摘要：The collective volume Intercultural Crossings: Conflict, Memory and Identity aims to address issues that relate directly to intercultural encounters. However, encounters initiate advantages as well as disadvantages: on the one hand they can endorse mutual understanding, permit sharing of knowledge, amplify people’s horizons and expectations, and encourage liberalism in the face of difference, what is described as lato sensu cosmopolitanism; on the other hand, encounters of/in difference engender cultural locations where conflicting life-styles and temperaments can transform into a space of skirmishes. More often than not, these encounters render an opportunity to scrutinise matters of identity which have been largely covered up by socially induced notions of political correctness, such as tolerance and multiculturalism. In Western society the former has been used as a contrivance to accommodate notions of difference which are at odds with a given identity, providing a means to appease discomforts which the humanist principles saw reinforced by the values of liberty, equality and fraternity and homogenising Enlightenment universalism.
