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.
"Ethnic Restaurant, March 2002," © Copyright 2002 by A. D. Coleman.
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. 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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