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July 26, 2024. Aya Nakamura, France’s most streamed artist and daughter of Malian immigrants, took the stage at the Paris Olympic opening ceremony. Behind her stood the Garde Républicaine, a living emblem of French statehood and Napoleonic legacy. Aya performed her signature Afrobeats sound, standing in harmony with one of France’s oldest institutions. A surreal sight. A moment where two Frances—one ancient, one emergent—shared the same rhythm.
I’ll admit it: I teared up.
That performance reminded me—Black, half-French, half-Senegalese—of something I’d almost forgotten: that culture keeps moving, even when the world feels stuck. That blending is still happening, even as borders close. It made me feel something I hadn’t felt in months.
Hope.
I had started to lose hope in a future of openness and diversity, a future I once took for granted. Not in some grand, dramatic way. But slowly, quietly. The world is consumed by polarization and division, blanketed by what The New York Times describes as "fortress nationalism." Fortress Europe. Fortress America. Fortress everywhere. A world where each culture is treated like a closed system under siege, defined by rules about who can enter, who belongs, and who gets to stay.
And I know I’m not alone. Across the world, more and more people are starting to absorb a distorted picture of reality—one where cultures are seen as fragile, preserved in silos, and shielded from outside influence. One where hybridity is treated as a threat, and difference as something to be managed, not embraced.
But what if that version isn’t true? What if the act of culture is telling us something entirely different?
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Fusion Moves Freely, Even Now.
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While politicians build walls to keep foreign cultures out, those same cultures enter our homes faster than ever before.
Take music. Bad Bunny sings proudly in Spanish, channeling his Puerto Rican heritage in his album DtMF, and claims the five most-streamed songs on Spotify in 2025. In recent weeks, he’s continued to challenge borders, flying the Puerto Rican flag on the Statue of Liberty in a pro-immigrant video released on 4th of July. But it’s not just Bad Bunny. Afrobeats hit 15 billion streams last year. Tyla, a South African artist, won the inaugural Best African Music Performance Grammy for her song “Water.” Gims, a French-Congolese artist, topped the charts in Georgia with a song that melds Afrobeats and Georgian classic sounds.
Language is another wall breaker. In France, youth slang weaves together Arabic, African, and Romani roots. Words like cheh, goumin, and pélo form a living archive of postcolonial history and are used everywhere. In the U.S., 46% of Gen Xers say they want to learn a new language, while official policies shy away from multilingual signage. Duolingo’s success—130.2 million monthly active users—is a testament to our hunger to connect through language.
In the broader world of entertainment, Japanese Anime now outpaces the NFL in popularity among Gen Z in the U.S., with 42% tuning in weekly. In food, Mexican-Indian fusion food, originally born out of restrictive immigration policies, is now celebrated in The New York Times.
Demographically, the shift is just as real: Millennials, the most diverse generation in U.S. history, are reshaping relationship norms—today, 1 in 5 new marriages are interracial.
The fortresses can’t hold. Culture is too vibrant and dynamic to be trapped between mental walls; it seeps through every crack, eroding the stone bricks of obstruction.
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Culture Was Always A Remix.
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But here's what the fortress-builders miss: fusion isn't a modern disruption. It's culture's natural state.
The very word culture comes from colere, the Latin word for cultivation: to grow something, to care for it, to let it evolve.
Franz Boas, one of the fathers of cultural anthropology, reminded us that cultures don’t evolve in isolation but are highly mobile, developing through contact and exchange. Fusion is not a bug in the system. It is the system itself. Just as land is enriched by new seeds and methods, cultures are enriched by new influences and exchanges.
Even the cultural markers we consider “authentic” today are a result of exchange and fusion. Take wax print cloth, for example—it is often described as “traditionally African.” But it originated from Indonesian batik, which was industrialized and traded by the Dutch before being adopted, remixed, and redefined by Africans. That’s how culture works: always in motion, always blending.
The fortress mindset isn't just wrong—it's ahistorical. Every culture we celebrate today is already a remix. The only question is whether we'll acknowledge this reality or pretend it doesn't exist.
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What People Do. Not What Politics Say.
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This is more than a cultural observation. It’s a strategic fork in the road for brands. You can follow the political noise, shake hands with power, stay quiet to avoid risk, align with fear. But culture isn’t waiting. People are already mixing, blending, and creating across the very lines that politics try to redraw.
So, following politics? It’s not just cautious. It’s irrelevant. But brands that follow and act on how culture actually behaves are building deeper resonance and winning.
Nike has done this for years. Its Hijab Product Playbook, drawn up in collaboration with Muslim athletes, made a strong statement and solved a real barrier to inclusion. Similarly, its Nigerian soccer jerseys have become global icons of cultural pride and the holy grail of modern kit releases.
McDonald’s did it more recently with “Sweet Connections,” an AI-powered platform that helped immigrant families bridge generational language gaps.
These brands championed the fusion of culture. And in turn, culture championed them.
It’s not without difficulty: choosing culture over politics requires bravery. But it also creates lasting resonance—something no short-term narrative can buy. Start by listening to your audience. What they say. What they stream. What they remix.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be the next big test. A tournament spanning three host countries (the U.S., Mexico, and Canada), a myriad of cultural forces, and millions of global eyes. Built to be a cultural canvas and designed to stretch across borders, languages, and identities, its brand already reflects this multiness. It invites every culture in, not just as spectators but as co-authors.
The stage is set. Will brands join the festival or retreat into the fortress?
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Walls Don’t Grow Anything.
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I want to be clear: Aya’s performance didn’t end racism on the Pont des Arts. But she reminded us that culture has its own rhythm, one that resists containment, one that moves even when politics stall. We’re not powerless spectators of fortress-building. We’re all cultivators. Of taste, of connection, and of what the future looks like.
The culture, our cultures, is already mixing, growing, and evolving. The only decision to make is whether we protect that process or retreat from it.
As brand leaders, let’s not be defenders of walls. Let’s be gardeners in a field, continuing to cultivate.
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Edouard N’Diaye is a Senior Lead Strategist at SYLVAIN, based in New York. He’s led brand strategy for Amazon, Nike, Electronic Arts, and American Express. Born in France to a French mother and Senegalese father, he sees culture the way he hears it in French Afrobeats and rap: layered, mixed, and built from everything that came before.
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Progress Report is a bi-weekly newsletter of business considerations, cultural conversations, and fun recommendations from around the world and web.
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