Island
Living 35: Pluralism on the Infobahn
by A. D.
Coleman |
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When we speak
of the emerging global culture, a term that pops
up frequently is pluralism. What exactly
do we mean by it?
Years ago, in
any of the boroughs of New York City, when you told
a friend that you knew “a nice little ethnic
restaurant” in the neighborhood, the term stood
for a type of low-key, inexpensive eatery that offered
tasty, well-prepared, ample portions of the foods
native to the country of the proprietors and staff:
Greek, Arabic, Ethiopian, Sicilian, Cuban, Indian,
Polish, whatever. That is, each one offered a specific
culture’s national cuisine, mostly the working-class
to middle-class staples. Put a few dozen of these
from different nationalities in a neighborhood and
you had a wide range of distinctive choices when
you wanted to eat out, each providing a reasonably
authentic version of what people elsewhere in the
world ate on a daily basis. Using a culinary model,
that’s as good a working definition of the
idea of pluralism as I can imagine.
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None of
these emporia ever called themselves “ethnic
restaurants,” of course -- it was a designation
for newspaper listings, food critics, and
diners to use in describing them loosely.
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Then, maybe ten years ago,
one of the fast-food stands inside the Staten
Island Ferry Terminal on the St. George side that
had closed down for a spell reopened under new
management. In big letters it announced its new
name on a sign -- which read, of course, “Ethnic
Restaurant.” And for years thereafter it
served up bad tacos, bad felafel, bad souvlaki,
bad pizza, and bad burgers, all of them aggressively
overpriced and pretty much indistinguishable from
each other.1
For a long time,
as a result, the word “pluralism” for
me has been haunted by the image of that fast-food
stand. But I’ve come back to thinking that
there’s another way to look at it. A most apropos
recent definition of the concept of pluralism comes
from a book by the technoskeptical David Gelerntner,
who miraculously lived through an attack by the
recently captured U.S. technophobe known as the
Unabomber. In Drawing Life, his eloquent
autobiographical account of his recovery, Gelerntner
referred to U.S. culture as "a plywood culture
that gained strength from the crosswise grain of
many separate, glued-up sheets."2
That image of
a "plywood culture" delights me, suggesting
a material that's ingenious in design, ecologically
considerate, structurally even sturdier than its
source, cheap, reliable, full of flaws yet constructed
to compensate for them, versatile, efficient, handy,
readily available for all purposes. There's also
something distinctly postmodern about this material
-- not exactly real wood, not exactly fake wood
either, a kind of useful and forthright ersatz,
with the implications of apology and responsibility
and making things right that the word's connotations
included in the original German.
Gelerntner’s
analysis is no less true of other countries and
continents than it is of North America. How does
that idea manifest itself in everyday experience?
Well, to give you just one example, during the course
of a winter residency in the Department of Photography
at Sweden's Gothenberg University in 1994 as a Fulbright
Senior Scholar, I offered several workshops for
people outside that program. In one of them, a young
Swede -- blond, blue-eyed, more than six feet tall
-- excused himself from one afternoon session, on
the basis that his African dance group had to rehearse
for its upcoming seasonal public performance. I
assumed he'd been allowed to apprentice with a visiting
African dance troupe, as a sort of a melanin-challenged
mascot. No, he explained, everyone in the group
was Scandinavian, except for their Nigerian instructor.
The image of
several dozen unmistakably Nordic types performing
traditional African dances under Nigerian tutelage
for a mostly Swedish audience huddling together
for warmth in a snowbound Gothenberg theater has
its ironic and comical aspects, of course, but also
its charm and certainly its provocations. White
folks of course can and do take African-dance classes
in the States, where Africans can also take ballet
lessons -- and Swedish clog-dancing instruction
is available too, for all and sundry. By the way,
you probably know that cross-country skiing -- a
sport developed in the Nordic countries -- is popular
in the States (though not yet in a televised version,
thank God)? But did you know that there's also a
cowboy cult in Sweden -- people who dress up in
six-guns and chaps and ten-gallon hats, camp out
in the country, rope cattle and boil mud-thick coffee
for campfire breakfasts? Or that the back-up band
of African musician King Sunny Adé includes
a man who plays that quintessential southeastern
U.S. country-and-western instrument, the pedal-steel
guitar, doing things with it that the c&w pedal-steel
genius Buddy Emmons never imagined? Things that
Emmons may well try after he runs into this guy
at the next Pedal-Steel Guitar World Expo and talks
pedal-steel shop-talk with him, or jams with him
at some future Johnny Cash/Sunny Adé concert,
or simply hears his album on the radio?
Fact is, everyone
plays "world music" today, whatever we
mean by that term. And if there's a "world
music," then there's a "world literature,”
a “world cinema,” a “world art,”
a “world photography," a “world fashion”
-- that is, for every creative medium and area of
social expression there’s an internationally
circulating repertory of styles and approaches and
ideas. Is that the end of culture, all idiosyncracy
broken down into some tasteless, undifferentiated
sludge? Not necessarily. As the Transylvanian emigré
Andrei Codrescu said recently after driving cross-country
through the States (in his vehicle of choice, a
1968 red Cadillac convertible), "Hugely incompatible
ingredients were thrown into the boiling cauldron
of this continent -- and very little, thank God,
has actually melted in this vast melting pot."3
Truth be told,
we’ve spent a lot of time and effort rehinging
of the doors of influence so that they swing two
ways. At home in New York, and more expansively
wherever I go in the U.S., I now eat far more varied
food than I've ever had available to me before --
both "authentic" traditional foods from
other cultures and new flavors, ingredients, and
cooking methods adapted from them. I'm even pleased
to report that, as an identifiable result of foreign
influence, I can now get a decent cup of coffee,
rather than the traditional U.S. "brown water,"
not only in cafés but in restaurants and
roadside fast-food stops and even little street-side
stands, surely a substantial improvement in the
quality of life. I hear a vastly greater diversity
of music, see more art from elsewhere, watch more
foreign-made movies, read more writings from abroad,
than I've ever before had at my disposal. The U.S.
and western Europe may seem to own the fast lanes
on the Infobahn, but these are multi-lane expressways,
and they go in both directions.
Time to quote
John Donne: "no man is an island, entire of
itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a
part of the main." Now more than ever. And,
to take his metaphor a step further, no island is
an island, either; everything connects. In other
words, the world needs to understand that Staten
Island is an integral part of it; and Staten Island
in turn needs to recognize that it is inextricably
linked with that world. Putting a few genuine and
varied ethnic restaurants in the soon-to-be-remodeled
ferry terminal, and a few more around St. George,
so that visitors to these shores can enjoy a delicious,
affordably priced meal from one of several different
cultures while they’re among us, would be a
savvy way of signalling that we’re bent on
keeping our end of that deal.
1
It subsequently became a Dunkin’ Donuts, while
retaining its original signage. While a major renovation
of the terminal that began in 2001 has resulted
in many changes, this sign remains there as of February
2003.
2
David Gelerntner, Drawing Life: Surviving the
Unabomber (New York: The Free Press, 1997),
p. 145. For Gelerntner's opinions on technological
matters, see hisMachine Beauty: Elegance and
the Heart of Technology (New York: Basic Books,
1998) and The Muse in the Machine: Computers
and Creative Thought (New York: The Free Press,
1994).
3
Julie Checkoway, "On and Off Communism's Red
Train: A Profile of Andrei Codrescu," Poets
& Writers Magazine, Volume 26, no. 6 (November/Deecember
1998), p. 31.
(Photo credit: "Ethnic Restaurant, March 2002,"
© Copyright 2002 by A. D. Coleman. All rights
reserved.)
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Copyright 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
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