
How do we create an inclusive & egalitarian society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved & benefit of the society as a whole? Despite progress made over the last decades, MULTICULTURALISM remains an enduring challenge, all the more urgent as we stand at the junction of retrogressing to the homogeneous & hierarchical past rather than progressing towards egalitarian, inclusive & plural ideals. JAYON YOU, in this collection of 24 personal & critical essays, uses her own experience of immigration to America at the age of 13 & what gave her a resolution on the questions of belonging, identity & relationship between cultures as a critical frame for illuminating the issue of multiculturalism both in the contexts of Europe & America. She frames three different ethos of 'multicultural' societies, provoking the reader to question where their own society might stand along the spectrum of ethos & what kind of society they would choose to create based on the values they believe in. In the process, she clarifies some of the most urgent questions of our time: HOW immigrants come to be integrated into a society and what we mean by 'integration' anyway; HOW a society could embrace diversity without losing culture, identity & solidarity of the nation; HOW the comparative context between an immigrant nation from its inception & an ethnic nation with a growing diversity can help inform each other.