Europe and the United States now confront many of the same unresolved issues of nationalist, religious, racial, and ethnic intolerance. The book addresses the question: How can the humanistic disciplines and social sciences play a role in a political transformation or address cultural difference? This "difference," the other, may be a racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, or colonial Other.

Contributors to this book focus on the serious political questions posed by the problems of strangeness, "the other," in the present climate of accelerating social change and global shifts in political power.

Gisela Brinker-Gabler is Professor of Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Binghamton.