Encounters between cultures have become a fraught matter in our era. Artists are supposed to avoid appropriation when they write about, paint, or otherwise engage with people of another race, ethnicity, or religious tradition, and to be wary to the point of anxiety about reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Audiences, for their part, are supposed to approach work from an unfamiliar context with an uncritical openness, the implication being that it is less important to evaluate or even understand the work than it is to celebrate the fact of diversity. Under such strictures, the scope of diversity too often narrows to the same kinds of affirmational stories and images dressed up in different native costumes. The politesse of the ideology of diversity can thus perversely make us more provincial rather than more genuinely cosmopolitan.

Yet the truth is that exploring a different culture with the aim of genuine understanding not only is enriching in itself, expanding the size of one’s imaginative world, but is an essential means to deepen one’s understanding of oneself and one’s own culture. Spend time in a foreign country, learn a foreign language, delve deeply into another civilization’s art and literature, and you realize not only the scope of human cultural variety but also the fact that, notwithstanding our common humanity, the variety is real, and not always superficial. And yet there are always enormous differences within, as well as between, cultures. Whether, in consequence, you newly appreciate your own difference or instead find yourself better reflected in a foreign glass than ever you saw yourself at home, you’ll have had an experience you could only have had by bringing your unfettered self to the table.