Book review: Interculturality between East and West: Unthink, dialogue, rethink

Abstract

Culture is one of the biggest concepts both in academia and on everyone’s lips in our daily life. For most of us, it has been taken-for-granted that cultures are divided by clear-cut Us-Them boundaries between countries, regions, religions, generations, among many others, manifesting a stark but ideologically imagined “boundary fetishism” (Pieterse, 2004, p. 224) that polarizes human beings between us/in-group and them/out-group. Interculturality is therefore confused with cross-national comparisons, for instance. This book Interculturality Between East and West: Unthink, Dialogue and Rethink urges us to question this taken-for-grantedness when we conceptualize culture and interculturality. By starting with a musician metaphor and some wellknown idioms, especially, the “众盲摸象 (The blind touching an elephant)” (Dervin et al., 2022, p. 5) encourages readers to ponder upon the nature of multiplicity of flavors (i.e., the underlying but hidden ideologies of ways of thinking) to open up pluri-perspectival discussions of interculturality in the beginning of this book. Overall, this book, like its title, is one of the very few works that are intercultural in nature by engaging the authors and their students into reciprocal and honest dialogues throughout the writing process when power relations are constantly (re)balanced in intercultural encounters. To challenge the long-held, dominant and (post-)modern paradigms of interculturality/intercultural research exclusively from the West, no rigid definitions of culture or of interculturality are given throughout the whole book; a posteriori logic is therefore favored. It is also important to note that, like many other critical scholars in intercultural fields (e.g., Holliday, 2011), the main idea of this book is neither to demonize nor to blow upWest/Westernization but to develop readers’ critical awareness of essentialist Othering/Otherization between superior Center and inferior Periphery when West and East meet each other; unquestioned and solid West-East binaries in this book are merely vivid cases for deepening and even reshaping our understandings