Listening to Duke Ellington quote Marshall McLuhan, making the incredibly deep thinking of the cultural philosopher accessible to his audience is priceless. In “the whole world is going oriental” the Duke found inspiration to create some of the most advanced jazz fusion of the 60’s by unifying themes from around the world without concern for the remix of cultural patterns.
When McLuhan made the original statement he was talking about the process of westernization of the East and orientalizing of the West:
The entire Western world, McLuhan argues, is now turning inward upon itself—in the old Oriental pattern—while the Orient “has been increasingly engaged in an outer trip, aided by Western technology.
That was back in the 60’s. More recently we could argue a very similar process has been evolving when around 200 million migrants find a new home every year. In immigrant population and the south in the heart of the north I’ve documented some of the facts and figures of this process, but what interests me today are the methods that migrants use to cope with the sudden disorientation that results from trying to build a new way of live in an unknown city.
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