multiculturalism' by vijay mishra

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MulticulturalismMulticulturalism

vijay mishra

This years review of multiculturalism looks at the ways in which it continuesto be an umbrella term under which a diverse number of issues related to

race and ethnicity are discussed. The great works on multicultural theory area thing of the past and what we are now seeing are either books which takeup quite specific issues or books which use multicultural ideas as ideas of andfrom the margins which have now been taken over by mainstream liberalintellectuals. In this context it is only proper that a book published a yearlater (in 2009) is also discussed as part of the 2008 output. Two issues standout: the first relates to the ways in which a European critical modernity cantake us back to a more enlightened way in which matters of cultural dif-

ference may be addressed; the second, in an uncomfortable fashion, suggeststhat multiculturalism as a social practice now deals primarily with theMuslim as the other in need of critical engagement. The latter, disturbingly,takes us to a reformulation of social practice as no longer a matter ofdiversity control or critique but one of a binary of a collective us(regardless of racial or cultural difference) versus the Muslim other.

I begin this survey with a book which makes a liberal case against diversityand end with a book published a year later (2009) which suggests that a newmarginalism has now become the dominant liberal discourse. The book withwhich I beginThe Multicultural Mystique by H.E. Baberasks the question:Is multiculturalism good for anyone at all? In a slightly different vein SusanOkin had asked the same question in respect of women (Is multiculturalismbad for women?). Whereas Okins question arose out of unease with de-

mands for difference recognition even when these demands were detrimentalto women generally, Babers question emerges out of recent Jihadist attackson New York, London, Madrid, Bali, and other places. With a furtherreading of terrorism as a primarily Muslim phenomenon (Baber paraphrasesthe common cry: Not all Muslims are terrorist but all terrorists are

The Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, The English Association (2010)All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

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Muslims) which is then linked to a religion which is by definition militant(Islam means peace but it is a peace only for the community of Muslimbelievers), the argument is made that the present global crisis in terrorism is

a result of multiculturalism. This particular theme has been a neo-conservative mantra which has surfaced often enough in the multiculturalbibliography; Baber gives it a more passionate twist by locating it as well inher own life-world experiences. Her argument though does not seem to betotally anti-multiculturalist if, by the latter, one simply means liberal ways ofengendering a more equitable society. Since, however, the latter definition isnot the one in common currency but is conversely identified with a pluralmonoculturalist salad bowl doctrine (pp. 89), her argument is that such

an understanding of multiculturalism as both theory and practice is no goodfor anyone since no one really wishes to live in such a salad bowl definitionof society.

The book, however, could have been dismissed as old hat if it were notfor the passion with which the writer composes it and the argument sheadvances, the latter taking us to multiculturalism as a way of repressing orsilencing some of the excesses of western culture, both economically and

militarily. A key chapter here is Identity-Making (Chapter 9) to which Iwant to turn my attention. Here Baber locates modern multiculturalismneither in the countercultural 1960s nor in the Canadian recognition ofracial communities in the 1970s. Instead she goes back even further andsuggests that it was born in the Netherlands during the seventeenth centurywhen Catholics and Protestants decided to live separately together(p. 182). What evolved over the centuries was the Dutch pillar system,an updated, egalitarian version of the Ottoman millet system (p. 183),

which meant that when later migrants came to the Netherlands they found apre-given ethos or culture of separateness already present in the nation assomething akin to a national creed or a national way of accommodatingdifference. Left alone in their own private worlds, and supported by anation foundered on an ethos of separateness, migrants simply existed asautonomous groups no different from the earlier Catholic and Protestantpillars. In this respect migrants from former Dutch coloniesIndonesia and

Surinam for instancesimply became Surinamese or Javanese pillars. Withthe arrival of Maghrebi Arabs, another pillar was created. These pillarswhich collectively constituted the multicultural mosaicwere relativelyplacid groups which went about their business like any migrant group.

In Babers argument, though, recent events which culminated in 9/11began to radicalize one of these pillars as Muslims regardless of their ori-ginsSurinam, Java or the Maghrebdeveloped a grand narrative of

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Islamic difference on the grounds of universal persecution. The shift was,however, not simply a matter located in Holland because pillarization fordifferent historical reasons became a feature of European nations as well as of

America and Canada. In the UK it is argued that multiculturalism wasinstrumental in shaping, if nor creating, Muslim identity, a point made inthe 2007 report of the British Policy Exchange, Living Apart Together(p. 188).In America multiculturalism became an escape from a misguided patriotismwhich had led to the creation of the ugly American. America became anideological symbol, a ravenous imperialist beast with no moral or spiritualcore. It stood for blatant and mindless materialism, of an outwardly demo-cratic nation which in fact supported military dictatorships. It was paranoid

about communism which in fact skewed its world view. In such a contextwrites Baber:

American identity had become polarized. America had ceased to be apiece of land with a history where people livedit had become anideology. America was racism, grasping materialism, internationalaggression, neocolonialism, and above all the war in Vietnam. Noone I knew wanted to be American. It should hardly be surprising

that there was an interest in alternative identities and affinity groups,and Americans who hated the conservative political agenda preferredto identify as female, black, Hispanic, deaf or disabled, or, for thatmatter, as Capricorns, vegetarians, or Hare Krishnas. Anything butAmerikan! (p. 190)

The prose style here is crudely polemical and the generalizations far toosweeping but the passage requires critical reappraisal because it persists in

the public sphere. Indeed, it may not be as far-fetched as one thinks it is. Forthe point is that difference rather than solidarity in the US grew out ofunease about self-projection as national character. In other words, if the badpress that America receives is a result of the collective ugly Americanimage then its opposite would be a differentiated and multiply accentedface where the collective (patriotic or nationalistic) American is under eras-ure. In this respect every citizen is hyphenated, from the first nation

Americans (Indian-American) and slaves (black-American) to migrants(Irish-American, Italian-American, Japanese-American, and so on). Whatmay have begun as a simple gesture to erase a false reading (of the imperialistAmerican) soon became a celebration of difference. This celebration in theend, though, left white Americans relatively untouched since they couldenter the grand narrative of assimilation quite easily. It was visible minoritieswhose difference became accentuated and ethnic and racial stereotypes began

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to rear their heads. In Babers argument the salad bowl which was meant toreplace the melting pot failed. We should therefore discourage practices thatpromote cultural diversity, because such practices render ascribed, immut-

able identities salient, impose scripts on members of minority groups, andrestrict individual choice (p. 245).Presented in these terms the liberal case against multiculture (which is

just another name for diversity) is old hat and does not go down well withmulticultural theorists. It is, in the end, an assimilationist theory which isbased on the premise that immigrants come to a nation by choice and theycome to it because they wish to embrace its values. By and large this is trueof the original migrants; those who are born in the new nation or who grow

up there may resent their parents choice for a number of reasons: lack ofrecognition, racism, exclusion from the symbols of the nation, hyphenatedidentifications, and so on. It is the latter group which now constitutes thereal object of multiculturalism. Baber, along with many liberals, believes thatrecognition of diversity makes matters worse; others find recognition ofdifference and degrees of accommodation critical to the well-being of themodern nation-state.

In The Future of Multicultural Britain Pathik Pathak argues that communi-tarian difference is a cultural fact and should be acknowledged. Drawingparallels between events in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley (in the summer of2001) and in the Indian state of Gujarat (in spring 2002), Pathak argues thatthe racist nature of these events signify a common reflex of the nation-stateto demonize minorities as inassimilable communities and a disinclination torecognize as citizens (p. 7). A declining multiculturalism, as the argumentgoes further, has led to an ascendant majoritarianism. Pathaks book teases

out this link but places the blame on the Left who Pathak suggests havesimply failed to recognize the role of cultural difference and communitariansense of solidarity. In their emphasis on class (race, ethnicity, community donot matter) and then in their uncritical deference to cosmopolitanism, theLeft simply left the entire discourse of multiculturalism in the hands ofliberal neo-conservatives. Nowhere is this more marked than in the writingsof someone like David Goodheart. What then is Pathaks contribution to the

debate and the importance of discussing a worn out theme with reference totwo quite disparate cultures? Even before we examine the thesis, a numberof things strike us. First, there is the question of the historical archive. Whileboth the British and Indian cases show the ills of a majoritarian ascendancy,we are not told the very different historical experiences of minorities inthese nations. The Muslims in India have close to an 800-year history com-plicated by a more recent (60 years) history of partition which effectively




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created a Muslim diaspora in India with a Pakistan homeland. This history ofitself does not excuse the violence of Gujarat, but it does help one under-stand the kind of madness engendered by history. The madness in Britain is

of a very different kind and reflects another history. Pathaks work seems notto register this difference. The second question relates to the ease withwhich the Left is invoked throughout the book. It leads the reader intothinking that somehow if the Left adopted a more nuanced understandingof multiculturalism or if they left behind the heavy burden of Marx andadmitted the power of communitarianism all would be well. The argumentconcedes too much power to the Left which simply has little if any input inthe workings of the liberal state. Even if the Left adopts Pathaks plea

towards communitarian aspirations, one doubts very much if things wouldchange. Finally there is Pathaks own thesis which in the end simply becomesa statement about multicultural recognition of difference and the adoption ofa non-majoritarian world view where the grand narrative of a nation has nocredence whatsoever. The sad, uncomfortable thing is that democracy alwayspanders to majoritarian views, which is why the Jewish people always feltuncomfortable with it.

Let us get back to the book if only because it shows how exhausted thefield has become. What we find in Britain is a move away from multicul-turalism to liberal assimilation which, like Indias degradation of secular-ism, has been incremental and propelled by a crisis of the Left (p. 11).According to Pathaks reading, urgent matters such as racism in both Indiaand Britain have been consigned to the realm of personal politics and notconsidered, as they should be, as structural constituents of national institu-tions. In this argumentan argument which found support in multicultural

discoursesracism may be resolved by people individually or collectivelywithout too much concern with the ways in which it is an expression of aparticularly pernicious world-view at the heart of a culture of exclusion andxenophobia. In India it has taken the form of the rise of Hindu fundamen-talism which has constructed an imaginary Hindu nation from which theMuslims especially are excluded. The argument has force and recent events,especially the state-endorsed killings of Muslims in Gujarat, render strong

support for it. What the argument misses is the degree to which the entireIndian nationalist movementfrom Vivekananda to the MahatmausedHindu discourses to construct the nation. The political terms of all thenationalist leaders were Hindu, the revolutionary anthems (from jana ganamana to bande matram) were Hindu as were all the outward signs of the nation.These signs began to take hold of colonial India even before partition and hadalready begun to exclude the Muslim other. Nehruvian secularismmuch




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made of in Pathaks booksimply turned a blind eye to these symbolswithout in any way challenging them. In the great Bollywood epic aboutIndia, Mother India (to celebrate the tenth year of its independence), the

Muslim does not exist except as a lone member of a village Panchayat, or theUrdu speaker whose voice frames the producers logo.

If the Indian section does not work too well as a parallel allegory of thedemise of secularism, the British narrative, while offering solid insights,again falters because of its lack of historical grounding and sociological re-search. So whereas we can readily endorse the following, [T]he problem isthat multiculturalism as anti-racist praxis is bereft of an adequate critique ofstate racism (p. 23), we are not told what form this state racism has taken

and why multiculturalism has been so readily embraced by minorities when,as Pathak argues, multiculturalism is simply the benign face of liberalism inits attempt to rid itself of its own investment in race. The challenge to thestate of affairsthe adoption of multiculturalism as a liberal creedneces-sitates the creation of a coherent strategy which would resist majoritarianreification of multiculturalism. To mobilize resistance multiculturalismshould return to its philosophical roots (not its institutionally prescribed

forms) and reinvigorate questions of identity and belonging. The latterwould include some kind of political autonomy for minorities as well as aradical dismantling of power structures both within diasporic and majoritycultures. Here, of course, the failure of the Left is spectacular, and for Pathaksalvation lies in the Lefts rethinking of their hitherto conservative and un-critical understanding of communitarianism. Pathak makes his own positionclear:

What I will argue here is that multiculturalism is as much a part ofthe problem as it is part of the solution, but that its flaws arecompletely misrepresented by the established Left. (p. 170)

We live in new times, times marked by cultural diversity. The challengefacing the Left is how to rethink class, redistribution (the greatest good forthe greatest number) and philosophical recognition (of cultural difference).In a seemingly post-multicultural Britain one may be easily seduced by the

argument of David Goodheart that what is necessary is a reinvigorated senseof citizenship along the lines of the American model where the flag, the oath,the creed, and so on are given prominence. The difficulty with such aproposal is that it denies what Pathak calls the reciprocity of belongingin favour of the special sensibilities of ideological majorities (p. 189).A number of consequences follow: cultural diversity and multiculturalismare disavowed, preference is given to the values of the established culture,




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and difference gets reabsorbed into a majoritarian world view. In India thesame process has taken the form of a state communalism which celebratesthe Indian as a Hindu corporate personality (p. 192) against a pluralist and

diversified set of communities. In Britain communitarianism is most markedamong Muslims, a good number of whom see religion as the defining char-acteristic of their lives. Multiculturalism has obviously failed to deliver thegoods since the form which has triumphed is precisely that endorsed bysomeone like Goodheart. How then should one respond to the very realpresence of difference in a multicultural nation? Pathak writes:

The current challenge for anti-racists, and the progressive Left, is

how they should distance themselves from multiculturalism withoutpre-empting the ascendancy of a majoritarianism that masqueradesunder the equitable language of social or community cohesion thatthreatens to stigmatise all expressions of cultural difference andidentity. (p. 196)

Culture therefore becomes important. Its recognition and acknowledgementare central to any empowering oppositional politics. To the Leftoften

Pathaks primary target as well as the nations likely saviourculture is anuisance and an impediment to the democratic society. This should not be sobecause culture and cultural difference are important. There is no contra-diction between adherence to culture and the need for material distributionsince people can aspire to the common good and remain close to theircultures. Against Goodhearts universally endorsed state citizenry there isthe advocacy of multiple identities. The Left needs to bring cultural differ-ence to the centre of their political consciousness and to debates about race

and nation. It is here that Pathak prefers philosophical multiculturalism tostate multiculturalism. The latter, in the end, always endorses a majoritypoint of view as it seeks to construct a national subject. The former wouldconfront the reality of modern nations where so many minorities remaindefiantly attached to their cultures. The solution, if this reading of Pathaksbook is correct, lies in a nations generosity of spirit, in its acceptance ofvarieties of national subjects and citizens, all with degrees of difference, but

all conscious of their commitment to justice. Is the theoretical premise then,one of the end of a grand (majoritarian) narrative of the nation and itsreplacement by fluid, competing and minor narratives without any havingthe power to become normative? Pathak, it seems, comes pretty close toendorsing this position.

At the heart of cultural difference is language. The critical bibliographyon multiculturalism has been sparse on language and has had little to say




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about the extent to which the survival of languages in diaspora is a keyconstituent of identity politics. Stephen Mays book, Language and MinorityRights, attempts to explore this link. The obvious is dealt with first.

Nation-states have an investment in language as the adoption of a commonlanguage and culture is one of the cornerstones of the old definition of thenation: a nation has a language and a culture, both relatively homogeneous.The question of minority-language loss is directly related to such an under-standing of the nation and nationalism as minority languages are read asimpediments to a robust citizenship. This process usually involves the le-gitimation and institutionalization of the chosen national language, writesMay (p. 6). With minorities seeking greater rights in nation-states, linguistic

human rights are now gaining prominence as an important agenda in debatesabout multiculturalism. Ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic democracies arenow being spoken about and indeed the argument of Stephen Mays book isthat ethnic and national conflicts are most often precipitated whennation-states ignore demands for greater cultural and linguistic democracy(p. 17). One of the more valuable contributions of this book is to debatesabout bilingualism and biculturalism. May uses the case of Maori claims to

greater self-determination as the source for a discussion of the ways in whicha nation begins to recast itself in response to minority language claims.For many years New Zealand was the worlds model multicultural nation

where the indigenous people lived in harmony with white settlers. Otherraces came to its shores, especially from the Pacific, and they too effortlesslyintegrated. Things changed in the last decades of the twentieth century withgreater demands made by the nations Maori people for self-determinationand acknowledgment of their own thousand-year history, their language and,

in terms of colonial history, their rights under the 1840 Treaty of Waitangiwhich brought to end internecine Maori-settler wars. The Treaty itself existsin two languagesEnglish and Maori (Te Tiriti o Waitangi)and this fact isitself pivotal especially in the wake of a consciousness about the decliningimportance of Maori as a living language. Reading the Treaty in Maori beganto show a different understanding of the rights which the Maori chieftainshad ceded to the colonial government in 1840. It also led to a complete

rethinking of Maori as a language and its place in Maori culture. To under-stand post-colonial New Zealand (now regularly used alongside its Maoriequivalent, hence Aotearoa/New Zealand) history Maori linguistic recog-nition was important. This was a natural consequence of rethinking the placeof the Treaty of Waitangi in Maori life-worlds: As a result of the Treatysreturn to prominence, the concept of biculturalism has come increasingly to




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the fore in Aotearoa/New Zealand (p. 289) and by the later 1980s hadbecome established in political and public discourse . . . and institutionalizedto some considerable extent in law (p. 290).

For multicultural theory, though, New Zealand biculturalism raises somevery fundamental issues, both in respect of principle and the place of otherminorities in the nation. With increasing numbers of Chinese, Indians,Indo-Fijians, Koreans and Samoans in New Zealand (the Pacific Islandercommunity getting to be as large as Maori) multiculturalism has beenadvanced as a fairer and more inclusive policy than biculturalism. Fromthe Maori side (both from individuals and from tribunals) have come strongdefense of the special place of Maoris in the nation, a place which multicul-

turalism, by definition, would inevitably dilute. May quotes two studies: thefirst from R. Benton, [multiculturalism] denies Maori people their equalityas members of one among two (sets of) peoples (p. 290) and a second fromthe Waitangi Tribunal, we do not accept that the Maori is just another oneof a number of ethnic groups in our community (p. 291). At another level,though, there is considerable support for multiculturalism by the Pakeha(white) community and this too many Maoris find disturbing. To them

Pakeha support for multiculturalism has another agenda: to ensure thatMaori bicultural aspirations are, in reality, not fulfilled. Among these aspir-ations are: Maori as an official language of the nation (a recognition given in1987 by the Maori Language Act); Maori as co-owners of the land; Maori asarbiters of decisions which may affect the nation as a whole. It is unease withthe implicit idea of equal partnership across the board which many Maorisfear is at the heart of Pakeha interest in multiculturalism. What the uneaseand suspicion demonstrate in a very stark and binary form is the whole issue

of liberal white investment in multiculturalism generally. What is true ofNew Zealand may be true of all settler nations. Is multiculturalism a way ofdiffusing bicultural claims which first nation peoples in settler nationstheUS, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin Americaare making?

Stephen Mays study of language and minority rights takes us to otherbooks which deal with specific minority groups as ethnographic rather thanmulticultural objects of knowledge, although the two modes of academic

practice are not mutually exclusive. I want to address, in succession, twobooks now: Ruth Mandels Cosmopolitan Anxieties which looks at the Turkishdiaspora in Germany and Shalini Shankars Desi Land, a study of the lives ofSouth Asian teens in the San Francisco Bay area. Mandels book looks at theimplications of some of the current readings of the Turkish diaspora inGermany. This diaspora, in recent times, has become a signifier of instability




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and anxiety, in national, sub-national, and transnational narrations. Mandelcontinues:

These narrations are also invested with competing ideologies,

whether nationalist, religionist, or secularist. Thus the ideologicalreferents of the nationalist perspective can evoke symbols of patri-otism or fascism, imperialism or its opposite; the sub-national im-plications equally connote political or religious minorityorganizations in Germany and civil war in Kurdistan; the ideologiesof transnationalism imply social mobility as well as social and politicalmarginalization outside the homeland. (p. 3)

There are now some three-and-a-half-million Turks in Germany (out of animmigrant population of some seven million) making them a very sizeableminority. The Turks, however, demonstrate an important aspect of diasporiclives: whereas expressions of ethnic difference were not a feature of theirlives in Turkey (either through state insistence on secularism or throughpersonal preference), in Germany the Turkish diaspora, right from the start,began to refashion itself in explicitly nonsecular terms (p. 7). Referred to

as the Auslanderproblematik, the foreigner question refers not simply to theTurks (or visible minorities) but to German identity per se: are Germansfrom the former Soviet Union truly German or what are the characteristicsof the German? With a horrific Nazi past the outsider question has traumaticimplications because it carries signs of an earlier presumption about theexistence of a pure Aryan race. In this context any unease about an inassi-milable race (Muslim Turks for instance) re-echoes an attitude so deeplyembedded in erstwhile German discourses about the impossible otherness of

Jews. The German nation-state is acutely aware of this reading of the for-eigner, and is taking steps to ensure that new, post-national possibilities ofcitizenship may be one way of rethinking the general question about inclusioninto the nation as denizens. Since Turks (and others) have not been readilynaturalized, it follows that Germanys own unitary history andquasi-chthonic understanding of who belongs to the nation is being retheor-ized. Here, of course, diaspora theory and multiculturalism as social praxis

provide valuable tools with which to address the question. There is no returnto a homeland for the Turks; it has either been deferred or exists only as aframe of reference for identity politics.

In the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 Islam, of course, has been demonized. The2004 killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh provided many Germanswith further evidence of Islams intractability (p. 248). The riding tide ofunease with Muslims, however, requires as Mandel points out, a more




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nuanced understanding of Muslims in Europe generally and, in the context ofthis book, of Turks in Germany in particular. Her extensive research into thelife-worlds of Turks in Germany shows that Turks do not speak about Islam

with one voice and Islamic practices themselves find a variety of expressionsin their daily lives. Writes Mandel:

The assumption that all migrants from Muslim-marked countries bydefinition are religiously observant is misleading at best. Many hun-dreds of thousands of migrants only on the most cursory of levelsidentify with Islam . . . (p. 250)

The benign form of multiculturalism practiced in Germany (and in other

European nations) tends to reinforce a hierarchical ideology in which aplace is found for the migrant other without dismantling the boundarieswhich define difference. In other words the enlightened form of liberalmulticulturalism remains boutique in form as it leaves power relations vir-tually intact. There is a need, after Derrida, to create an enabling ethics ofhospitality which might decenter the structure of the state (p. 324). HereMandels concluding remarks are worth quoting in full:

What then could effect a public recognition that the obsoleteAuslanderproblematik instead might better be approached as anInlanderproblematik to be overcome? Legislation leading to the adop-tion of a less conditional law of hospitality would pave the way for theredefinition of Germanys relationship to its own outsiders inside.This might imply, for instance, overcoming the fears of permittingdual nationality to local foreigners on the basis of an exclusivist view

of cultural citizenship. The demotic citizen of a denationalized state,whose demos and cosmos transcend borders, instead would representa critical step toward the democratization of cosmopolitanism, whereworld-openness necessarily would include the local as well as theglobal. (p. 325)

The outsiderinsider question, in a markedly different critical discourse maybe found in Shalini Shankars book to which I now turn my attention. The

book deals with an emergent demographic identity: Desis. Shankar definesit as countryman although the word itself (the dental s more common inits palatal s form: des ) also has the meaning of indigenous and enters, inthe diaspora, into interesting hyphenated combinations such as des-vides(ones own country and others), des-nikala (banishment, exile) and soon. Although Shankar defines Desi as the newest in a long line of names torefer to South Asians living outside the Indian subcontinent (p. 1), it is a




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term used most commonly in America and Canada, with little currency inthe UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In the old Indian diaspora avariant form of desi, jat , has been used for indigenous people. This is

certainly true of Fiji. From Shankars own study, it is clear that the term ismost comfortably used by young Indians (or South Asians generally) as amarker of cultural solidarity and even difference from other groups. Butbuilt into the whole concept of Desi is the idea of the diaspora because forDesi quotidian life worlds the term signifies a way of establishing Indiannessby superimposing Indian modernity onto ones lives in America. In thiscontext the symbols which bring this modernity into their lived existencein America are of course Bollywood films. This is especially true of the target

groups which form the archive of Shankars research. This target groupprimarily Indian/South Asian teens in high schools in the Silicon Valleyuses Bollywood creatively to mark out symbols of cultural belonging whichDesi children alone understand. This is not to say that Desi children do nothave other modes of connecting among themselves or with others. Giventhat Indians generally pride themselves to see themselves as an upwardlymobile class, it is not uncommon to find Desi kids socializing with others

who also aspire to this kind of upward mobility. Of course, skin colour playsa part and in Shankars study it is not uncommon to find instances of Desichildren aligning themselves with Mexican teens because they look alike. Theambiguous position of Indians (especially North Indians who constitute thevast majority of teens in Shankars target group) in respect of ethnicity(Caucasian looks with fair skins) also makes it a little easier for them toenter into relations with white kids too. The fact that the latter is not ascommon as it could be, reflects the specially hegemonic presumptions which

bind white children in America in as much as they see themselves as beingthe ideal or foundational group which has given the nation its grandnarrative. Post-9/11 has also created a climate in which the threat toAmerica is read in terms of a threat to liberal white values for whichwhites (and blacks let me add) alone have made significant blood sacrifice.

Much of what happens in Desi land may be understood in terms of PierreBourdieus definition of the habitus: what is essential goes without saying

because it comes without saying (p. 169). Shankars own research into the livesof Desi teens endorses this point as living in habitus explains why so manyactions are self-evidently followed even when cultural theory would suggestotherwise. Arranged marriages, religious practices, intergenerational view-ing of Bollywood, language use at home, code-switching and varieties ofEnglish usage among Desi teens, all these exist and are followed becausethey are habitual. Thus notions of hybridity or Salman Rushdies




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mongrelization are not so much a matter of internalizing the dominantculture and translating it, as ways of glossing ones life-world in a habituswhich has its own socio-cultural dynamic. In this dynamic, the Desi may be

outwardly postmodern and inwardly conservative. Shankars study explainsthis dilemma in multicultures generally when she addresses Desi participa-tion in multicultural programmes which, often, understand cultures as fos-silized and timeless.

Despite all their flaws, multicultural programs are valued spaces ofrepresentation for Desi youth. Indeed, these spaces are rare andcherished opportunities for Desi teens to define themselves to their

peers. Choices of music, costume, choreography, and other stylisticelements enable them to display Desi teen culture in their schools.Such choices are far more complex and nuanced than the reductivestereotypes of Desis in the media or in their curricular lessons aboutIndian Culture. Yet it is often this very essentialist nature of SouthAsian culture that their peers and school faculty expect to see duringthese programs. Indeed, the reductive character of multiculturalismoften lays to waste students efforts as audiences anticipate cultural

representations they consider to be authentic or traditional.Negotiations of what it means to be a Desi come to a head in theseprograms, as do broader questions of race, class, and gender equity.(pp. 1212)

The passage is taken from Shankars chapter on High School Desi studentsparticipating in Multicultural Week. As she points out, in actual practicewhen Desi or any other ethnic youth group is asked to perform during a

designated multicultural day or week, all the essentialist assumptions aboutethnicity and culture come to the fore. Expectations remain locked intoprior or received hegemonic presumptions but these expectations are nowbeing critically interrogated and not silently set aside as Desi teens projectthemselves as fully-formed and complex people rather than as symbols of aparticular ethnic group. Shankars study therefore tells us about the everydaylife-experiences of Desi teens as they play to the stereotype but also decon-

struct that stereotype from within.A different way to world things is how Iain Chambers addresses theissue in the context of what he calls Mediterranean Crossings, which is alsothe title of his new book. Chambers is an extraordinarily gifted writer,arguably among a small group of impressive stylists in the area of culturalstudies. He writes with a rare facility; he is always remarkably lucid andclear; his sentences models of elegant variation. But his style is also seductive




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to the extent that he convinces by virtue of the style itself which is inim-itable. In this extremely readable and creative book Chambers offers a cri-tique of erstwhile charting of modernity:

if maps, movement, and mobility are clearly among the most obviousmeans of charting modernity, their contemporary restriction andblockage simultaneously also suggest another, darker and more dis-quieting account. The very right to travel, to journey, to migratetoday increasingly runs up against the borders, confines, and con-trols of a profound unfreedom that characterizes the modernworld. (p. 3)

Today walls and fences restrict and confine movement, contrary to the en-lightened trajectory of modernity. For Chambers the Mediterranean func-tions as a metaphor of the new constraints, what Blake referred to aschartered street and mind-forged manacles, in our contemporaryworld. Whereas once the Mediterranean was a fluid, mobile space withoutnational boundaries and covered all the littoral lands, now it has beenbounded and worlded in a very different manner. What has emerged

now is a hegemonic Mediterranean which excludes its subaltern other; itis a Mediterranean which has lost its older legacy of interconnectedness andopenness. An Occidental modernity (varied to an Occidental humanism)now sees itself as a defender of a world from the onslaught of Islam, fromthe Ottoman Turks who for centuries were in fact part of the Mediterraneanworld and its most important imperial power, having dislodged the Romansalong the way. The Mediterranean has to be recovered, its poetry foundagain, its dynamic being given new meaning. Instead of the bland, wooden

narrative of prose, we need to recharge it with the beauty of poetry.

Here the dominant language of mimesis gives way to a more raggednarrative that arrives through a rent in Occidental sense to insist onanother way of telling, another way of being, in which the gesture ofthe body, the performance of poetics, the distillation of being in asound exceeds the conclusive logic of a monument, a book, a map, anarchive, a law. (p. 10)

The Mediterranean has been reduced to a monophonic discourse, to a worldbound by principles of exclusion and contained within a spurious occidentalhumanism and instrumental rationality. But was the Mediterranean (and byextension Europe and the world generally) ever so hermetically sealed?Chambers rhetorical question Whose Mediterranean? requires the logicof a multiple modernity, a polyphonic voice. The Ottoman Empire was once




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referred to as the sick man of Europe but today Turkey, the national centreof the Ottomans, is seen as a country which should be excluded from theEuropean imaginary. And this when Turkey has been such a central part of

Europe having its own positive as well as negative histories: the glories ofIstanbul alongside the horrors of the Armenian massacres between 1915 and1922. Chambers makes the latter point to establish that the illnesses anddiseases of the Mediterranean/Europe are shared equally by Turkey and yetits exclusion from the European Union is based on the Gramscian dichotomyof hegemony/subaltern groups which now frames a European world-viewgenerally. This being so what is needed is a return to the Mediterranean as anunstable site with rhythms of a different kind. These rhythms, marked by amultiplication of tempos, textures and temporality (p. 19), require a dif-ferent scansion of history, a more nuanced, poetic reading of the space of theMediterranean. The unraveling which becomes necessary (and which takes usback to the real legacy of Europe) is one which would dismantle the currentparanoia with differences and with the extension of the values of the West asbeing self-evidently universal. Adorno had written about creative hatred oftradition; Chambers, after Pasolini, writes about the need to cultivate an

atrocity of doubt (p. 21). In this way alone can one avoid reducing theworld to the intolerant straitjacket of instrumental reason (p. 22).

The maps of the Mediterranean are therefore a lot more complex, itshistories showing considerable intermingling which is being denied in thecurrent political climate of division, absolute difference and exclusion. SoChambers language is one which uses metaphors of ruin, the waves andcurrents of the sea, unstable locations, narrative of passage, cultural cross-

overs, creolization. In this way alone can a monotheistic Occidental hu-manism face up to its own past, its own ghosts. Only a polylinguistic andpolycultural (p. 32) understanding of the Mediterranean can dismantle aEuropean subject-centred objectivity or world picture (after Heidegger)and accommodate alternative reasons. If there is a unity of theMediterranean, concludes Chambers, it is perhaps a hidden, criticalunity where the sea itself, as the site of dispersion and drift, exposesthe fragility of inherited configurations (p. 149). What is therefore proposedis a new poetics of interpretation which would, like the romantic lamp,illuminate new areas of meaning and not, like a mirror, simply reflect its ownprosaic and highly paranoid drama. Such an interpretation would require areturn of the Mediterranean to its historically and culturally contaminatedroots and routes; it would require the metaphor of the icy current andcompulsive course of the Pontic sea rather than the prosaic language of a




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handkerchief spotted with strawberries with which to reflect upon its owntraumatic past.

Chambers has written an unusually poetic book for a cultural theorist. As

his literary metaphors show the enabling intertext here is not so muchhistorical archives as a creative rendition of that archive along the lines ofworks such as Amitav Ghoshs In an Antique Land. And this connection ex-plains why there is a nostalgia for a boundaryless world which existed beforeEuropean imperialism began to break the world up with a masculine evan-gelism in one hand and instrumental reason in another. In this post-colonialtake, for Chambers, that lost world has to be found again and freedom madea crucial part of national polities. What gets lost in the deft move to

post-colonial theory are the changes in world views and the desire on every-ones past to return to ones own known worlds, to living in diasporas ratherthan in fluid, hybrid states. So that in the end Chambers persuades not byforce of contemporary historical reality but by a mode of discourse so per-suasive and in the end so remarkably poetic that it convinces in spite of theevidence to the contrary. By a sleight of hand and through the construction ofa romantic Ottoman/Islamic other in the littoral Mediterranean states,

Chambers recalls a lost world of interconnectedness and old-fashionedhumane values which he then recommends as the answer to the economicallyuneven and racially divided world we inhabit. That there are different rea-sons and different kinds of modernities is something which is self-evidentlytrue. That they are equally self-reflexive and accommodating is not neces-sarily true. When a culture or religion, for whatever reason, refuses tocountenance its own absoluteness and the unquestioned primacy of its reve-lation; when a culture cannot theorize itself in terms other than religion and

does not have a place for non-believers, independent women, gays andlesbiansalternative life-styles generallythen recourse to liberal ghostsof yesteryear does not help. Chambers has written a poetic book; it is,however, about the past as a kind of nostalgic literary-cultural historyrather than as a meditation on the immensely urgent political problemsfacing not only the West but the world generally: John Lennons,Imagine requires believers in Teheran and Islamabad as well as in Rome.

If there is beautiful writing in Chambers book and a sad look at theworld as it once was, if there is a sense in which the West has lost its valuesof enlightenment and liberal democracy, in Robert Youngs book there is oneportion of the world (albeit beyond the narrow confines of theMediterranean) out of which grew the idea of decency and respect forother cultures. Strange as it may sound in the context of a critical surveyof multiculturalism that world was the world of the English. Young has




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written many books since editing a seminal post-structuralist reader Untyingthe Text (1981). In The Idea of English Ethnicity Young is about his best largelybecause it is focused and his conclusions are uncluttered. We may enter this

book through a citation from its first pages.Englishness was created for the diasporaan ethnic identity designedfor those who were precisely not English, but rather of Englishdescentthe peoples of the English diaspora moving around theworld: Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, SouthAfricans, even, at a pinch, the English working-class. Englishness wasconstructed as a translatable identity that could be adopted or

appropriated anywhere by anyone who cultivated the right language,looks, and culture. It then allowed a common identification with ahomeland that had often never been seen. Englishness paradoxicallybecame most itself when it was far off. (pp. 12)

This is prose written with confidence, the kind of confidence lacking inYoungs post-colonial work where as it is not uncommon with manynon-native informant writers, discriminations are not as precise and enthu-

siasm often mars the recognition of cruel facts, facts such as the uneven andoften unpleasant histories of many post-colonial nations. Here Youngs ob-servations grow out of an inner, lived experience sharpened by his know-ledge of a vast post-colonial archive. For what is implicit in his definition ofEnglishness beyond its compass as a marker of the English out there in thecolonies is the recognition that even the non-English could become English.The homeland (but not the diaspora) English acceptance of a Nehru(though, mercifully, not a Gandhi) or a Vidia Naipaul or even a Salman

Rushdie makes the case remarkably well. Not being in place (p. 20)meant that being English was always about being out of place (p. 19)which also explains the unease the English had about ethnicity generallyfor without an established location, the sense of an ethnic identity is anuneasy category for purposes of self-examination.

Kipling, of course, had made the case with typical epigrammatic econ-omy: And what should they know of England who only England know

(p. 229). Earlier, Young had shown the views of Thomas Arnold, Matthewsdad, who had lectured at Oxford on the grand Teutonic/German ancestry ofthe English and had indeed declared, half of Europe, and all America andAustralia, are German more or less completely, in race, in language, or ininstitutions, or in all (p. 27). Youngs own argument finds support in Kiplingin as much as England had now become that vaster civilization, encounteredall over the globe (p. 230). There were, of course, specific instruments or




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transportable set of values (p. 232)Shakespeare, cricket, common sense,detachment, balance, reserve, decency, fair play, the very well then re-sponse to difference, and so onwhich helped create an English diasporic

identity, an identity carefully constructed through acts of self-projection onto the English in the Empire. The fact that these characteristics were care-fully cultivated and were not in any way intrinsic to a people needs empha-sizing. To understand Englishness in these terms takes us to the heart ofcurrent debates about a British multicultural identity. As a general rule (andthis rule being general may not be true) multiculturalism locates itself in abinary of diversity versus a homogeneous, identifiable and hegemonic uni-formity. The fact, however, in the British context is that there was never ahomogeneous traditional Englishness which because it happened elsewherewas therefore in no urgent need for multicultural theorizing. The curiousemptiness of Englishness because it could never be located here (it wasalways there as Rushdies S.S. Sisodia stutters about English history) meantthat for many in Britain there was no need for a multicultural theory becausea localized dominant group never existed. In other words the English neversaw themselves as an ethnic category. From the Naipaul brothers, Nirad

Chaudhuri and Salman Rushdie to the many Indian critics and writerswhat we find is a confirmation of Youngs observation that Englishness wasan invisible norm against which all other ethnicities were measured and thatnon-white people would also be able to respond to the idea of Englishnessand be able to negotiate their own identifications (p. 239) because of theEnglish tolerance of the difference of others (p. 240). The English sens-ibility implicit in F.R. Leavis was something which could be easily interna-lized by a Professor Harish Trivedi or a Professor C.D. Narasimaiah. Youngsunderstanding of the Englishin places romantic, in other places a study ofthe return of the ethnic repressedwill not go unchallenged by multicul-tural scholars for its failure to address how racism emerges in spite of agroups (a group because the English, in this argument, neither constitutean ethnic collective nor a race) refusal to see itself as a homogeneous foun-dational constituent of the national polity. Nevertheless for anyone familiarwith the life-worlds of the colonies, there is intrinsic value in Youngs

understanding of the English.

In the English case, what is astonishing but unmistakable is that thecultural apparatus developed for the English diaspora of the colonialsettler empire was successfully translated and reincorporated into amodern ideology of a tolerant multiracial society . . . England and theEnglish have always involved a syncretic community of minorities,




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then as now. There can always be one more. This is the syntheticsecret of English society . . . whose tolerant liberalism is activelyinclusive, self-critical and, in what is probably now yesterdays par-

lance, multicultural. . .

(p. 239)Multiculturalism, a word in yesterdays parlance is now being rethoughtthrough different paradigms and through different ways of assembling know-ledge. Both Iain Chambers and Robert Youngs books bear testimony to theshift which has taken place. And both, from what I have read of their works,have ended up writing their best books in large part because the presumedideological binaries of the multicultural have now shifted so dramatically.

It is this shift which has led to the writing of books that examine, case bycase, quite specific inter-cultural issues without necessarily either offeringsolutions to the multicultural problem or different ways of theorizing it.One such book published in 2008 is The New German Jewry and the EuropeanContext. We have got so used to a decidedly American-Israeli world view ofJewish life generally that other ways of thinking through recent Jewish his-tory is not seen as legitimate. To see Israel, for instance, as Daniel andJonathan Boyarin have done, as a subversion of Jewish culture and not itsculmination (p. 2) is an act of betrayal. Less dramatically to see Jewish lifefrom a European perspective is considered to be equally inadmissible. Whatthis collection of essays edited by Y. Michal Bodemann proposes to do is tobring back Europe as an important factor in our understanding of contem-porary Jewish history. To do this one has to find release from a hegemonic(that is Israeli and American Jewry) reading of Europe as irredeemablyconnected to the Shoah/Holocaust and hence either perpetrator or guilty

accessory to an unspeakable evil. Diana Pinto in her essay in the volumeexplains the reading of Europe as follows:

the American interpretation comes together with the Israeli vision ofEurope as a continent eager to dispense teachings about the MiddleEast without, however, ever having confronted the horror of its ownpast. (p. 17)

It follows that European responses to the Jewish dilemma cannot be delinkedfrom the state of Israel whose survival is seen as the unending struggle ofJewish people. If on the one hand there is European guilt (which it is askedto forever affirm) and on the other a European commitment to a liberalworld order in which the Holocaust can never happen again, then what doesone do with this rather dangerous breach between Europe and the Jewishworld? The European view, at times constrained by Europes own




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increasingly assertive Muslim citizens, cannot overlook Israels own treat-ment of minorities which Pinto refers to as the growing discrepancy be-tween the rights Jews possess across Europe and the rights non-Jews possess

in Israel (p. 19). It is as if when it comes to Israel some fundamental liberalquestions cannot be raised without Europe being constantly reminded of itspast. Further, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and massive migration ofMuslims and other non-Europeans to Europe, a fact which led to ethnicitiesbeing defined along multicultural lines, European Jews not only feel desta-bilized and fragile but also unable to shake off their reconstruction as ahomogeneous group. In this newly found Europe (post-Communist,a larger European Union) there is not only a greater assertiveness but a

seeming indifference to the anguish of the Jews whose own nation, Israel, isnot in Europe. A people of memory rather than history now find them-selves abandoned; their own lives often seen in terms of paranoia andborder security (of Israel) and not through a multicultural, porous under-standing of national boundaries. In this reading the Jews are becoming theexact antithesis of the European. Of course, Holocaust commemorationsseen by many Jews as a means of making this evil solubleonly exacer-

bated the wounds in as much as these commemorations tried to explain awayacts and exculpate the perpetrators. For Jews not living in Europe memoryof the holocaust has been fossilized so that they are eternally present withthemselves as eternal victims. Pinto writes about this millennial anguishwhich makes Jewish reconciliation with Europe so difficult but she alsosuggests that two key conceptsthe idea of the Judaeo-Christian traditionand that of the Enlightenment (p. 26)need to be rethought.

But Jews also have an uneasy relationship with democracy for after all

Hitler came to power democratically. In a multicultural democratic Europewhere Jews as a minority are outnumbered by the larger Muslim minority10:1 it would stand to reason that the stridently anti-Jewish attitudes ofMuslims would carry greater political mileage. In this reading of democracy,Jews can feel safe only in their homeland where regardless of demographicshifts the pre-eminence of Jews will remain unchallenged. So can Europeansreconcile themselves with the Jewish world and vice versa? There are diffi-

culties on both sides. First, Europe will never be able to act as honest brokerover the IsraeliPalestinian crisis if Jews cannot reconcile themselves toEuropean history. Second, Jews see post-2000 Europe as they didpre-democratic Eastern Europe: unable to rein in its anti-Semitism andunable to integrate its recent migrants. Third, there is a sense in whichthe old Toynbee or Spengler cyclical readings of history are at work here asEurope is seen as undergoing a terminal decline. So much via a reading of the




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general attitudes of a global Jewry. For Pinto the way out lies with EuropeanJews themselves who are now very much in a minority but significant enoughas European citizens with a long past to be able to change general Jewish

perceptions of Europe. European Jews should know only too well Europescommitment to never again is carved out in stone, its commitment to a fairand decent society is bound by universal values and the duty of memory(p. 30). These may read as suggestions only but they show the necessity ofachieving a correct ethical ground of existence between Jews and Europe; aco-existence made even more urgent in a new multicultural Europe wherethe latters own tragic treatment of Jews is both a haunting presence but alsoa sign that it can never ever be repeated.

[E]verything, or nearly everything, is or can be associated with the Jews(p. 35), writes Dan Diner in his contribution to the volume. Although, inmore general terms, this is true of religion (to rephrase Dostoevsky onGogols cloak, all monotheistic religious have grown out of Abrahamscloak) Diner is here speaking about the Jews and Europe where they werea European population, indigenous Europeans avant la lettre (p. 35). Thepoint is that the Jews were transnational and lived without a defined sense of

the nation-state. As non-territorial, multilingual, mobile, diasporic and im-mensely resourceful people, their life worlds were situated beyond, beside,or above that form of the body politic which is generally denominated as thenation-state (p. 35). In present day Europe, where borders are fluid andcurrencies unified, the Jews were modern in as much as they were childrenof the law of reason, and pre-modern in as much as they had no under-standing of the forces which create unified nation-states. In this respectEurope has much to learn from the Jews and this in itself may well be an

answer to the question posed by Diana Pinto.I want to return to Bodemanns volume a final time through Sander

Gilmans brilliant essay on the Jewish diasporic experience and Islam intodays multicultural Europe. Secular Europe, suggests Gilman, has itsroots in the manner in which Europe came to terms with Christianity inthe wake of its own post-Reformation wars. For Gilman it is not a matter ofnow making connections between Judaism and Islam as Abrahamic reli-

gions; rather it is a matter of thinking through the entry of Muslims intoEurope in ways not dissimilar to Jewish entry into Europe many generationsbefore: a religious minority enters into a self-described secular (or secular-izing) society that is Christian in its rhetoric and presuppositions and thatperceives a special relationship with this minority (pp. 567). Gilmanmakes comparisons between Jewish presence in Europe in the nineteenthcentury and Muslims in present day Europe by drawing attention to an




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earlier age in which Jews had to make compromises so as to live alongsideChristians. With or without Albania and Turkey as part of a unified Europe atsome future stage, Muslims have to do the same. Gilman also understands

that in the Europe of today it is the concept of multiculturalism that seemsto provide a new model for understanding ethnicity and religion (p. 61).Built as multicultural theory is on notions of hybridity, on the role of culturein our lives, on pluralism and the critique of nationalism, on subcultures andidentity politics, on diasporic alliances and, finally, on debates as to whethercultures should exist as autonomous or integrated collectivities withinnation-states, one reads it as an uncanny image of the Jewish experience.Like the Jews, Muslims too are now understood as ethnicity rather than

religion, in other words the Muslim is deemed to have become deterritor-ialized as the difference between a Moroccan and a Pakistani is elided. Andyet the history of the Jews in Europe takes one back to the corporeal, thebody. In Germany, Jewish bodies did matter even when outwardly there wasno difference, and they did so hard to become Germans. At this pointGilmans citation from the Turkish-German Zafer Senocaks novelDangerous Relations (Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft, 1998) may be quoted.

Many orientalists were German Jews. They attributed to the Orienteternal tyranny, fatalism, immutability, and difference. Who wouldhave thought that their grandchildren would become Orientals liketheir ancestors? (p. 67)

The ironynoted by Gilmanis that the Turks are trying desperately tobecome Germans while the Jews are becoming Israelis. The Jews had tried itall in their attempts to become Germans and failed miserably. Can the Turks,

through this new multicultural celebration of hybridity, be more successfulor is it that even after language has been mastered, the Oriental Turk willonly be just that, an oriental, and hybridity will expose him or her to adouble risk? It is a pessimistic view of a multicultural Europe which can onlywork if we are to read only one version of Jewish-European history, theversion which ended in the catastrophe of the Shoah (p. 70). There are otherhistories, other negotiations which can be of value to German-Turk relations

in Europe. These and other issues are taken up in Bodemanns very fine vol-ume, and especially in Bodemanns own chapter in the volume co-authoredwith Gokce Yurdakul.

Multiculturalism has it and so does secularism: there is a sense in whichaccommodation must take the form of incorporation into some idea of atranscendent subject or at least the transformation of the minority subjectinto one. While minor narratives and difference are encouraged and even




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multiculturalism' by vijay mishra

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