Initially, I tried to do everything in the strictly conventional way, setting out my theoretical stall in considerable and polysyllabic detail, and decking it with my various wares But it didn’t work… it stood in direct contradiction to every-thing the book itself tries to do. This is a book about diversity and multiplicity; about the subversion of the fantasicd monolithic icons of a culture which believes itself to be uncontcstably dominant by a polyphonic choir, in which by no means all the voices arc in harmony with each other.1