Imagine What It Is Like

Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a late nineteenth century writer, got a lot of attention because she was identified as African-American, but now turns out to have been white. Timothy Burke noted

...it is far more possible for people to empathetically and intellectually understand the experiences of others than our received wisdom about race, gender and other identities assumes, that a white American through intellect, will and emotional insight can credibly imagine what it is like to be a black American, that a woman can credibly imagine what it is like to be male, and so on. The govering metaphor I like to apply to this capacity is one of translation: that we can translate the experiences of others, sometimes through impersonation, sometimes just through intellectual inquiry.

Sometimes, anyway. Me, I can't even imagine what it's like to be another human.

Earlier, Crooked Timber invoked Borges’ Tlön, where critics

often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...

It sounds all too much like a lot of literary criticism, which tells you more about the person writing it than what they're discussing.