“The history of all cultures is one of cultural borrowing.”

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“We are all two, each of us, at least two – it is only a matter of knowing it!”

Nancy Huston, Nord perdu

“Everyone comes from somewhere else; each carries within himself or herself the story of a rupture, of wandering, of conflicts – but also the possibility of an East and a West reunited.”

Philippe Baldini, Passage

Can we still today speak of culture as an autonomous whole? Can we still juxtapose cultures or place them back to back, as if they were separate, fixed and impermeable entities?

Culture is a reality that forms and transforms itself-particularly in immigrant countries, where people from around the world meet on a daily basis, where exchanges and influences multiply.

As we face the phenomena of globalization, migrations and new communication technologies, "mixed space" becomes a fact; it is thus necessary that we recognize it and that we multiply the places where it can be named.

Far more than a passing fad in popular music and culture, this hybridity is a choice-as much ethical as aesthetic-that goes beyond folklorizing cultures, beyond juxtaposing memories, to favour the encounter between peoples and cultures. It is a choice that opens the way to a creative interculturalism, which would see each one of us as a culturally-mixed human being in constant evolution.


“Mélange [...] is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.”

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

“[...] each of us has already lived, even if to unequal degrees, this meeting of cultures within the self: we are all interrelated.”

Tzetan Todorov, L’Homme dépaysé

“ [...] to exile oneself is that: to force change. In oneself and in the other! ”

Abla Farhoud, Apatride

“I am the connections that I weave.”

African proverb

“[...] no matter our origins, we are all interrelated beings.”

Robert Lepage, Métissage exhibition,
Musée de la civilisation in Québec

“What makes me myself and not someone else, is that I am [...] at the edge of two countries, of two or three languages, of several cultural traditions. That is my identity...”

Amin Maalouf, Les Identités meurtrières