Word: hybridization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Intermarriage, of course, is as old as the Bible. But during the past two decades, America has produced the greatest variety of hybrid households in the history of the world. As ever increasing numbers of couples crash through racial, ethnic and religious barriers to invent a life together, Americans are being forced to rethink and redefine themselves. For all the divisive talk of cultural separatism and resurgent ethnic pride, never before has a society struggled so hard to fuse such a jumble of traditions, beliefs and values...
...that's just the beginning. "All American art is a function of the hybrid culture that resulted from centuries of immigration to this nation," says David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. "We're just more dramatically aware of it today." American culture used to be depicted as a Eurocentric melting pot into which other cultures were stirred and absorbed. The recent waves of newcomers have changed that. Today it seems more like a street fair, with various booths, foods and peoples, all mixing on common sidewalks...
...traditional metaphor for this is that of a mosaic. But Richard Rodriguez, the Mexican-American essayist who is a psalmist for our new hybrid forms, points out that the interaction is more fluid than that, more human, subject to daily revision. "I am Chinese," he says, "because I live in San Francisco, a Chinese city. I became Irish in America. I became Portuguese in America." And even as he announces this new truth, Portuguese women are becoming American, and Irishmen are becoming Portuguese, and Sydney (or is it Toronto?) is thinking to compare itself with the "Chinese city" we know...
...linking two related disciplines that are already neighbors with a hybrid lab is a very different matter from uprooting and replanting a good portion of the universities departments...
...film version of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice adds a powerful third dimension to the prose of the reknowned novella. The film is a hybrid of a silent film and an impressionist work of art. This combination lends itself well to a story whose main commentary is on the relationship among life, art and reality...