INVOCATION

Scholars tell us that diverse groups of people have more that binds them together than tears them apart. This important insight has guided efforts toward multicultural educational and political inclusion, and supports a humanist vision of cooperation across difference. Yet this model, while providing a basis for coalition building, tends to stall our efforts to more completely understand the continued power of difference – rhetorically and experientially. This is in part because encouraging people to choose one among many hyphenated identities, the similarity-difference model doesn’t help us to examine these identities in relation to each other, historically and in the present. Nor does it easily acknowledge that our identities are never singular, and that we may represent ourselves differently over time and according to context. So what would it mean to think not in terms of similarity and difference, but in terms of relationality? What might this open up as we think about our identities, and our relationships with other people? How might it help us both to develop more sophisticated analyses of conflict, and to forge stronger alliances that move us beyond conflict? What might our future look like if we imagined ourselves to share one history instead of many?