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"Some People Call Them Heretics"
TRACE Editor-in-Chief Claude Grunitzky on today's new transculturals
The word “transculturalism” first came to my attention in the New York City Spring of 2002. I had been working day and night, with a small team of grossly underpaid yet highly motivated collaborators, trying to set up a boutique advertising agency out of the one sunny corner in TRACE magazine’s SoHo loft. During one of our ad hoc working sessions, Christopher Davis, the man who would become the creative director of our (now successful)agency, pulled out a graph where he outlined a new definition for a word that had been quietly circulating in academic and underground marketing circles. From that moment on, the word “transculturalism” took on a new meaning for the assembled TRUE Agency team. It defined what we were about, how we wanted to communicate with—and be viewed by– the outside world. Post 9-11, it defined who we were, and how we saw the changing world. Transculturalism soon became our new agency’s philosophical lifeline because in that word we knew we’d found a convenient, one-word summary of our aspirations. Now, the hard part was defending that precious word—our turf-without diluting it. Hence the idea of this book, which should be read and understood as nothing more than an exploration of certain progressive world views and experiences.
This book is about identity, and the modern quest for belonging. Still, it’s not about conforming. At its core, we will explore how certain curious, open-minded people manage, through perseverance and affinity, to adapt to new, alien cultures. The basic premise of this book is that some individuals find ways to transcend their initial culture, in order to explore, examine, and infiltrate new, seemingly alien cultures. These people are “transculturalists” and their experiences show that in the future it will become increasingly difficult to identify and separate people according to previously accepted delineations. In essence, we are saying that transculturalism defies race, religion, sexuality, class and every sort of classification known to sociologists and marketers. Transculturalists lead unusual lives, and some people continue to call them heretics. They date and marry outside of their race or religion; they date and marry inside of their gender; they travel on a whim and venture into faraway lands; they dress unconventionally, and customize new dress codes regularly; they live in areas their parents were once barred from, and take jobs previously considered outside of their leagues; they listen to, and create and criticize music they are not supposed to listen to; they display high levels of creativity in the arts and other progressive disciplines.
I am a transculturalist. In my case, transculturalism can be traced back to my initial transatlantic journey from the sandy streets of Lomé, Togo, to the curvy tree-lined roads of Washington D.C.’s Rock Creek Park neighborhood. This journey, which took place in the permissive Jimmy Carter late ‘70s, followed the itinerary of the eighteenth-century slaves, but in lieu of a plantation, my siblings and I landed in the official residence of the Togolese ambassador, who happened to be my father. Every weekday, we were driven to the French lycée in Bethesda, Maryland, and early on we learnt to play, argue and compete with children-mostly diplomatic offspring like ourselves-from all over the world. With the help of bratty cartoons and beloved television shows like ‘The Jeffersons,’ ‘Good Times’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ we mastered the American English language (and Dy-no-mite Afro-jive) within a few months. On weekends, we were driven to other African embassies in a merry-go-round of African civility, but I was always asking for permission to sleep over at the houses of my school friends Rodrigo Herrera-Vegas (from Argentina), Anthony O’Sullivan (from Ireland) and Amadou Thiam (from Senegal).
A model student, I knew that I longed for nothing more than to discover the world. One can only imagine how so very excited I was when I learnt, in the early summer of 1983, that I’d be sent off to a Catholic boarding school outside Paris. The College de Juilly was a turning point, because all of a sudden I found myself one of a handful of black kids in a Franco-French establishment that prided itself on counting the great writer Montesquieu amongst its most celebrated alumni. At the cafeteria, older students would ask if they could land their palms on my nappy “carpet” and feel what a baby afro felt like. They would ask me whether we ate French fries and drank hot chocolate in my part of Africa. I was no longer in an environment where my fellow pupils were well traveled and educated on the cultures of the world. I had to adapt to a new, self-centered, self-serving mentality where every conversation had to do with the greatness of French culture, and the greatness of France’s role within the world.
Little did it matter that few of these adolescent philosophers had ever ventured outside the comfort of their Parisian or provincial bourgeois homes. I soon found out that these kids were just repeating their parents’ dinner table conversations, as adapted to the “histoire-géographie” lessons we were being taught in class. I felt somewhat ostracized until I met a French language teacher called Jean Ferret. Ferret became my first mentor as he opened my mind to those great French writers—Voltaire, Hugo, Baudelaire, Malraux-who understood and explained how one’s life could get richer through the discovery of foreign cultures. By the time I got to college in Paris I had become a total hip hop head, and I’d learnt to dissect the street teachings of A Tribe Called Quest, Slick Rick and Boogie Down Productions through the universal thinking of philosophers like Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche. A political science student, I was also becoming increasingly disillusioned with the polarizations within President Mitterrand’s French society and the rise of the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The first Gulf War ended on February 28th, 1991, my twentieth birthday. Pretty soon I would be on my way to London, where the Bristol band Massive Attack-then known as Massive because they had temporarily changed their name in a refusal to condone the war vernacular-had just released the album ‘Blue Lines.’ I was fascinated by the atmospheric, cinematic sound and in-your-face hip hop attitude of this multi-racial collective, which was blending the hardcore beats and laid-back rapping I lived for, with the incredible old soul and jazz stylings they had somehow managed to fuse into new ska and electro mixes from ancestral Jamaica. In London, university classes were somewhat trite and not so time-consuming, so I pursued my real passion and became the budding music writer who could easily gravitate between the disparate worlds of Jewish Swiss Cottage, Jamaican Brixton, posh Mayfair and trendy Notting Hill. In 1995, I started a hip hop and street fashion magazine, called TRUE, out of the converted Old Street warehouse of my then-employer, the nascent style magazine Dazed & Confused which was then led by its (appropriately named) editor Jefferson Hack. By the time the first issue of TRUE came out, I had met and hung out with the boys from Massive Attack, I had interviewed young British actresses like Rachel Weisz and Kate Beckinsale, and I had sat down with the rising artist Damien Hirst for an unforgettable “chat” at the celebrated Groucho club.
Now the young husband of a Jewish French-African 19-year-old, I started feeling like I knew everyone I needed to know, and that the challenge was to turn the magazine-now called TRACE and published out the loft where my wife and I lived down the road from the Dazed offices in Clerkenwell-into a creative space where my personal experiences and strange journeys could meet my friends and newfound collaborators’ personal experiences and strange journeys. The backdrop to these transcultural voices of expression and self-reinvention was a publication devoted to music, art, fashion and global youth culture, but the mission could have been summarized in the prophetic title of the A Tribe Called Quest album: ‘People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.’
In 1998, the rent on our Clerkenwell Road loft was tripled when our lease was up, London got expensive and pretentious, and I found myself escaping to New York City on a Virgin Atlantic flight. Before our readers knew it, TRACE had relocated to 476 Broome Street. Now, we are publishing TRACE magazine in American, British and French editions. In the Spring of 2003, we even launched the TRACE television network in France, Africa and the Caribbean, but we now also run the TRUE Agency think tank (called TRUE Intelligence) out of the same, expanded Broome Street loft. Rather than isolate our accumulated TRACE editorial expertise from the non-traditional marketing programs we are constantly asked to implement for our TRUE Agency clients, we decided to select the most relevant TRACE magazine articles from the last few years, and produce some new essays, analyses, and relevant first-person writings for this book, which should be read not literally or linearly but laterally as an honest, earnest attempt to decipher and understand a new process of humanist thinking. In our instinctive travels, we have found that human beings from seemingly opposed cultures are much more similar in behavior than the media propaganda would have you believe. Reading between the lines, some optimists will see in this book on transculturalism a new roadmap for peace.
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