A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies.

几周前，我坐在电影院里，脸上泛起笑容。《实习生》(The Intern)里的安妮·海瑟薇(Anne Hathaway)穿着客用浴袍坐在酒店床上，正喝着茶，吃一罐贵得离谱的坚果，显得六神无主。如果跟在家带孩子的无私甜心丈夫离婚会有什么后果？还能找到这么一个人吗？如果找不到，是不是得孤独终老了——就这么一个人度过余生。而她的婚姻问题，难道不正是作为一个成功女商人的下场吗——因为人在但心不在？《实习生》是南希·迈耶斯(Nancy Meyers)的电影，像这种可爱的职业女性崩溃戏，在她的浪漫喜剧中就如同埃迪·范·海伦(Eddie Van Halen guitar)的吉他华彩段落。

But what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway. After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie Larson. It’s not Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. It’s someone not far from the last person who comes to mind when you think ‘‘soul-baring bestie.’’ It’s Robert freaking De Niro, portrayer of psychos, savages and grouches no more.

然而这场戏最有意思的地方——让我发笑的地方——是在床另一头那个人的反应。听着她的飙泪吐槽，这人终于受不了了：你凭什么怪自己，怪你的事业！事实上，此人是用这么一句话打断她的：“我们两个人里，女性主义的居然是我，我可不想这样……”之所以不想，是因为在床另一头的那个人不是朱迪·格里尔(Judy Greer)或布莉·拉尔森(Brie Larson)。不是梅丽尔·斯特里普(Meryl Streep)或苏珊·萨兰登(Susan Sarandon)。你无论如何也想不到让这个人来担负“有话直说的闺蜜”角色。是罗伯特·德尼罗(Robert De Niro)啊妈妈，那个整天演疯子、狂徒和暴脾气的家伙。

On that bed with Hathaway, as her 70-year-old intern, he’s not Travis Bickle or the human wall of intolerance from those Focker movies. He’s Lena Dunham. The attentiveness and stern feminism coming out of his mouth are where the comedy is. And while it’s perfectly obvious what Meyers is doing to De Niro — girlfriending him — that doesn’t make the overhaul any less effective. The whole movie is about the subtle and obvious ways in which men have been overly sensitized and women made self-estranged through breadwinning. It’s both a plaint against the present and a pining for the past, but also an acceptance that we are where we are.

作为一个70高龄的实习生和海瑟薇在一张床上的他，不是Travis Bickle（《的士司机》），也不是《拜见岳父大人》里那堵油盐不进的人肉墙壁。他是莉娜·杜汉姆(Lena Dunham)。他那一副倾听者的样子，嘴里吐出坚定的女性主义言论，正是本片的笑点所在。迈耶斯把他塑造成闺蜜的意图十分明显，但这并没有丝毫减弱这个角色的颠覆效果。整部影片就是要微妙而明显地表现男性的过度敏感，以及女人在成为家庭经济来源后的自我疏离。它既是对当下的哀叹，也是对往昔的怀恋，同时又有一种对现状的承认。

And where are we? On one hand: in another of Nancy Meyers’s bourgeois pornographies. On the other: in the midst of a great cultural identity migration. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. If Meyers is clued into this confusion, then you know it really has gone far, wide and middlebrow. We can see it in the instantly beloved hit ‘‘Transparent,’’ about a family whose patriarch becomes a trans woman whose kids call her Moppa, or in the time we’ve spent this year in televised proximity to Caitlyn Jenner, or in the browning of America’s white founding fathers in the Broadway musical ‘‘Hamilton,’’ or in the proliferating clones that Tatiana Maslany plays on ‘‘Orphan Black,’’ which mock the idea of a true or even original self, or in Amy Schumer's comedic feminism, which reconsiders gender confusion: Do uncouthness, detachment and promiscuity make her a slut, or a man?

那么我们的现状是什么？一方面：我们身在南希·迈耶斯的又一部布尔乔亚色情片中。另一方面：我们正经历一场文化身份认同大迁徙。性别角色正在合并。种族在蜕变。过去大概六年里，尤其是2015年，我们看到我们就是一群跨性别、多性-兼性-全性恋者。如今连迈耶斯都插手来理这一团乱麻，你就知道它已经扩散到每一个角落了。我们可以在迅速蹿红的《透明家庭》(Transparent)里看到这一点，该剧讲了一个家族的族长成了一个跨性女，大家都管她叫“妈爸”；或者是今年在电视上频频露面的凯特琳·詹纳(Caitlyn Jenner)；或者百老汇音乐剧《汉密尔顿》(Hamilton)中棕色皮肤的美国白人开国元勋；或者《黑色孤儿》(Orphan Black)中塔提阿娜·玛斯拉尼(Tatiana Maslany)饰演的众多克隆人，对真实甚或原始自我的概念进行了嘲弄；或艾米·舒默尔(Amy Schumer)的喜剧女性主义对性别困惑的重新思考：她的粗野、超然和放荡，让她成了一个荡妇，还是一个男人？

We can see it in the recently departed half-hour sketch comedy ‘‘Key & Peele,’’ which took race as a construct that could be reshuffled and remixed until it seemed to lose its meaning. The sitcom ‘‘Black-ish’’ likewise makes weekly farcical discourse out of how much black identity has warped — and how much it hasn’t — over 50 years and across three generations. ‘‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’’ turns selfhood into a circus, introducing us to a lower-middle-class Native American teenager who eventually succeeds at becoming a rich white lady, and to other characters who try out new selves every 10 minutes, as if they’re auditioning for ‘‘Snapchat: The Musical.’’ Last month, Ryan Adams released a remake of Taylor Swift’s album ‘‘1989,’’ song for song, as a rock record that combines a male voice with a perspective that still sounds like a woman’s, like Lindsey Buckingham trying on Stevie Nicks’s clothes. Dancing on the fringes of mainstream pop are androgynous black men like Le1f, Stromae and Shamir.

从最近完结的《Key & Peele》中也可以看到，这部半小时小品喜剧集把种族当成了一种构造，可以打乱、重混，直到失去其本身的含义。同样，情景喜剧《喜新不厌旧》(Black-ish)也用每周一集的滑稽言语，述说跨越50多年、三个世代的黑人身份出现了哪些的扭曲——又有哪些始终未曾改变。《我本坚强》(Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt)将自我变成了一个马戏团，向我们呈现了一个最终如愿以偿成为富有白人女性的中低阶层美国土著少女，其他的人物也是每隔10分钟换一个新自我的类型，仿佛他们在给一个叫Snapchat的音乐剧试镜。上个月，瑞恩·亚当斯(Ryan Adams)发布了泰勒·斯威夫特(Taylor Swift)专辑《1989》的翻唱版，把所有歌曲都改成了男声摇滚乐，但听起来依然像一个女人在唱歌，就像林赛·巴金汉姆(Lindsey Buckingham)穿上了史蒂薇·尼克斯(Stevie Nicks)的衣服。还有游走于主流流行乐边缘的半男半女黑人男性Le1f、Stromae和Shamir。

What started this flux? For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.

这股洪流从何而来？过去十多年里，我们的手边有了电子游戏和社交媒体平台这样的个人科技，可以帮助我们创造别样的或辅助的表象人格。此外，这些年我们每天都被那些“改头换面”类节目吸引着，这种节目会找一组专家来改造你的个人形象、你的家、你的身体、你的配偶。电视上还有最佳时装设计、身体绘画、易装皇后的竞赛。其中某些化妆易容的形式，现在已经见怪不怪——对此也有专门的电视节目去呈现。我们的重新发明有一种欢快和释放的感觉——这与某种本性中的美式乐观主义息息相关。千百年来女人靠着男人生活，各种族比邻而居，而现在——尽管只是名义上——我们坚守的性别和种族边界终于开始崩塌。我们能感到一种流动与包容性，二元论正在被瓦解。我们正成为彼此。是的，我们本就是彼此。但现在不是。

In June, the story of a woman named Rachel Dolezal began its viral spread through the news. She had recently been appointed president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. She had been married to a black man, had two black sons and was, by most accounts, a black woman. Her white biological parents begged to differ. The ensuing scandal resurrected questions about the nature of identity — what compelled Dolezal to darken her skin, perm her hair and pass in reverse? She might not have been biologically black, but she seemed well past feeling spiritually white.

6月，一个名叫蕾切尔·多尔扎尔(Rachel Dolezal)的女人频频见诸报端。她前不久被任命为有色人种协进会(NAACP)华盛顿州斯波坎市分会主席。她和一个黑人男性结了婚，有两个黑人儿子，她本人被大多数人认为是一名黑人女性。但她的两位白人生身父母提出了异议。随之而来的丑闻再次引发了有关身份本质的争论——是什么促使多尔扎尔加深自己的肤色，烫卷发，进行反向种族冒充呢？也许她生理上不是黑人，但精神上似乎早已不觉得自己白。

Some people called her ‘‘transracial.’’ Others found insult in her masquerade, particularly when the country’s attention was being drawn, day after day, to how dangerous it can be to have black skin. The identities of the black men and women killed by white police officers and civilians, under an assortment of violent circumstances, remain fixed.

有人称她为“跨种族”(transracial)。有人觉得她的伪装是种侮辱，尤其想到这个国家正日复一日地注意到，一身黑皮肤会带来怎样的危险。黑人男女被白人警察和平民在各种各样的暴力情境下打死，这样的身份认同始终牢不可破。

But there was something oddly compelling about Dolezal, too. She represented — dementedly but also earnestly — a longing to transcend our historical past and racialized present. This is a country founded on independence and yet comfortable with racial domination, a country that has forever been trying to legislate the lines between whiteness and nonwhiteness, between borrowing and genocidal theft. We’ve wanted to think we’re better than a history we can’t seem to stop repeating. Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her.

但在多尔扎尔的身上却又有一种奇怪的吸引力。她用一种疯狂而又恳切的方式，表达了超越我们的历史过往和种族化当下的渴望。这个国家在独立中诞生，却可以对种族霸权心安理得，这个国家一直费尽心机通过法律明确白与非白、借用与灭族盗取的区分。虽然总是无法避免重复历史，但我们曾认为自己没有看上去那么糟。多尔扎尔毅然决然地认定自己是个黑人，说明了她对种族融合有何等的信心：仿佛她已经抢先到达了某个未来世界。

It wasn’t so long ago that many Americans felt they were living in that future. Barack Obama’s election was the dynamite that broke open the country. It was a moment. It was the moment. Obama was biological proof of some kind of progress — the product of an interracial relationship, the kind that was outlawed in some states as recently as 1967 but was normalized. He seemed to absolve us of original sin and take us past this stupid, dangerous race stuff. What if suddenly anything was possible? What if we could be and do whatever and whoever we wanted? In that moment, the country was changing. We were changing.

这种置身未来的感觉，美国人不久前刚刚领略过。贝拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)的当选将这个国家炸得四分五裂。那是一个瞬间。无与伦比的瞬间。奥巴马为某种进步提供了生理证据——他是一个跨种族关系的产物，而就在1967年，这样的产物在某些州还是非法的，只是被常态化了。他似乎赦免了我们的原罪，让我们可以把那些愚蠢而危险的种族问题抛诸脑后。要是突然之间一切皆有可能了呢？我们可以做任何事、成为任何人？那一刻，这个国家变了。我们变了。

Before Obama ran for president, when we tended to talk about racial identity, we did so as the defense of a settlement. Black was understood to be black, nontransferably. Negro intellectuals — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and James Baldwin, for starters — debated strategies for equality and tolerance. Some of them asserted that to be black was also to be American, even if America begged to differ. For most of those many decades, blackness stood in opposition to whiteness, which folded its arms and said that was black people’s problem. But Obama became everybody’s problem. He was black. He was white. He was hope. He was apocalypse. And he brought a lot of anxiety into weird relief. We had never really had a white president until we had a black one.

在奥巴马参选总统之前，每当试图展开种族身份的讨论，我们总是会为一种和解做辩护。我们懂得，黑人是黑人，是不可转换的。以拉尔夫·埃里森(Ralph Ellison)、阿尔伯特·穆瑞(Albert Murray)、詹姆斯·鲍德温(James Baldwin)为首的黑人知识分子曾探讨争取平等和宽容的战略。其中一些人提出黑人也是美国人的主张，尽管美利坚不以为然。在那几十年间，黑白基本上是保持对立的，白人一方双臂抱胸，说那是黑人的问题。但奥巴马成了所有人的问题。他是黑人。他是白人。他是希望。他是启示。他把许多的焦虑变成了奇怪的解脱。在有黑人总统之前，我们没有过真正的白人总统。

This radical hope, triggered by Obama, ushered in a period of bi- and transracial art — art that probed the possibility that we really had transcended race, but also ridiculed this hope with an acid humor. During Obama's past year in office, those works of art have taken on an even darker, more troubled tone as we keep looking around and seeing how little has really changed.

这种被奥巴马触发的根本希望，开创了一个双种族和跨种族艺术时期——其间的创作探究了我们从真正意义上超越种族的可能性，同时又用尖酸的幽默嘲弄了希望本身。在奥巴马过去一年的执政里，这类艺术作品开始有了一种更阴暗、不安的气息，因为我们环顾四周，发现其实没有什么真正的改变。

When the Dolezal story broke, I was partway through Nell Zink’s ‘‘Mislaid,’’ one of the four new satirical novels of race I read this year — Jess Row’s ‘‘Your Face in Mine,’’ Paul Beatty’s ‘‘The Sellout’’ and Mat Johnson’s ‘‘Loving Day’’ were the others. (I also read Fran Ross’s long-lost, recently reissued ‘‘Oreo.’’) But Zink’s was the only one that felt like an energy reading of Dolezal. Zink’s white heroine, Peggy, has run off with her daughter, Mireille, and decided to take the birth certificate of a dead black girl named Karen Brown and use it for Mireille, while changing her own name to Meg.

多尔扎尔事件刚曝光时，我正在看奈尔·津克(Nell Zink)的《遗失》(Mislaid)，那是我这一年看的四本新出版的种族讽刺小说之一——其他几本是耶斯·罗(Jess Row)的《我脸中的你的脸》(Your Face in Mine)、保罗·比蒂(Paul Beatty)的《出卖》(The Sellout)和马特·约翰逊(Mat Johnson)的《洛文日》(Loving Day)（我还看了弗兰·罗斯[Fran Ross]那本被遗忘多年、新近再版的《奥利奥》[Oreo]）。但只有津克的书给我感觉像一本多尔扎尔的能量读物。津克的白人女主人公佩姬带着女儿梅瑞尔离家出走，并拿了一个名叫凯伦·布朗的已故黑人女孩的出生证，作为梅瑞尔的身份证明，同时把自己的名字改成了梅格。

The next year, Karen was 4 years old going on 5 and still blond. Nonetheless registering her for first grade as a black 6-year-old was easy as pie.

第二年，凯伦刚四岁多、快五岁，而且是一头金发。但她还是轻而易举地以一个六岁黑人孩子的身份入学，开始上一年级。

Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue-green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P.

可能只有南方人才能理解金发黑人是怎么回事。弗吉尼亚的定居先于蓄奴，因此是很多元的。那里有棕褐色皮肤、浅褐色眼睛的黑人。赤褐色头发、肤色似黄油、眼睛是深蓝绿色的黑人。跟近年的某任NAACP主席相似的金发、蓝眼睛黑人。