While literature and art are heterogeneous, and we can and should read and feel influenced by art across cultures, it is equally true that our readings are relative to our knowledge of those cultures, and our personal proximity to them. My argument is not to keep lineages rigid, but rather to appraise them honestly where they exist. It is to say they should not be overtaken or disappeared by forms that a dominant society masks as universal. . . . [T]his model offers a permission to step back, to learn, to hold back on an adjudicative impulse in favour of making space for that which is not well understood. Evaluation might give way to an education in form, an expansion in genres, and may eventually do away with camps in favour of a constellation of positions in relationship.
