Cultural Studies

Volume 9 Issue 3

Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134805174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

First published in 1995. Cultural Studies is an international journal committed to exploring the relationships between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts.

ARTICLES

RETHINKING POSTCOLONIALISM AND MULTICULTURALISM IN THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

JOHN DOCKER

Abstract

The article argues that terms like ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ can be totalizing and themselves elide difference. In terms of recent argument in cultural studies in Australia, approaches drawn from postcolonialism referring to Orientalism and race have been contentiously applied to multicultural discourse referring to migration and ethnicity. In such discourse there is a ruling binary distinction between the migrant and Australian society. I seek to complicate the analysis of multiculturalism by pointing to a heterogeneity of shifting centres and margins, for example, between and within ethnic communities, and in diasporic relationships.

Keywords

postcolonialism; multiculturalism; fin de siècle

During the 1980s, literary and cultural studies were swept by a powerful movement, in publications, conferences and curricula, centred on the term ‘postcolonial’. Postcolonial discourse displaced an older paradigm, influential from the 1950s to the 1970s, focusing on the notion of Third World’, and associated with anti-colonial nationalist movements. Such older anti-colonial discourse came increasingly to be seen as insisting on fixed, binary, stable distinctions between First and Third Worlds, the colonizer and colonized. Postcolonial theory promised to be more adequate to a postmodern world of contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences generated by First World-Third World intersections, in particular the experiences of Third World peoples in Western metropolitan centres.

In the fin de siècle, however, when, as we might expect, all things are questioned, the term ‘postcolonial’ is itself being sharply interrogated. The Iraqi-Israeli-American critic Ella Shohat (1992a) argues, for example, that postcolonial theory, while it has been and continues to be productive, can be deployed in ahistorical and universalizing ways. Shohat sees ‘postcolonial’ as associated with Third World countries which gained independence after World War II. But, she feels, the term has become increasingly global in its theoretical ambitions, attempting to include and subsume most of the known world. Shohat points, for example, to the introduction of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), which suggests that the literatures of Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all postcolonial literatures, as is the literature of the United States. Such a formulation, Shohat writes, is problematic in the extreme. It collapses into the one term and history very different national—racial formations, as between settler-colonial societies like the United States, Australia, and Canada, and societies like Nigeria, Jamaica, and India. Situating Australia and India as together postcolonial simply because they were both colonies equates a society dominated by white settlers with a society composed of an ex-colonized indigenous population. Used in this way, ‘postcolonial’ becomes a totalizing category neutralizing geopolitical differences across the globe.

The term ‘postcolonial’ is, Shohat feels, not only dubious spatially, but also problematic temporally. It risks reintroducing a new teleology, a unified history, announcing a new epoch, the postcolonial. When, she asks, did this new epoch begin? ‘Postcolonial’ elides differences between early independence won by settler-colonial societies as in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, in which Europeans formed their new nation-states in non-European territories at the expense of the indigenous peoples, and nation-states whose indigenous populations struggled for independence against Europe, winning it, for the most part, much more recently with the twentieth-century collapse of European empires. Further, she asks, how does the term apply to situations in the world, as with the Palestinians or indigenous peoples in Australia or the Americas (in the United States in relation to Native Americans), where there are continuing anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles? Are they now to be marginalized by postcolonial theory as pre-postcolonial? As a term, ‘postcolonial’ reproduces once again, Shohat argues, the centrality of the colonial narrative, a linear narrative of progression in which colonialism remains the central point of reference, in a march of time neatly arranged from the ‘pre’ to the ‘post’. Shohat concludes by suggesting that the term ‘postcolonial’ should perhaps have more modest ambitions in the world, be deployed more contingently and differentially. It need not be considered the single and primary term of a new epoch and theoretical discourse, but can be used alongside other terms like anti-colonial, neo-colonial, Third World, post-independence, where every term is provisional and ultimately inadequate.

My focus in this essay will be on multiculturalism in Australia in the light of such recent argument (see also McClintock, 1992). Multiculturalism is both a government policy and a debate over the desirability of cultural- ethnic pluralism, stimulated by post World War II, largely European, immigration. The specificity of Australian migration history is worth establishing here, particularly in relation to US experience. Gary P.Freeman and James Jupp, editors of Nations of Immigrants, a volume of essays comparing migration patterns in the United States and Australia, note that immigrants from a wide variety of nations populated North America from the earliest days of European settlement. North America was invaded by a number of European colonial powers: the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the British. While the British eventually attained dominance over the territory that was to become the United States, by 1790, when the present style of government of the US was established, persons of Anglo-Irish stock made up only 61 per cent of whites. The next largest white ethnic category was German, followed by Dutch, French, and Swedish. The seventy years between 1860 and 1930 saw unprecedented numbers of migrants land on American shores, the majority drawn from nationalities new to the United States, Poles, Czechs, Russian Jews, providing the hands to run the burgeoning industrial machine that was springing up in the East and Midwest. In the 1920s, legislation was passed controlling the numbers of migrants and attempting to favour those from the countries of western and northern Europe that had provided the bulk of immigrants before 1860. During the Depression, World War II and the Cold War, immigration to the US fell dramatically, with accompanying calls for assimilation and Americanization; there was an ageing of the established immigrant communities. Since 1965, however, immigration has resurged, stimulated by the liberalization of refugee laws and reforms attempting to eliminate racial and national discrimination, within an overall commitment to family reunion. Refugees from Hungary, Cuba and Indo-China increased, as did immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico (Freeman and Jupp, 1992).

In contrast, when the Australian island-continent was invaded, from 1788, it was by only one European colonizing power, the British, and the white population of Australia is still drawn predominantly from the British Isles. Compared to the United States, the role of the state in immigration matters has been far more longstanding, extensive and decisive. Convict transportation began in 1788, lasting until 1852 in eastern Australia (until 1868 in Western Australia). The great majority of convicts were English and Irish, although many were sent from throughout the British Empire, including some non-Europeans. From the 1830s, assisted passage was the single most important device for attracting immigrants to a land that was, compared to the United States, while almost equal in size, far less rich in resources, and less hospitable for European-style settlement. From the beginning most people inhabited the eastern seabord cities, Australia now being one of the most highly urbanized countries in the world. Assisted passage was primarily offered to British subjects, although also to Irish people even after independence in 1921. There were some assisted passages to Queensland from the late 1870s for Germans and Scandinavians, looked on favourably as stable, rurally skilled, family-centred and industrious. When southern Europeans became prominent from the late 1880s there was concern, and quota restrictions were imposed in the 1920s, mainly against southern Europeans who had diverted to Australia after restrictive United States legislation (Freeman and Jupp, 1992).

In the nineteenth century the largest group of non-British migrants arrived as free settlers in the 1850s in response to the gold rushes, the Australian population trebling within a decade, including many Chinese, Americans and a variety of other nationalities. Chinese continued to come in significant numbers until stopped by restrictive measures directed specifically at them, culminating in the 1901 legislation popularly known as the White Australia Policy. In the early decades of this century, non-British migrants were in a minority, coming mainly from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Malta, Poland, Lebanon and Germany. Because of the Depression in the 1930s, immigration in general was very low. After the war, this situation changed dramatically. From 1947, under agreement with the United Nations International Refugee Organization, over 170,000 refugees arrived in the next five years, the largest planned intake of non-British in Australian history. The great majority of these refugees came from eastern European societies, with additional intakes from Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Non-European migrants, effectively excluded since the White Australia Policy at the turn of the century (not officially repudiated until 1973), began to surge from the middle 1960s and especially 1970s, in particular Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Malay and Indonesian (Freeman and Jupp, 1992).

I might make mention here that my mother’s family, Anglo-Jews from London’s East End (in family lore, Sephardi Jews from Portugal, then Holland, then England), took assisted passage to Australia in the middle 1920s (Docker, 1992–3). Like the rest of the immigrant population, Jews, whose history in the antipodes coincides with the beginning of colonization in 1788, were, until the post World War II period, predominantly from Britain. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, Polish and other Eastern-European, Yiddish-speaking Jews arrived, in part, again, because of American immigration restrictions. As in the United States and Canada, there were in the immediate post World War II period some restrictions on the entry of Jewish refugees and immigrants, so that fewer Jews arrived than might have. Even so, Australia accepted, after Israel, the highest number of survivors of the Holocaust on a pro rata population basis (Rutland, 1988).

Given its history of centralized state supervision and intervention, Australia’s immigrant population has been far less heterogeneous than that of the United States (Freeman and Jupp, 1992:1, 19). Where massive non-British European migration to the United States occurred largely during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was introduced in Australia mainly in two periods, during the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes, and after World War II, which explains some of the post-war intensity of discussion and debate around issues of cultural and ethnic identity. Such intensity of debate over migration and multiculturalism has tended at times to rival the separate debates, sharp and continuing, over white/Aboriginal relationships.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the refugees and migrants from Eastern Europe, Italy, Greece and Lebanon, intended as workers for post-war industrializing and development projects, were faced with harsh conditions and inadequate services, and also experienced frequent social hostility, a language of insult edged with racism when applied to migrants from the Mediterranean, considered not quite white. Official government policies were of cultural assimilation to some kind of imagined Australian national way of life. Migrant communities, however, set tenaciously about maintaining what Gill Bottomley calls ‘valued traditions’ and ‘ethnic honour’. Settling mainly in the cities, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, they created large ethnic concentrations and established their own institutions and facilities, in churches, newspapers, radio programmes and cinemas, afternoon schools, clubs, restaurants, cafés, and shops (Bottomley, 1979: ix, 6). Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west, has traditionally been the city’s Greek centre, although in the last decade it has also become a locus for Vietnamese shops, cafés and social life; nearby Petersham, where I live, is the Portuguese centre of Sydney, while the next suburb along, Leichhardt, has traditionally been the Italian centre. By the 1990s, Melbourne and Sydney have, compared to a previous Anglo-conformity, become strikingly ethnically heterogeneous. According to the 1991 Census, Sydney has surpassed Melbourne as Australia’s ‘migrant capital’, with 35.7 per cent of Sydney residents born overseas. Sydney, indeed, featured its multi-ethnicity in its successful bid for the year 2000 Olympics.

Particularly from the early 1970s, there was continuous criticism of the authoritarianism of the notion of assimilation. There was recognition of its impossibility in a conflictual society, particularly with longstanding tensions in Australian history between English and Irish, often inflected as tension and dislike between Protestantism and Catholicism. Through tortuous political processes in the 1970s, policies of assimilation and then integration were succeeded by multiculturalism, government and social recognition of the value of a diversity and mixing of cultures. While multiculturalism has become official government policy at federal and state levels, it remains a space of contention and conflict.

From social science to cultural studies

It was primarily sociologists, anthropologists, political economists and demographers, who from the 1960s produced studies of migrants in Australia, deploying a variety of theoretical approaches. Some were influenced by Marxist concerns with class, work and ideology, focusing on exploitation and unequal power relations. Jean I.Martin (1978), was interested in a sociology of knowledge, of how migrants were defined in relation to public policies, organizations and services, concentrating on institutions like education, health and trade unions; Martin called on Foucault’s formulation of the concepts of truth and power in his essay The political function of the intellectual’ (Foucault, 1977). In After the Odyssey (1979), her study of Greek Australians drawing on fieldwork with young Greek women, Gill Bottomley applied a cultural anthropology approach. In 1984 a collection of essays, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Australia, was edited by Gill Bottomley and Marie de Lepervanche. In 1991 Gill Bottomley, Marie de Lepervanche and Jeannie Martin edited a related collection, Intersexions: Gender/class/culture/ethnicity . The 1984 volume evoked in particular the migrant experience of Greeks, Italians and Lebanese, theoretically deploying the triad of ethnicity, class and gender. The 1991 collection sought to go beyond what it called this holy trinity, into analyses of cultural representation and construction (far more fluid and ambiguous terms than ideology) in the context of ‘postcolonialism’. It also ranged more widely across ethnicity and race, in Asia and the Pacific as well as in Australia, including within the one project study of Aboriginal writings, second-generation Greek Australians, Italian Australians, Latin American Australians, and gender relationships in south India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vanuatu.

By the 1980s, the sociologists had been joined by the literary critics. From the early 1980s there was a flourishing of literary studies, inspired by the then Melbourne critic Sneja Gunew, focusing on the new writing that had arisen and become associated with the massive post-war migrations, particularly from Europe. As critics, they insisted on a textual rather than a sociological approach to migrant writing. Such studies constitute what I will refer to in this essay as the literary multicultural discourse. Its chief practitioners include not only Sneja Gunew but also Kateryna O.Longley, Efi Hatzimanolis, and Ivor Indyk, and they focus on writers like Ania Walwicz, Anna Couani, Antigone Kefala, Silvana Gardner, Rosa Cappiello. From the platform provided by such ‘high literature’ writing, challenging generalizations have been launched, through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

The literary multicultural discourse attempts to apply to ‘migrant’ writing and notions of multiculturalism what we might call post-Fanon theory, from Edward Said’s Orientalism to ‘postcolonial discourse’. Gunew, the multicultural discourse’s leading theorist, has suggested that Said’s theory of Orientalism can be applied to the way mainstream society and culture in Australia position and inscribe the migrant as other: ‘Edward Said has explored in detail how the Orient becomes an object constructed ...