Contemporary accounts of cultural conflict fixate on the material causes of global disparities, but overlook how culture originates and functions in lived places. Given that cultural conflicts play out increasingly not on international battlefields, but in the contested terrain of cities, there is an urgent need for analyses of conflict that take both culture and place into account. This paper explores how the problematics of identity and difference play out in Toronto, Canada, a diverse city where immigration has made unlikely neighbors of diasporas, reflecting the dynamics of three centuries of cultural conflict. Literary representations of culture, identity, racism and difference illuminate the importance of communicating across culture and underscore the paper's central argument that narrative itself can become a way of negotiating cultural conflict if it helps people put cultural difference on the table without coming to blows. Finally, this paper argues that tolerance, and such multiculturalism as tolerance makes possible, is vital to mitigating not only crises of identity in local places, but also cultural ruptures and clashes in the global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]