[a ‘global soul’ might be] a person who had grown up in many cultures all at once – and so lived in the cracks between them […]. She might have a name that gave away nothing about her nationality […], and she might have a porous sense of self that changed with her location.
Iyer, 2000, 18
Novelist Pico Iyer’s definition of “transculturality” masterfully identifies the complexity and fluidity of the very essence of transculturality in today’s modern world of increasing mobility across national borders and ethic contexts. Most human’s are by nature adaptive and in a world that consumes cultural production at increasingly high speeds due to the proliferation of technological advancements in communication platforms, creatively rearranging and juxtaposing cultural components to create new genres of cultural productions. This is evident across all forms of the arts, from music to performance to the visual arts – for many artists transculturality “designates a chameleonic disposition for strategically rearranging one’s sense of cultural identity by drawing from an expanded repertoire – according to the moment context or location” (Benessaieh, 2010, p 28).
A great example of this is the music of French singer and child of the world (or #ThirdCultureKid), Jeanne Galice, aka, Jain. Born in Toulouse, France in 1992, as a result of her father’s employment, Jain spent her early years in France, Dubai, the Pointe-Noire, in Congo-Brazzaville, and finally Abu Dhabi where she she picked up Derbuka, an Arabic style of percussion. During her time in the Congo where she learned musical programming, Jain developed an interest in danceable melodies that are evident in her single Makeba, the song she wrote for South African civil rights activist Miriam Makeba.
Jain cultural production and processes exemplify “the seduction of establishing a sense of understanding that may reduce the distance from what we perceive as difference” rather than viewing “cultural encounters with otherness as a source of anxiety or estrangement” (Benessaieh, 2010, p 30).