Introduction: Localities

Abstract

This book aims to develop textual and literary mechanisms – a poetics – for dialogue and exchange between different ‘communities’, in order to enhance positive communication and empathy, and lead to ‘conflict’ resolution, seeking ‘common ground’ for social and cultural interaction. This might be subtextual in most instances, but the suggestions are as relevant as the overt statements, and if this generates ambiguities, it also generates multiples points of departure from a status quo (of text, of reading, of context), from the nexus or tangled webbing of communications – it offers nodal points, zones of agglomeration and coalescence, moments beyond the ambiguities. The core principle here is the notion of exchange between communal and individual voices privileged in how they are received and heard outside their own communities, and those who are only (and often barely) heard within their own communities, struggling to be heard in a way that can implement positive change for themselves, their communities, and humanity as a whole.