Truth

The Alliance of Independent Publishers, a literary organization "dedicated to a different kind of globalization" and the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation have invited Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House (China), Arab Cultural Center (Morocco and Lebanon), Double Storey Books (South Africa), Sage India (India), Editions La Decouverte (France), and Other Press (United States) to participate in the creation of an unprecedented intercultural project.

Entitled Keywords, this original and international experiment is divided into four concise volumes. Each one refers specifically to a word that is key to the understanding of the human condition. Truth, Identity, Gender, and Experience are concepts that we presume universal; therefore we would be hard-pressed to think that they refer to different systems of thought in cultures distinct from our own. Keywords explores the cultural specificity of these terms, and links them to issues that are most relevant for the region under consideration.

Each volume of the series offers six different points of view on a given keyword. The authors, who have been carefully selected by their respective publishers for their mastery in their fields and for the clarity of their writing, have been given free rein to share their distinctive visions of the concept at hand and to emphasize particular examples that would best illustrate their unique perspectives.

In the volume entitled Gender for example, we find a highly contemporary American analysis of the tension between feminist studies and the concept of the "queer," while the Arab reading of the same word turns to the history of the Arab world to champion the cause of women and homosexuals.

For the African author, identity is bound up with questions of ethnicity, race, and colonial laws. The Chinese author shows how in his country identity has been informed in the 20th century by Western references, such as Marxism and the market economy, because at its roots Chinese thought does not directly include these notions. The American author selects Tiger Woods' debate with the media to reveal how in the United States the question of "identity politics" defeats the ideals of multiculturalism.

Experience in China may be understood classically as an actual event but also as revealing what cannot be spoken. The French reading emphasizes the contrast between the scientific experience, its psychoanalytic version, and the definition of the "judgment of experience" as formulated by Kant.

Truth, from the American perspective, appears to have shifted from a mathematical and universal model to a contemporary notion of truth so elusive and plural that it has almost disappeared as a concept. The Indian approach is deeply historical, as it surveys the meaning of truth from the Vedas to the Gandhian ideal. The African author in this instance has chosen to ignore the history of the concept in order to concentrate on a crucial contemporary question: How well has the South African Commission for Truth and Reconciliation worked and what are its realistic limitations?

The variety of the authors' backgrounds (anthropology, philosophy, sociology, epistemology) and their commitment to making Keywords relevant in the explosive "here and now" offer new parameters for envisioning the implications of the process of globalization. This project is required reading for anyone who aspires to become an informed citizen of the world.

Keywords will be published in its entirety in 2004 by Other Press. The series will be brought out simultaneously by the other five participating publishers in the languages native to their territories. Each essay was written originally for this series and has never before been published.

Ali Benmakhalouf

Ali Benmakhalouf teaches philosophy at the University of Nice. He has published Averroes (Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2000).

Ganesh Devy

Ganesh Devy taught literature at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda before moving into the ara of tribal languages and oral literature. He has initiated a cultural movement among the tribal communities of western India and has set up the Tribal Academy at Tejgadh for carrying out research in tribal culture. He is the author of the book Of Many Heroes (1998).

Yang Guorong

Yang Guorong is a Professor of Chinese Philosophy at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Professor Guorong is the author of Rationality and Value.

Bertrand Ogilvie

Bertrand Ogilvie is professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis, teaching at l’Universite de Paris X-Nanterre. His most recent publication is Par Dela Masculin et Feminin (a propos de Francoise Heritier, Masculin/Feminin II).

Douglas Patterson

Douglas Patterson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kansas State University. He is the author of numerous essays, including ＂Theories of Truth and Convention T＂ in Dialectica and ＂What is a Correspondence Theory of Truth?＂ in Synthese.

Deborah Posel

Deborah Posel is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of Witwatersrand. Her most recent book, co-edited with Graeme Simpson, is Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2002).