In the aftermath of the »culture wars,« new battle lines, this time international, are forming again around the issue of »multiculturalism.« Challenged and debated from both right and left, the term itself has become subject to diverse political force-fields, in some ways becoming a sliding signifier onto which diverse groups project their hopes and fears, their fantasies and anxieties. At least since the 1980s, we in the US have become accustomed to neo-conservative (and sometimes liberal) diatribes branding multiculturalism »separatist,« »tribalist,« and »unpatriotic,« the domestic equivalent of a Lebanon-style war of ethnic militias. For Lynn Cheney, Arthur Schlesinger, Dinesh d'Souza, Richard Bernstein, George Will, and many others, multiculturalism is simply an attack on the West and on »western civilization as an area of study.« Some left intellectuals like Tod Gitlin, meanwhile, worry less about multiculturalism »dividing the nation« than about its »dividing the movement,« through distracting ivory-tower debates about race. For Gitlin, »identity politics« and »multiculturalism« fracture the »common dreams« of real world left solidarity. Some feminists, meanwhile, see multiculturalism as splintering feminism and therefore as »bad for women.«

These debates are articulated differently in other national, institutional, and discursive contexts. In countries like Canada and Australia, »multiculturalism« comes to refer to official government programs designed to placate and to some extent empower »minorities« by offering some representation within the existing political system, a form of multiculturalism challenged by some radicals as too cooptive and assimilationist. In other sites, journalists and academics people project their fears as well as their hopes onto the term »multiculturalism,« Here we will examine some international left critiques of U.S. multiculturalism, specifically those emerging both from France and Brazil, but focussing especially on two recent essays by Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, »La Nouvelle Vulgate,« published in Le Monde Diplomatique, and »The Cunning of Imperial Reason,« published in »Theory, Culture, and Society« (1999).

[b]Multiculturalism: A Tentative Definition[/b]

Before getting to the details of the Bourdieu/Wacquant critique, however, we should briefly clarify what we mean by multiculturalism. Although we cannot control the meaning of such a slippery and polysemic concept, we can at least schematize some of the diverse and even contradictory discourses that find shelter under its broad umbrella, while also clarifying what we ourselves mean by the term.¹ Since the Bourdieu/Wacquant polemic is largely addressed to academic multiculturalism, we will limit our discussion to that dimension of the multicultural project, setting aside its relation to artistic production, curating, community activism and so forth. For us, »multiculturalism« designates a complex social and intellectual movement and debate produced at the intersection of critical knowledges. The term functions as convenient shorthand for a body of scholarly work that critically engages issues of power relations rooted in the practices and discourses of colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

In »Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media«², we distinguish between the multicultural »fact« and the multicultural »project.« The »fact« references the obvious cultural heterogeneity of most of the world, but especially of the »Black Atlantic« (R.F. Thompson, P. Gilroy) and the »multi-nation states« (W. Kymlycha) of the Americans. What provokes the howls of execration against multiculturalism³ is not the indisputable fact of cultural heterogeneity, but rather the multiculturalist project, because it calls for reinvisioning world history and contemporary social life from the perspective of the radical equality of peoples. The multiculturalist project, in this sense, entails a profound restructuring of the ways knowledge is produced through the distribution of cultural resources and power. But multiculturalism can not be a purely celebratory form of national/ethnic narcissism. Multiculturalism as a positive project needs to be articulated in intellectual terms together with a critique of colonialism, racism, as well as of Eurocentrism as a substratal set of axioms of undergirding conventional ways of mapping history and »reading the world.« Furthermore, it needs to be articulated in political terms with projects of justice and empowerment, always in relation to other axes of social stratification having to do with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.

What we call »Polemic Multiculturalism« is actually an assault not on Europe or Europeans European-Americans but on Eurocentrism - the view which sees Europe the world's center of gravity, as ontological »reality« to the rest of the world's shadow, as the fountain from which all good things flow. (We use »Europe« not to refer to Europe as a political or geographical unit per se but rather to refer to the neo-Europes and to European hegemony around much of the world, for example in the Americans). The residues of centuries of Euro-colonial domination have seeped into the everyday language, and media discourses, engendering a fictitious sense of the axiomatic superiority and universality of Western culture. Eurocentric discourse projects a linear (»Plato-to NATO«) historical trajectory leading from classical Greece (constructed as »pure,« »western,« and »democratic«) to imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the U.S. Eurocentric discourse is diffusionist, it assumes that democracy, science, progress all emanate outward from the originary source which is Europe and Europeans. Eurocentric discourse embeds, takes for granted, and »normalizes,« in a kind of buried epistemology, the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism and imperialism.

Although complex, contradictory, and historically unstable, Eurocentrism as a mode of thought engages in a number of mutually-reinforcing operations.

1) Eurocentrism attributes to the »west« an inherent trajectory toward democratic institutions (Torquemada, King Leopold, Mussolini and Hitler must be seen as aberrations within this logic of selective amnesia and legitimation).
2) Eurocentrism elides non-western traditions, while a) obscuring the limitations of western formal democracy, and b) masking the West's part in subverting democracies around the world.
3) Eurocentrism appropriates the cultural and material production of the non-west while denying both the non-West's achievements and its own appropriation, thus consolidating its sense of self and glorifying its own cultural anthropophagy.

In sum, Eurocentrism sanitizes history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-west, it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements - science, progress, humanism - but of the non-west (variously known as »the Orient,« the »Third World,« or »the South«) in terms of its deficiences, real or imagined. The celebration of multiculturalism and the critique of Eurocentrism are for us inseperable concepts, each becomes impoverished without the other. Multiculturalism without the critique of Eurocentrism runs the risk of being merely accretive - a shopping mall summa of the world's cultures - while the critique of Eurocentrism without multiculturalism runs the risk of simplify inverting rather than profoundly unsettling and rearticulating existing hierarchies. The goal of what we call »polycentric« multiculturalism is to eliminate, as far as possible and in our own specific sphere of action, the long-term cultural legacies of colonialism, Eurocentrism and white supremacy.

[b]Multiculturalism as Project[/b]

The Bourdieu/Wacquant essay is riddled with false dichotomies: academics must either do real politics or do multiculturalism; the oppression of blacks in the US is either about access or it is about recognition and identity. Whereas they favor/or thinking, we favor both/and thinking. It is always easy, furthermore, to condemn academics for their lack of power in the »real world,« to point out that oppression continues in the streets while academics philosophize in seminar rooms. The logical tricks here are multiple:

1) the buries assumption that the academe is not also part of the »real world,«
2) the extrapolation of the feature of the academic life in general - the relative political powerlessness of academics - so as to apply exclusively to one group, here academic multiculturalists;
3) the lack of any empirical evidence for the idea that multiculturalists are less politically active than other academics, when in fact they are probably more acitvist;
4) the facile juxtaposition of injustice in the world with the proclamations of academics (which would apply to all academics, including French sociologists) as if the latter were somehow responsible for the former. Finally
5) the imputation of some sort of sexualized pathology - »libido wasting academics« - onto a large and diversified array of scholars, as if the accusers had researched the psycho-biographies of the scholars in question. This completely gratiuitous sexualization of the charge reeks of prejudice a l'etat pur, and perhaps says more about the accusers than about the objects of their attack.

But let us first address the »grain of truth« in the Bourdieu/Wacquant critique, if one is to dignify by that name which is little more than a cri de coeur based on doxa and prejudice. Multiculturalism is sometimes rightly criticized for its cooptability. Although Bourdieu/Wacquant do not use this word, it is implicit in their charge that multiculturalism forms part of an imperial arsenal of doxa, along with such concepts as »globalization,« »markets,« »flexibility«, and so forth. And while it is difficult to see multiculturalism as »imperial« - since so much of the work has been explicity anti-imperialist - the »cooptability« charge does a certain ring of possibility. We ourselves have often pointed out that multiculturalism can be coopted, that it can degenerate into a United-Colors-of-Benetton pluralism whereby established power promotes ethic »flavors of the month« for commercial or ideological purposes. Transnational corporations have sometimes devoured the concept to »multiculturalize« their image and sell products through a skin-deep display of exoticism, while simultaneously abusing the disposable laborers (largely women of color) that help produce their profits. Recently, even right-wing political parties have scrambled to create a multicultural façade, which Jesse Jackson has called »inclusion as illusion,« although Republicans never use the word »multiculturalism« except to denounce it. Here we find public-relations multiculturalism at its most cynical; a parade of epidemic difference meant to hide a racist agenda.

It is precisely this danger of co-optation that leads many U.S. scholars on the left to applaud »radical,« »critical« and »polycentric« multiculturalism, on the one hand, while critiquing »corporate,« »liberal« and »pluralist« multiculturalism on the other. But even co-optive multiculturalism, is co-opting something, and that something is, ultimately, what began as the political and cultural mobilization of minoritized and racialized communities. That Republicans have abandoned race-baiting (as the notorious Willie Horton ads) in favor of epidemic multicultural exhibitionism, shallow as it is, is on another level a sign that the multiculturalists have managed to move the racial discourse to the left. One cannot always blame a movement, moreover, for others' attempt to coopt it. In the 1960s and 1970s, Richard Nixon, the lethal archenemy of the Black Panthers, adopted their slogan: »Power to the People.« But that was hardly the fault of the Panthers. While the word »multiculturalism« might soon pass, the issues to which it points will not soon fade, for these contemporary quarrels are but the surface manifestations of a deeper »seismological shift:« the decolonization of Eurocentric power structures and epistemologies, and that shift is ultimately more important than the word »multiculturalism.«

We ourselves have criticized certain strands of multiculturalism ⁴ that seem to us covertly nationalist and Americanoentric. The small grain of truth in some left critiques of multiculturalism is the fact that at times the issues are glimpsed in the US through a narrowly national grid, as when well-meaning curriculum commitees call for courses about the »contributions« of the world's diverse cultures to the »development of American society,« blithely ignoring the nationalistic teleology underlying such a formulation. Although nationalism is often seen as a specifically Third World malady, the term is no less relevant to the labor, feminist, queer, and multicultural movements within the U.S. This submerged American ethnocentrism has sometimes given us what we call »star-striped multiculturalism,« or »nationalism with a tan,« or »rainbow nationalism,« or »nationalism in drag.« But for us, »multiculturedness« is not a »United Statesian« monopoly, nor is multiculturalism the »handmaiden« of U.S. identity politics. Educational institutions concerned about »diversity« often glimpse multiculturalism through a largely unconscious national-exceptionalist lens that celebrates difference but which does not necessarily deconstruct the nationalist paradigm.

[b]Multiculturalism: An »American discourse?«[/b]

On one level, of course, multiculturalism is indeed »not a theory,« just as »French sociology« is »not a theory;« both terms refer not to theories but to rubrics, umbrella terms »covering« many theories. (Similarly, multiculturalism is not a social movement, but it is a project allied with a number of social movements, forming part of a loose coalition for social/racial/cultural justice). Like any complex critical formation, multiculturalism is not a single discourse, but rather a constellation of discourses. It is a heteroglossic (many-languaged) arena of competing and sometimes contradictory currents. And multiculturalism cannot be reduced simply to the national banner of the nation-state within which it is produced. Even if multiculturalism in the US was shaped by public debates about exclusionary practices and discourses rooted in colonialism and slavery, it still cannot be conflated with a monolithic national essence. The US, in this sense, is just one of many arenas for the multicultural debate; it is a multidirectional terminal in a network, not a point of origin or final destination. We are not proposing a stagist, diffusionist narrative that has multiculturalist gospel »beginning« in the US and then »travelling« elsewhere, diffusing a redemptive dogma. As a result of colonial karma, many ideas and people »traveled« back and forth between the US and other geographies and came to mould US-style multiculturalism, just as they shaped analogous movements elsewhere. To situate multiculturalism historically, then, requires a relational approach to the unequal ways in which populations and ideas travel. The »Voyages of Discovery,« for example, turned indigenous Americans into internal exiles, made Africans forced émigrés, and generated a multitude of criss-crossing diasporas. Later developments, - US imperialist policies, military interventions, expulsions, detentions, immigration, refugees, the »brain drain« - also brought a hybridized mix of people and ideas, all of which helped shaped »multiculturalism« as both fact and project.

Not only is multiculturalism animated by scholars of the most diverse national/ethnic origins, it also draws on a wide range of international theories, such as »dependency theory« (strongly associated with Latin America), »subaltern studies« (associated with India, hegemony theory (associated with Gramsci and Hall), post-structuralism (associated with France), along with all sorts of »Afro-diasporic,« »third woridist« and »postcolonial« trends. For complex historical reasons, including the Civil Rights movement, »minority« activism, changes in immigration laws, and the neo-imperial »brain drain,« the US academe has become a »clearing house« for intellectual tendencies of all types, a magnet for what George Yudice calls »centripetal and centrifugal academic desires.«⁵ Postcolonial theory, for example, gained strength in the US academe not only because a number of well-known diasporic intellectuals moved here, but also because other difference-affirming movements - ethnic studies, third world studies, multiculturalism - had already created a hospitable space for it. At the same time, U. S. geopolitical interventions and neo-liberal globalization also resulted in the movement of political refugees and economic immigrants- a process that could be summed up in the postcolonial maxim: »We are here, because you were there.« ⁶

The Bourdieu/Wacquant essays are riddled with dichotomous thinking. According to Bourdieu/Wacquant, »multiculturalism« hides social crisis by depoliticizing a struggle which isn't really ethnic or racial but has to do with access to the instruments of production and reproduction. It seems never to occur to Bourdieu/Wacquant that many multiculturalists are also opposed to the oppressive aspects of globalization and in favor of class militancy, unions, and access to power. (Although the notion of »access« implies mere insertion of the dominated into pre-existing structures, without exercising agency in changing those structures). Bourdieu/Wacquant project their own dichotomous thinking onto multiculturalism. But if for the radical wing of multiculturalism the struggle is about access, it is not only about access. And while it is certainly about class, it cannot be reduced simply to class. It is also about race and gender and sexuality and other axes of social difference such as religion and region, which all come into play with a complex »intersectionality« (Kimberley Crenshaw), especially since race in the US has often played the role of »hiding« class. And even class is not a fixed pre-ordained position, but a space of negotiation strongly mediated through race and gender, which is why we argue for a discourse of »relationality.« In the Bourdieu/Wacquant analysis, one cannot think race and chew class gum at the same time, while gender and sexuality are not there to »chew« at all. Class trumps race, rather than race itself being, as Stuart Hall famously put it, »the modality in which class is lived.« And in the US, the struggle for justice - the struggle for entitlements, the broadening of what is too often a »white« left - the anti-war movement, the greens - invariably passes »through« race.

Bourdieu/Wacquant also ask us to choose between analysing »structures and the mechanisms of domination« or »celebrating the culture of the dominated and their point of view.« It seems never to occur to them that the two issues might be related, that it is precisely the structures of domination that make it necessary to also celebrate the culture of the dominated, since one of the mechanisms of domination is precisely to hide and denigrate the culture of the dominated while normativizing the culture of the dominant. Only those accustomed to enjoying hegemonic cultural privilege, used to having their »point of view« be the normative one, one suspects, could be so dismissive of the »culture of the dominated« and scornful about their »point of view.« Fanon and Cesaire and Malcolm X saw nothing wrong with articulating the »point of view of the dominated,« in counterdistinction to an »objectivity« which always »works against the native.« Here as elsewhere, the very words in which the Bourdieu/Wacquant critique of multiculturalism is formulated reveal, ironically, the validity and indeed the necessity of a multicultural critique. Multiculturalism, furthermore, does not exist as a product of »national vices« but because of the concrete historical conditions we outlined earlier, most notably a complex overlay of cultures, existing within relations of subordination and domination, and the copresence of academics knowledgable about those cultures, operating in a conflictual space where it is possible to articulate those issues.

The Bourdieu/Wacquant approach to politics is reminiscent of that of some class-based US leftists. In his 1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams, Tod Gitlin characterizes »identity politics« as »groups overly concerned with protecting and purifying what they imagine to be their identities.« Only someone unfamiliar with the corpus of multiculturalist writing could come up with such a prejudicial definition. The approach to alliance, then, seems to be: insult your potential allies, ridicule their concerns, show complete ignorance about their histories and positions, and then blame them for »dividing the left.« Unity is invoked at the cost of erasure, a melting down of difference rather than a coalitionary ochestration of difference, a jazz-like ensemble of differentiated voices.

[b]Bourdieu/Wacquant's chinese Encyclopedia[/b]

In their co-authored essays, Bourdieu/ Wacquant powerfully denounce globalization and the new doxa of the globalized order, in terms with which we largely agree. They wisely call for resistance against the blandishments of a model which would undo the social welfare state in the name of the »market,« »modernization« and »globalization.« The dominant US political model, as articulated by the two major parties, is one in which the government has so far not managed to provide basic public goods such as comprehensive health care, inclusive voter registration procedures, free or at least affordable higher education, a high standard of public safety, and a reasonable protection from police abuse and unnecessary imprisonment. While the media »debate« usually consists of a shouting match between a centrist Democrat (»the left«) and a right-wing kook (the right), both major parties stand complicit with a racist justice system and its veritable cult of industrialized incarceration. And that model not only should not be exported to France, as many of us have suggested, it should be deported from the US.

But unfortunately Bourdieu/Wacquant amalgamate this completely legtimate critique with a misfired attack on »multiculturalism.« For Bourdieu/Wacquant, the terms and tropes of the new planetary doxa include »globalization,« »markets,« »multiculturalism,« »racial minorities« and »identity,« terms which impose on all societies specifically American concerns and viewpoints, which »naturalize« one particular historical experience, tacitly instituted as a model for humanity in general. But this lexicon of the new vulgate constitutes an update of Borges' »Chinese Encyclopedia.« The inclusion of »multiculturalism« and »identity« in their surreal heterotopia comes as something of a surprise, rather like listing the proponents of National Socialism as »Hitler, Goebbels, and Brecht,« or citing the doxa of Nazism as »lebensraum,« »blitzkrieg« and »ideologiekritik.« Since the more radical wing of the multiculturalist movement in the US, subscribes to the critique of globalization as false universalism, one wonders what »International House of Unprogressive Activities« has put multiculturalism on this list? The same movement called anti-American in the U. S., seen as unpatriotic, as conducting an »America Sucks Sweepstakes!« (and sometimes, ironically, as too »French«), is paradoxically seen by these French left intellectuals as quintessentially American, an extension of U. S. imperialism rather than a critique of it. Bourdieu/Wacquant move from a completely valid, even indispensable critique of globalization to a clumsy and misinformed slander of US multiculturalism, which puts in exactly the same sack neo-liberal terms like »flexibility« and »globalization« and oppositional terms like »identity« and »multiculturalism.«⁷ The authors manage this conflation of globalization and multiculturalism through a series of rather abstract and rhetorical links between the efficacy of the market, the recognition of identities, and the notion of individual responsibility. In the US, ironically, multiculturalism is usually criticized as promoting »group rights« rather than individual responsibility, but that is only the beginning of the problem in terms of translating debates and discourses.

 

 

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