Foreword: The Ethics of Writing, Reading, and Othering

Through the last decades of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, “political correctness” was one of the worst slurs hefted against scholars working in the fields of Ethnic, Women’s, Postcolonial, and other emergent minority studies areas.1 The term stung. After all, much of the intellectual energy driving the projects that distinguish these studies was and is related to activist commitments to communal and collective identities. These projects have made visible the radical difference between how “knowledge” is formed in the empirical sciences (through “objective” research) and how it is generated in the social sciences and humanities (allegedly as more “subjective” research). Indeed, inasmuch as science-based methodologies are commonly valorized, so have humanistic ways of knowing become undervalued.