Through the Reading Leiden: An Experential School, we were talking about seeing the world from the non-western perspectives and bringing in the voice from our surrounding in our research and work. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding in this TED Talk. Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
"Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. ...
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized"