ABSTRACT
There have been some underlying themes of this conference, and one of those themes is fear. Fear of the Other is one form of it. And I don't just mean racist fear, which we've elaborated on quite a lot during the conference. I mean that in Euro-American culture many people think the business of a critic is establishing and protecting norms. To acknowledge high art in another culture is to threaten 'our' standards (i.e. whatever it is we endorse to our readers). And it also threatens how those standards are determined, which is something we don't normally examine. Where did we get them from? What are they based on? How much do they influence what we write? If we open ourselves up to the Other, on equal terms, we'll have to give up our position as standard-setters, because it means acknowledging that someone else has set some other standard that's equally . . . standard.
