Today the world is characterized by global migration which is caused by crisis - or, due to the preceeding globalisation of economics and education, the chance to work or study in other countries.

This caused one of the main topics of literature and art of the 20th century to change:
The identity.
While in the 20th century most artists focused on identy in the sense of responsibillity, the polarity between the individual and the mass, or autonomy of the individual, the center of interest in the 21st century is the „cultural identity“.

But is there really something like „cultural“ or „national“ identity?

Following the concepts of existentialism and the theory of action, identity reveals itself only in the action. It is nothing that exists besides action like the system software of a computer which deals with changing content but remains itself unchanged.

Following Pierre Bordieu, identity is continiously created during action. It emerges from a style of acting, called „habitus“. So culture and cultural identity are nothing fixed, measureable or nameable. It is created by and exists only in acute acting.
Like the native american activist Jack D. Forbes said: „The religion of a man is not what he believes in, but what he is doing“.

Acting is always interacting. The individual perceives, arranges perception, gives meaning via conscious and subconscious processes and deduces actions. Thus it transfers the order of perception onto the things in its environment. This order of things organizes space and the patterns of space vice versa induces the habitus.

But as the habitus is just a style of action, it does not determine each action. The individual acts in an individual way only on the basis of habitus. Thus the patterns of action and the cultural contexts are continiously recreated and therefore change slowly.

If the individual is forced to leave its familiar environment to live in exile, the identity, according to the theory of action, cannot remain unchanged.