Michael Orthofer: belief

Transcript context

…But it is a kind of paradox of globalization, right? After the ’70s in particular, immigration to the United States goes up quite rapidly. There’s a lot more trade, especially with Asia. Many more Americans get passports. They travel abroad. And yet, at the same time, we’re less interested in some aspects of foreign literature. Maybe there’s something more general to this. If you think of America as, in some ways, an open country, actually we’re much less willing to watch foreign films than are people from most other countries. Then you go to Canada, for all of its talk of cultural protectionism — they do a small amount of it — or Paris, arguably they’re, in many ways, more open to foreign cultures than America. What’s the general paradoxical lesson about globalization we can pull out of all of this? It might be a cultural thing that America has, in many ways, always been sort of integrating. It has integrated the immigrants that have come in, and it has valued that they become American, that they adopt American values. And part of that has been leaving behind, to a certain extent, the culture. I think there’s a great amount of literature of sort of the first-, second-, third-generation Americans and — but it’s almost all in English. And there’s very little of returning to the languages that these immigrants brought with them. On the other hand, it’s fascinating how many foreign authors live, especially in university settings, in the United States. But they live in these sort of isolated pockets. They’re not part of the broader American literary culture, which I find a bizarre paradox. I don’t quite understand why that happens. Let me tell you an argument about New York City which I occasionally hear. And I know it’s not true about you, but whether you think it’s true at all. And it gets at these paradoxes of globalization. That in some ways New York City, or maybe just Manhattan, is fairly provincial because people think — and they’re led to believe — that the whole world comes here. In some ways that’s true, both tourism and migration, but you don’t actually get the whole world here at all. You get a highly processed, filtered version of a bit of it from each particular region. Then people here, in a way, become more inward looking. They don’t go as many other places. They feel everything is right here. They get into their routines. And is it possible that parts of Manhattan are evolving into this highly provincial place because of these cultural paradoxes?…

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