![]() It does not seem like a particular infringement of liberty to pass through the world without being its owner, unless someone else is continually asserting property rights over the ground beneath your feet. They respect people, not by leaving them alone in the inviolability of their cultural authenticity, but by becoming involved with them. They treat their own experience of the world as provisional. Good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know. For the deviant others, who came in by the kitchen door, it has always been expected, even demanded. I’m being silenced! My freedom is being abridged! Norm is unaccustomed to humility because he has grown up as master of the house. Yet it appears that for some, the call to listen before speaking, to refrain from asserting immediate authority, is so unfamiliar that it feels outrageous. For those who have never experienced the luxury of normativity, the warm and fuzzy feeling of being the world’s default setting, humility in the face of otherness seems like a minimal demand. Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities, other experiences, is an act of ethical urgency. I don’t believe any subject matter should a priori be off limits to anyone, or that harm necessarily flows from the kind of ventriloquism that all novelists perform. Should the artist go forth boldly, without fear? Of course, but he or she should also tread with humility. It is true that the politics of offence are used to shut down dissident voices of all kinds, frequently in minority communities, and the understanding of culture as a type of property to which ownership can be definitively assigned is, at the very least, problematic. ‘Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities is an act of ethical urgency’ … Hari Kunzru Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
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