There may be a rise in "the ideology of sameness," more nationalism, more religion, more paranoia, less empathy, less tolerance.
Yet the dancing, which grew increasingly robust, was marred by Ms. Harper's structural sameness: More often than not, a group, as a framing device, was placed around a single dancer.
"Back in 1996, it was going to be this brave new world where women were finally going to take control of their stories, and to me, it is often more a crushing sameness".
Behind a comforting illusion of diversity lies an even more comforting reality of sameness.
The grayness of these stories is numbing, their sameness even more so.
In each case, what scarred them was not pain — a job is a job, after all, and there were children everywhere subsisting in more brutal conditions — but sameness, without the prospect of relief.
Britain has its fair share of unimaginative holiday cottages that offer little more than three-star sameness, so you have to look around carefully to find a green getaway where the kettle doesn't match the curtains.
The relentless work was made more difficult by its numbing sameness, day after day.
All of which makes Lowry's remarkable children's novel – about a young boy elected to store all human memories preceding his society's faux-utopia of Sameness – seem even more forward-thinking than it did on its publication in 1993, when it was challenged by numerous American parents' councils and school library boards.
(Much more can be said about sameness: for discussion see, e.g., Lewis 1976, and de Vries 1988).
