “might prevent us from understanding other worlds as a distortion of our own way of knowing and being, just as we are, as well, a distortion of theirs” (pp136). 

She talks about true understanding of different cultures, not as an act of bridging divides, but as a process of distortion. To understand someone or some place that is “other”, we have to go beyond our way of seeing things and “tilt our vision slightly askew to see and reflect those myriad humanities as ourselves” (pp135). This is the multi-culti vision, this is the spirit of the multi-culti: to see the differences and distort one’s perspective. We can’t understand other people without seeing it their way. In a sense, it’s the classic, “put yourself in their shoes” type of thing. This is what literature is about; each piece of literature has its own angle and reveals culture. She writes that “reading literature is always, to some extent, a cross cultural experience”(131). However, although we may read different perspectives, prejudices may easily remain to tilt the way we read. These prejudices bring us back to our own way of thinking and our own perspectives.

Narrative conventions influence how we think about reading and writing fiction as well as thought patterns. Xu Xi emphasises these differences, generalising east and west for the sake of making distinctions. Generally (but not in all circumstances) English is dominated by the three act structure, where narrative is linear and causal and relies on formal logic rooted in ancient Greek philosophy. Eastern literature is often very situation/world based, drawing on Confucianism/Taoism, “in which the world is full of contradictions, constantly changing, and logic is relational rather than linear” (pp132).

From the western perspective, there may be a tendency to criticise some Asian literature for lacking structure or being illogical, because the logic, norms and standards are different. I think it’s useful to understand these differences so we can read literature with these standards in mind. In this way, we can get more meaning out of reading if we apply the corresponding standards rather than judging and misunderstanding using our own. Using our own standard assumes that our perspective is universal. Seeing similarities and universalities is important, but this is not the end. “If we read and write for the universal, as we are used to doing, might we not miss the signals and differences, those tantalising, tasty ways of thinking that deviate from the our own?” ~


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