Beyond the Romance of Multiculturalism: Radicalizing Difference and Community in Cultural Studies

Abstract

Miranda Joseph. 2002. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $18.95 sc. xxxvi + 231 pp. E. San Juan, Jr. 2002. Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. $24.95 sc. xii + 428 pp. Thomas R. West. 2002. Signs of Struggle: The Rhetorical Politics of Cultural Difference. Albany: SUNY Press. $57.50 hc. $18.95 sc. xi + 149 pp. Identity politics, though most often performed as a rejection of and effort to transform dominant culture, has nonetheless been an ongoing object of critique among leftist theorists. Traditional Marxists, of [End Page 181] course, have taken issue with the focus on cultural identity rather than economics, while poststructuralists have questioned the essentialism and othering suggested by any appeal to singular identity (Heyes 2002). Even so, the contemporary world, perhaps especially in the militaristic aftermath of September 11, seems a space that intensely needs the kind of analysis made available by concepts associated with identity politics—concepts like community, culture, and difference. To what extent, for example, does a racializing discourse of difference continue to function as a way to "other" people of the Middle and Far East, and how does this discourse contribute to renewed nostalgia for an imagined peaceful and democratic United States community? How do concepts of difference and community circulate in and help to sustain the globalized "Empire" that Hardt and Negri so expertly describe and that takes an especially visible form in the current occupation of Iraq? Although no doubt completed before the events of 9/11, all three books under review here offer useful tools for radically rethinking Empire, a regime whose work is coming into ever sharper focus. While rejecting romanticized views of difference and community, the three authors nonetheless find much of value in these concepts for furthering radical, anti-capitalist projects. Recuperating the radical potential of community through a process of cultural critique is precisely Miranda Joseph's goal in Against the Romance of Community. Expertly moving between and bringing together Marxist and poststructuralist theory, Joseph seeks to understand the ongoing attraction of concepts of community in contemporary culture and theory while slipping past the conundrum of "identity." Rather than focusing on the traditional categories of difference and sameness that have informed identity politics, Joseph looks at social processes, the ways in which "social relations and social activities [are] mobilized for particular political and economic purposes" (xxxii). Thus, rather than examining community as a static concept or a static formation, she questions the function of community as concept and strategy. She points out that despite the fact that critiques of community have been made by poststructuralist and feminist scholars for the past twenty years, "a celebratory discourse of community relentlessly returns"; her project is to understand why it returns (2002, viii). Having participated in identity political projects herself, Joseph hopes to "interrupt the reiteration of community" in order to reclaim its potential value as a vehicle for social change: "Fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the enactment of domination and exploitation. I see the practice of critique, and in particular a critical relationship to community, as an ethical practice of community, as an important mode of participation" (ix). [End Page 182] Joseph employs both ethnographic and discursive analyses to argue "that both the rhetorical invocation of community and the social relationships that are discursively articulated as community are imbricated in capitalism" (viii-ix). She arrives at this conclusion by first establishing community as capitalism's supplement through a deft theoretical analysis. Noting that late-twentieth century evocations of community (from authors such as Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah) tend to criticize bureaucratization and the welfare state more than capitalism per se, Joseph argues: The critiques of bureaucratic conformism promote differentiation, while the critiques of individualism promote subordination to existing social norms and structures. Taken together, differentiation and subordination would seem to yield hierarchy. . . . [I...