The Fusion Class

From The TIMES...."Reflections on the First Decade of the 2000s"

THE FUSION CLASS: If identity politics defined earlier decades, identity straddling defined this one. The traditional brain drain became brain circulation as developing-world émigrés began to move back and forth between adopted and home countries. The United States elected president a biracial man whose present-day relatives speak Cantonese, French, German, Hebrew, Igbo, Indonesian, Luo and Swahili.

The writers who dominated prizes and imaginations were products, and chroniclers, of in-betweenness: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Orhan Pamuk.
The words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, channeled by Ms. Lahiri, became an anthem: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.”