Multicultural States

Rethinking Difference and Identity

David Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134807970
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The idea of the nation is globally in crisis, but multiculturalism has often seemed to name a specifically national debate. Multicultural States challenges the national focus of these debates by investigating theories, policies and practices of cultural pluralism across eight countries with historical links in British colonialism: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Ireland and Britain.
This important book combines discussions of the principles of multiculturalism with studies of specific local histories and political conflicts. The contributors discuss:
* communalism and colonialism in India
* Irish sectarianism and postmodern identity politics
* ethnic nationalism in post-apartheid South Africa
* British multiculturalism as part of the heritage industry
* feminism and Australian republicanism.
Contributors: Ien Ang, David Attwell, Homi K. Bhabha, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Abena P. A. Busia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Terry Eagleton, John Frow, Henry A. Giroux, Ihab Hassan, Smaro Kamboureli, Maria Koundoura, Beryl Langer, Anne Maxwell, Meaghan Morris, Susan Mathieson and Jon Stratton

1

Introduction

David Bennett

‘Multiculturalism’ is fast following ‘postmodernism’ from the isolation ward of scare quotes into the graveyard of unusable, because overused, jargon. But if the word no longer emits an audible buzz in many of the circles in which it confidently moved and mixed a decade ago, the crises of cultural identity and authority, national self-confidence and democratic conscience, to which its promiscuous uses attested, show no signs of resolution. Indeed, as many of the policies instituted in its name since the 1970s – anti-discrimination and immigration legislation, ‘affirmative-action’ programmes in employment, education and cultural funding, policies of ethnic ‘reconciliation’ and indigenous ‘restitution’ – are now being reconsidered in the face of disillusion and ‘compassion fatigue’ across the political spectrum, the issues of social justice and cultural ‘survival’ debated under the rubric of ‘multiculturalism’ have taken on fresh political urgency.

While the scare quotes seem all but obligatory in the late 1990s, however, they represent more than the signs of embattlement, or the stigmata of multiculturalism’s guilt by association with ‘political correctness’, its presumed accomplice in the indiscretion of ‘politicising’ culture. Just as ‘feminism’ and ‘postmodernism’ were pluralised in the 1980s, as the obligation to take up positions on or within them multiplied the sites in which their meanings have been debated, so ‘multiculturalism’ has been pluralised in the 1990s. Victorian ethnographers constructed taxonomies of ‘race’, with more or less subtle discriminations of difference and degrees of ‘mongrelity’; cultural analysts now construct taxonomies of ‘multiculturalism’, distinguishing such species and hybrids as ‘conservative or corporate multiculturalism, liberal multiculturalism and left-liberal multiculturalism’, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’, ‘polycentric’ and ‘insurgent’ multiculturalisms.¹ Scaremongering aside, then, the quotation marks are a sign of contestation within the multicultural imaginary, not just from its margins. In the disparate domains in which the term has circulated during the past three decades – from political party manifestos to fashion advertising, from law, education, arts and healthcare administration to the rhetoric of ethnic group leaders and the academic discipline of cultural studies – ‘multiculturalism’ has served variously as code for assimilationism and cultural separatism; campus marxism and ethnic nationalism; transnational corporate marketing strategies and minority competition for state resources; radical democracy and cosmetic adjustments to the liberal-democratic status quo.

Multiculturalism in its various guises clearly signals a crisis in the definition of ‘nation’, but the self-conscious pluralising of the term has often been perceived as a local, intra-rather than international affair, perhaps not least in the USA, where many of the varietal names, if not the agendas they designate, first emerged.² Like contemporary ethno-nationalisms, however, multiculturalism is in many ways an epiphenomenon of globalisation, and since its coinage by a Canadian Royal Commission in 1965, the word itself has had a diasporic career, entering and inflecting numerous national debates about the politics of cultural difference, the ‘limits of tolerance’, and the future of the nation-state. This volume of essays is an attempt to cross, in the dual sense of traverse and contest, the national boundaries of some of these debates, participating in the decentring project that is one of the meanings of ‘multiculturalism’. ‘Culture’ itself is a diacritical rather than a substantive concept – whether used in the sense that made Goering reach for his revolver or in the ‘anthropologised’ sense assumed to be its currency in contemporary cultural studies. In Fredric Jameson’s words, culture ‘is not a “substance” or a phenomenon in its own right, it is an objective mirage that arises out of the relationship between at least two groups…. [N]o group “has” a culture all by itself: culture is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one.’³ Multicultural States approaches ‘multiculturalism’ in the same way, as no less relational, no more essential a concept than culture, articulating its ‘mirages’ across a range of national and institutional sites, with a view to identifying shared principles and problems in the ways that culturally diverse and divided societies are being represented today. The ‘states’ at issue in its tide are in part territorially defined. Contributors to this book contrast and interconnect current debates around policies and practices of cultural pluralism in eight national contexts with historical links in British colonialism: the USA, Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the no less dis-United Kingdom itself. All of them are de facto multicultural states, some of them de jure multiculturalist or biculturalist. The essays in this collection also emanate from the less territorially determinate ‘states’ that Homi Bhabha here calls ‘culture’s in between’. Many of the contributors are themselves ‘transnationals’, several of them ‘doubly migrated’ (to use Maria Koundoura’s self-description); and while some of the essays reflect explicitly on personal experiences of migration, all are written from ‘in-between’ positions of negotiation and translation – between academic and public ‘cultures’, local, national and international constituencies of various kinds.

The sense that such a multinational collection would be timely arose partly from a suspicion that the ‘centre–periphery’ model of cultural relations, now in disrepute in postcolonial and postmodern cultural studies, still characterises the unequal awareness of multiculturalist debates, both public and academic, in such self-nominated ‘centres’ as the USA and such ascribed ‘peripheries’ as Australia and New Zealand. In the logic of the panopticon, those on the ‘peripheries’ assume they know what the concerns of the ‘centre’ are, while the ‘centre’ itself has no real need to observe the ‘peripheries’ (except when there are rumbles of a break-out). Contributors to this book help to dispel this impression of the state of multiculturalist debates, by showing how mutually informed and diverse the perspectives on these debates can be in the different national as well as institutional sites it addresses.

The interplay of local and globalising perspectives in this book has both geopolitical and rhetorical aspects. Chapters that focus on the distinctive socio-historical conditions in which cultural pluralism has emerged on the political agendas of particular countries demonstrate both their national specificity and their implication in global processes and globalising discourses – processes of imperialism and colonialism, the politics of anti- and post-colonial nationalisms, the ‘grand narratives’ of enlightenment and political liberalism. Other chapters that argue their cases in ‘universalist’, abstract-theoretical terms also reveal the partiality and locality of their perspectives when read in this context. The gesture of weariness with which this Introduction began by treating the term ‘multiculturalism’, for example, can seem a rhetorical necessity, an expression of privilege, or a betrayal, depending on both where and who you are. Whether you are in Australia, say, where ‘multiculturalism’ has figured as part of the rhetoric of government for more than two decades before coming under virulent, public attack from a new brand of white populist in the late 1990s. Or in the USA, where multiculturalism is typically addressed as an oppositional, minority-driven demand for ‘recognition’ and social advancement for racialised groups, and where the political intensity of the disputes over its usage in education and the ‘culture wars’ has made it all but unusable by its erstwhile proponents. Or in Canada, where multiculturalism is a contested letter of the law. Or in Britain, where it became an all but dead letter during the decades of Thatcherite Conservatism. Or in South Africa, where constitutional processes for resolving inter-ethnic conflicts have been cast in a rhetoric of confession and ‘restorative justice’ rather than inter-cultural ‘tolerance’. Or in New Zealand, where state-administered biculturalism has been defended as a staging-post to multiculturalism. Or in India, where ‘multiculturalism’ has no grip on the national imaginary and ‘secularism’ is the charged name for ‘managing’ ethno-religious conflicts. How you interpret gestures of weariness toward ‘multiculturalism’ in these or any other national settings also depends on ‘who’ you are, and whether you are marked or self-identified as ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ where you happen to be at any moment. That any interest in using or ignoring, ironising or retiring the term will always be contingent and related, though not reducible, to one’s caste, colour, class, sexual or ethnic identifications should go without saying.

The approaches to ‘multicultural states’ taken in this collection, then, reflect many differences of position apart from those of national locale, but the ambivalence expressed in most of these essays toward any usage of ‘multiculturalism’ assumes a different complexion depending on whether the term is regarded as alien or integral to discourses of national identity, and whether it is interpreted as naming what have been called ‘top-down’ (state-sponsored) or ‘bottom-up’ (minority-led, oppositional) strategies for reinventing the nation.

The local–global interplay also has a rhetorical dimension. As readers will quickly discover, the book is as multivocal as it is multinational, and its voices range from the philosophical-theoretical to the autobiographical and anecdotal, from the historical to the polemical to the belle-lettristic. The voices of ‘theory’ are concentrated, but not confined, in Part I, ‘The Limits of Pluralism’, where contributors examine the limitations of liberal-pluralist models of multicultural society, the problems of value relativism they raise, and the positions from which cultural difference can be theorised as other than mere diversity or ‘happy pluralism’. The voices of historiography are concentrated but not confined in Part II, ‘Multiculturalism and the Nation: Histories, Policies, Practices’; essays in this section investigate the specific conditions of emergence (or non-emergence) of multiculturalist and biculturalist politics in different national contexts; the techniques of government and education that produce politically ‘representable’ ‘cultural’ and ‘ethnic’ identities; the kinds of agency ascribed to such identities; and the various faces of nationalism and the nation that are being lost or saved in the ‘multicultural wars’. The voices of autobiography are concentrated but not confined in Part III, ‘Positionings’, where contributors reflect on their own positioning by and toward discourses of multiculturalism in the various civic, political, intellectual and national contexts in which they negotiate their ‘hyphenated’ identifications – as feminist-republican-Australian, for example, or lesbian-Black-British, or Ghanaian-African-British-American, or migrant-national-cosmopolitan.

The Limits of Pluralism

Since multiculturalism emerged as a discourse of government in several British Commonwealth countries during the 1970s, opposition to it from the left has often been expressed as a rejection of its ‘culturalism’ and a commitment to more ‘fundamental’ categories of social analysis – class, race, gender – whose manifestly political dimensions multiculturalism is seen as obscuring, either more or less programmatically. In the globalised economy of fin-desiècle cultural consumerism, ‘culture’ is deemed a matter of choice as much as of inheritance, and thus as a potentially less oppressive, and hence less ‘politicising’, category of identification than colour or ethnicity, class or gender (the latter, however, being seen as more subject to ‘bending’ than race or ethnicity). The charge of ‘culturalism’ takes various forms, well represented in the chapters of this book. One of the most common is that state-managed multiculturalisms reify and exoticise alterity; addressing ethnic and racial difference as a question of ‘identity’ rather than of history and politics, they translate alterity as cultural diversity, treating difference (a relation) as an intrinsic property of ‘cultures’ and as a value (a socially ‘enriching’ one), to be ‘represented’ as such.

Liberal pluralism conceives of egalitarianism in terms of representation: the more inclusive (of non-whites, women, gays, minorities of various kinds) the membership of public institutions is, the more ‘representative’ such institutions will be, the more justly will they ‘reflect’ the constitutive interest-groups of society.⁴ Similarly in the institutions of education: the more inclusive the ‘canon’, the more ‘representative’ it will be of the cultures that are assumed to define social identities. This has been called the ‘additive’ model of representation, which treats minorities as ‘add-ons’ to the pressure-group spectrum.⁵ What is left out of this model is the specific cultures of institutions themselves, and their historical roles in reproducing social inequalities variously marked as racial, ethnic, sexual or cultural differences. The logic of this ‘additive’ model of representation is a pseudo-dialectic of consensus and dissent. A given community is defined by its consensus on questions of value and interest: it is this consensus, rather than any overarching structures of power, privilege and inequality, that defines a group as a ‘community’. Hence, those who dissent from a given consensus are compelled to constitute themselves as another distinctive ‘community’ – and this is the ‘fragmentative’, proliferative logic of identity politics, in which ‘communities’ break down into progressively smaller groups of solidarity and values, raising the spectre of national disintegration or ‘multinationalism’ invoked by anti-multiculturalists.⁶ But the consensus-effect, which mystifies social determinations as ‘collective decisions’,⁷ is always produced by a process of exclusion, operating variously as persuasion, silencing, domination. Thus the next stage in the dialectic of ‘difference’ is the recognition that, if all communal identities are in a sense ‘fictions’ founded on exclusions which are oppressive for some or many, then the ‘individual identities’ that form the atomic particles of these communities are themselves strategic fictions masking a chaos of subatomic particles. The recognition of differences between communities, or group identities, and between individuals who are members of such communities, must give way to recognition of differences within individuals, or the ways in which consciousness does not coincide with identity.⁸ This premise of ‘postmodern’ identity politics, which gives the lie to the notion of ‘community’ as consensus, is characterised by Barbara Herrnstein Smith thus: ‘each of us is a member of many shifting communities, each of which establishes, for each of its members, multiple social identities’.⁹ It seems there cannot even be a consensus of one: no judgement of value or interest can have even what Herrnstein Smith calls ‘local universality’, and the chances of any individual forming an alliance or a coalition with herself look slight.

As the essays in this book testify, identity politics is as protean a concept as any other in multiculturalist debates, changing its connotations and designations as easily as ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’ or ‘culture’, from one milieu of debate to another. Signalling essentialism, separatism, withdrawal from the liberal-democratic polity on one hand, it can signify complicity with the ‘culturalism’ and identity-consumerism thought to be promoted by liberal-pluralist and corporate, ‘Benetton-style’ multiculturalisms on the other. Multicultural ‘representation’ as it was translated into educational and political practice in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, for example, was seen by anti-racists as mobilising identity politics while endorsing the claims to tolerance and inclusiveness of the liberal traditions of Anglo national culture and the British state. ‘Official’ multiculturalism, it was argued, isolated racial and ethnic conflicts from other political antagonisms (between the sexes, labour and capital, first and third worlds, overdeveloped and under-resourced societies), while serving to distract public attention from the radical social restructuring involved in the monetarist ‘stripping’ of the welfare state and the ongoing exploitation of cheap labour markets worldwide.¹⁰ As a doctrine of tolerance of ‘ethnic’ difference, it preached a change of consciousness, leaving social structures and institutions largely unchanged. The liberal imperative to ‘tolerate’ cultural difference, predicated though it is on a doctrine of equal rights, is inherently hierarchical, the structural privilege and prerogative of the ‘majority’; for in what sense can a minoritised culture be asked to ‘tolerate’ the maiority or ‘national’ culture that assigns it the marginal status of a minority? Such are some of the charges levelled against multiculturalism for its ‘culturalism’, or its tendency to translate racial, ethnic and sexual difference as cultural diversity, inequality as multiplicity.

‘Culturalism’, however, has not been without its progressive mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: The limits of pluralism
• Part II: Multiculturalism and the nation: histories, policies, practices
• Part III: Positionings
• Index