Transforming Otherness

Today, people in different situations and contexts face intercultural challenges. These are a result of increasing mobility. Sometimes such challenges are brought about by crisis situations and an international labor market. However, people also come in contact with each other through forms of new technology such as the Internet, and through literature and film. In these multicultural encounters, misunderstandings and sometimes clashes are experienced. This volume presents studies in culture, communication, and language, all of which strive, through a variety of theoretical perspectives, to develop understanding of such challenges and perhaps offer practical solutions. Encountering otherness may evoke fears, negative attitudes, and a corresponding will to dismiss the otherness in front of us—either consciously or unconsciously. This denial of otherness may also be subtle. Thinking about otherness, as described in this volume, also raises questions about how otherness is represented and mediated and about the possible role of third parties in facilitating communication in such situations. Sometimes a third party can play a crucial role in facilitating the communication process and serve as a channel of communication. Trust in humanity as a bridge to community requires a subtle balance between representations of self and other. Various problems arise in intercultural mediation, which may be caused by cultural and political differences, and these are sometimes used to validate stereotypical beliefs and images. The editors argue that in both academic and art circles, European perspectives have widely been understood as universal.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1: If Culture is Practice … ? A Practice-Theoretical Perspective on Intercultural Communication and Mediation; 2: Transforming Versus Repressing the Self and the Other in Virtual Language Learning and Teaching; 3: Simon Harel’s Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante and the Question of Migrant Literature as Intercultural Mediator in Quebec; 4: A Heart from Jenin: Transformation, Mediation, Vulnerability; 5: Moving on Boundary Spaces: Altering Embodied Representations of the Other and the Self; 6: Meeting the Heathens in Ostrobothnia: Moravian Mission Tales and Myths of West Indian Slavery; 7: The Other Time: Use of the Victorian Past in William Plomer’s Double Lives; 8: Iterative Mapping of Otherness: A Mapping Discussion of the Transforming Potential of the Other; 9: In the End—Am I a Chicana? Imagining the Communities of the Multi-Genre Anthologies This Bridge Called My Back and this bridge we call home in Dialogue with Susan M. Guerra; 10: Intercultural Competence and False Projections: A Perspective on the Critical Tradition of Intercultural Documentary Film