Our studies of and engagements with global matters—people and practices, languages and histories, values and geographies—should not be regarded merely as a kind of overlay upon or supplement to whatever we might be inclined to think of as “our own,” as local, as domestic, as home. Our home is the world, the entire world—past, present, and future—in all of its dazzling multiplicity and variety. Whatever risks might attach to a naïve cosmopolitanism that undervalues the significance of our particular, localized practices, meanings, and relationships, it is essential for us to acknowledge, to explore, and embrace all of those global, inter- and transnational currents that have contributed to who we are, here and now. We are—each of us—products of cross-cultural and inter-cultural influences and mixings, patterns of migration, amalgams of heterogeneous cultural folkways. We are all mongrels, as it were, constructing and reconstructing identities out of the multifarious, unpredictable, often conflict-laden and accidental intersections that occasion our being here and now, in Dayton, Ohio.
As we listen to and reflect upon “global voices” in this symposium, it is imperative that we acknowledge that all of our voices, in some significant ways, originate from elsewhere. We all must look more clearly and critically into the otherness, the alien-ness, the differences that dwell deep within us. For we cannot begin to fathom who we are as persons until we examine and appreciate the wonderfully rich and diverse streams of human life and culture that have formed us, that make the world our home
