The Crisis of Performative Kitsch

In October 2008, Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association—he would be appointed minister of tourism by Saad Hariri the next year—made the following statement: “It is not enough they [Israelis] are stealing our land. They are also stealing our civilization and our cuisine. Hummus and tabouleh belong to the Lebanese people the same way that Feta cheese belongs to the Greeks. It is unfair that hummus should be known across the world as a kosher Israeli or Greek dish. Hummus and tabouleh are Lebanese specialties and must be registered as such.”

Subsequently, a bill was solemnly drafted by the Lebanese parliament to protect hummus from cultural appropriation. The European Union was called on to support it. Then the Palestinians entered the debate, claiming that hummus in fact belonged to them, not the Lebanese—and even less so, of course, to the Israelis. Abboud promptly answered: “Hummus might be debatable, in any case we will be happy if the Palestinians win … But nobody can even discuss whether tabouleh or baba ghannouj are Lebanese.”

In his new book, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, the French sociologist Olivier Roy tells the story of “hummus-gate” and reminds us that “accusations of cultural appropriation are in fact founded in a moral judgment: The plight of the dominated is disregarded, and the product of their labor, often exploited, has been stolen … The logic behind this form of taxonomy is that people are only entitled to speak about their own culture, in other words about themselves.”

Roy ridicules a number of other recent incidents that compete with the Lebanese hummus drama for sheer silliness: British Labour MP Dawn Butler, of Jamaican origin, accusing chef Jamie Oliver of cultural appropriation in 2018 for marketing a culinary product as “jerk rice”; Gucci accused of the same for selling a Sikh-style turban at a price of over 700 euros; the singer Adele, who caused outrage in 2021 for wearing her hair in Bantu knots and wearing a Jamaican flag top; and so on. It is a list, as Roy rightly notes, that “looks a lot like the UNESCO inventory of intangible heritage.” Roy’s point is that the gap between the dour seriousness of those who take offense at such violations of cultural roots and national and personal identities, and the obvious harmlessness of the actual offenses (the “authenticity” of a plate of hummus), can no longer even be laughed at. Everything is existential and deadly serious; everything is “cultural” and a matter of honor. This is the world of “the narcissism of small differences,” as Freud once called it—adding that it almost invariably leads to racism, antisemitism, and misogyny.

But how did it become so ubiquitous? Roy, an intellectual celebrity in France and one of the country’s foremost thinkers on the Muslim world, has an answer, and it’s a very suggestive one: Globalization is not creating a universal culture, as almost everyone assumed it would, but a universal erosion of all cultures. Under the influence of globalization, Roy argues, even the word “culture” tends to become elusive, meaning both everything and increasingly nothing at all.

A political scientist and philosopher by trade, Roy defines “culture” both anthropologically—as the set of beliefs, values, and manners that he calls “the imaginary,” implicitly understood by every member of a group that defines itself by it—and as an artistic canon—the works of art born out of a group’s imaginaries but universal in scope and purpose. In Roy’s view, these two aspects of what we mean by culture are historically linked to the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century, particularly in the West. But they are not without paradoxes: “High culture professes to be a monument to civilization, in other words demonstrating the greatness of the human spirit wherever it may originate,” he writes, “whereas it is underpinned by a nation building project, in the spirit of the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648, which established the functions of national sovereignty for European states.”

That globalization has exacerbated this paradox is only part of the current problem. Roy sees what we call assimilation as a two-step process: The first, which he calls “deculturation,” is the moment when a group sees its culture destroyed by another through the conquest of soft power. The second, “acculturation,” is the dynamic in which that same group assimilates at least partly into the new, dominant culture, while also changing along the way—retaining some aspects of the old culture but ultimately transforming beyond recognition. For instance, says Roy, “Gallic society and its language have disappeared, but Gallic populations blended into a new Roman (and hardly Gallic) ensemble.” Roy focuses on the examples of the Inuit and American Indians to demonstrate how slow and painful that transformation can be, especially when, as he says, “the opportunities for accessing the dominant culture are blocked” by racism and segregation, leaving the dominated group to mourn its old, futureless culture. Roy does not mention them, but the rise of the secular Jewish Yiddishkeit in Europe in the 19th century, with its assimilation into the urban life of the continent, and the paradoxes and contradictions experienced by African Americans in the United States during and after the Civil Rights Movement, are additional examples of this protean process through which culture, and history, are made.

Whether a group assimilates fully, partially, or not at all, there has always been at least a dominant culture of reference for the group to either join or rebel against. But the mere existence of a clearly defined culture, according to Roy, is precisely what globalization has eroded. The result is that today, even members of the theoretically dominant culture instead feel “dominated,” threatened, and no longer in possession of their cultural bearings. In India, for instance, Hindus form the vast majority of the population and are culturally and politically hegemonic, but their cultural insecurity is such that they have felt the need to propel the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi to power in 2014 and to keep him there. According to Roy, a similar fear drove white Americans to support Donald Trump in 2016, Italians into the arms of Giorgia Meloni, the French middle-class toward Marine Le Pen, and the French defenders of laicité to ban the Muslim veil in public offices and high schools.

To account for this fear of cultural domination even among members of dominant cultural groups, Roy blames four factors: the “hedonist,” “individualist” revolution of 1968 (its sexual aspect in particular); the neoliberal financial globalization of the 1980s (which he says put the last nail in the coffin of “traditional values”); the invention and spread of the internet; and the melting away of physical borders after the end of the Cold War.

The result, says Roy, is that there is no longer any center of gravity from which a legitimate, enviable, or universal model of culture can spread. The United States played that part between 1945 and the end of the 1990s, but ever since, what was generally assumed to be a global process of “westernization” turned out instead to be a process of de-westernization—i.e., of the creation of a void where Western culture was once globally dominant. Acculturation, says Roy, is therefore no longer possible—acculturation to what? If “modernity” has turned into a provincial, empty, permanent present, as Roy believes, then we are all like the Inuit, wandering among the shambles of old histories and local cultures.

“Globalized culture,” Roy expounds, “is by definition a kitsch culture”: “Athena in manga, the feudal knight against the Buddhist Karateka, the Middle Ages in science fiction, and on scraps of places, period and historical figures that are all … unmoored, and that can ‘speak’ to everyone.” One can only imagine what he made of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. But Roy’s serious point is that the disappearance of culture, which is something that can be shared, necessitates the elevation of “identity,” which cannot, as the central fact of group and individual life. Complex national or transnational histories are being replaced by cultural markers removed from their contexts, extracted from now-incomprehensible historical texture, and recoded as metonymy for the real thing, which has vanished. Thus you get hummus for the Lebanese, hair knots for the Bantu, jerk rice for the Jamaicans—and, I would add, kaffiyeh for the Palestinians—all of which Roy refers to as folklorèmes.

The old cosmopolitan’s dream, in which one could feel truly at home everywhere, has turned into a reality in which one feels homeless more or less everywhere. In a world where nothing is self-evident, everything becomes performative: “I am what the code indicates that I am,” as Roy brilliantly writes. The more advanced process of de-historicization at work in China—where an inclusive, pseudo-Confucian narrative serves to cover an ultrapowerful normative system of social control, while the traditional culture is destroyed at amazing speeds—gives an indication of where all this is going.

There is no question that The Crisis of Culture addresses one of the most fundamental issues of the 21st century. It is a thin volume, as frequently ingenious and full of intuition as it is incomplete, and sometimes frustratingly sketchy. The critical process by which the polyglot and cosmopolitan culture of the European aristocrats of the 17th and 18th centuries gave way to different national cultures at the turn of the 19th, for example, is dispensed with in barely two paragraphs; the cosmopolitan Jewry that replaced it until the Shoah is missing entirely. In general, specific historical considerations are barely treated at all, with pride of place given instead to intellectual speculation. In this sense, The Crisis of Culture could not be more arrogantly French. Or, to put it perhaps more accurately, more Baudrillardian.

Although discreet, the subjectivity undergirding the book is unmistakable. Roy himself acknowledges it when he writes about his own experience in Afghanistan, where he first went in 1969 at the age of 19, and returned to in 1980 as a young historian appointed to the French National Center for Scientific Research, during which he fought with the mujahedeen against the Red Army in a unit the Afghans called “the foreigners’ movement,” composed of volunteers from all over the world (including Osama bin Laden, whom he did not meet). By his own admission, the most fascinating episode of Roy’s long journey remains his flight from the country to Pakistan disguised as an Afghan peasant, with his then-wife hidden under a burqa, to escape border controls. The experience was so profound that as late as 2017, Roy was still referring to it as “an initiation” (to what remains unclear), “a symbiotic moment, a physical mutation.”

For Roy, this was the beginning of a lifelong meditation on the destruction of traditional cultures and religions, which he’s written about in Afghanistan, Islam and Political Modernity, Globalized Islam, Holy Ignorance, and Is Europe Christian?, among other books. Today, Roy is known in France as the opposite number of Gilles Kepel, the country’s other great “Islamologist,” whose writings on the subject haven’t been as brutally contradicted by reality in recent years as Roy’s have. Roy is the kind of man who, in 2012, three days after the murder of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, and before any investigation into the killings had even begun, rushed out an op-ed in The New York Times urging to readers that the killer, Mohamed Merah, “was not known for his piety: He did not belong to any radical group or even to a local Islamic movement,” and that he was just “a petty delinquent, psychologically fragile.” In advising the French government on matters of Islamic communities for decades, Roy has always denied that Islamist networks of influence and belief in the country have had any kind of significance, insisting instead that “jihadism is a nihilist and generational revolt” of the youth brought on by “modernity,” which has produced not a “radicalization of Islam” but an “Islamization of radicalism.”

Roy’s professional biography and prior work matter, because they both crop up from time and again in The Crisis of Culture. The whole intellectual scaffolding of the book, in fact, can sometimes appear as a defense of his career-making idea, which he has developed over decades, that Islamic terrorism has no relationship at all to religion as such, but instead is the result of the postmodern “codes” that have replaced it. There is, in other words, an implicit link between Roy’s contention that the traditional beliefs, values, and manners of “culture” no longer exist, and his longstanding claim that Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood have had no influence whatsoever on radicalized Islamic communities in France, and his advocacy for teaching what he sees as “true” Islam in order to prevent the radicalization of the youth.

Roy thus manages to restate in The Crisis of Culture, which was published in French in 2022, that “The trial relating to the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris ... began with the assumption that the perpetrators came from a Salafist ecosystem comprising in this case the town of Molenbeek, Belgium, but it gradually became apparent that they had no ties with a hypothetical ‘Muslim community.’” But such a contention is the product of either willful blindness or simple disinformation, because the investigations and trials that followed the 2015 attacks amply demonstrated the precise opposite. We know beyond any doubt now that Merah, for example, was trained by a Salafist group whose two main figures, the Clain brothers—who spent years between Molenbeek and Toulouse disseminating Islamist propaganda provided by a then-Saudi-backed Islamic center, and who ended up in Syria with ISIS—claimed responsibility for the Nov. 13 Bataclan attack that killed 130 people. Seven years on, what remained “hypothetical” about that?

Perhaps it is because in 50 years he has never mastered either Arabic, Dari, Pashto, or Farsi that Roy has clung to an essentially existential vision of things, too expansive to be contradicted by the individual facts of religiously inspired violent acts, like the Saudi, Qatari, and Iranian financial networks that have sustained periodic terror activity in France and elsewhere since the 1980s. Even if he is right that Islamic terrorism is just the “Islamization of radicalism,” it still would not explain how or why such nihilism has found strength and legitimacy among some radicalized groups and individuals more than others.

The Crisis of Culture is therefore best read as an insightful and often brilliant theoretical framework that can fall apart when applied to the specific human actions it is meant to explain. To understand why old systems and cultures have become pathologized, it does not suffice to claim that they have simply disappeared, or exist only as innocuous folklorème. They are still with us, even if only in the guise of radicalism—calling for performative action.