Ruth Lea: Dos formas de entender el multiculturalismo

Ruth Lea afirma que hay dos formas de entender el multiculturalismo

The first one is the more common way and that is every culture has the right to exist and there is no over-arching thread that holds them together.

That is the multiculturalism we think is so destructive because there’s no thread to hold society together. It is that multiculturalism that Trevor Phillips has condemned and, of course, we are totally supportive.

There is another way to define multiculturalism which I would call diversity where people have their own cultural beliefs and they happily coexist.

And that is clearly what I would support because you do accept that people have different cultures and you accept them.

It a positive acceptance not a negative tolerance.

Maxine Hong Kingston, a woman who never tires

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes – The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese-American writer, best known for being the author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, a memoir discussing concepts of gender, ethnicity and identity. Using a revolutionary dream-like writing style she has written several novels and essays, combining autobiography and Chinese folktales, as Kristopher Fortin explains.

As The New York Times said in 1976 about The Woman Warrior, her work is

[...] an investigation of soul . . . Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are crises of the heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it.