Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy magazine.

IAN BURUMA

I’ve always been interested in, and in some ways, all the books I’ve written revolve around this same subject, which is how people imagine themselves. What they think they are. How they imagine their identities, and so on. That is probably true of all writers. It has an autobiographical background, in that, I grew up in Holland, but my mother was not Dutch. She was British, and so I was always very aware ever since I was a child of different national characteristics, of different ways of behaving, even speaking different languages. We spoke several languages at home. So you become very attuned to that, so most of my writing, whether it’s about Japan, China, or Europe, is really about that question of what people think they are, how they imagine themselves to be.

I think it’s a sign of people drawing inwards more and more. That goes for the Right Wing populists and White Supremacists just as much. They’re also drawing the wagons around what they see as their identity, and I think that’s exactly not the way to go.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).