Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism: Between Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

The relationship between multiculturalism and postcolonialism appears to be an uneasy one. Multiculturalism deals with theories of difference but unlike postcolonialism, which is to a great extent perceived to be defined by its specific historic legacies in a retroactive way, multiculturalism deals with the management (often compromised) of contemporary geo-political diversity in former imperial centres and their ex-colonies alike. It is also increasingly a global discourse since it takes into account the flow of migrants, refugees, diasporas, and their relations with nation-states. The reason for continuing to focus on multiculturalism, particularly a critical multiculturalism, is precisely because it is so intimately bound up in many parts of the world with those practices and discourses which manage (often in the sense of police and control) 'diversity'. Within critical theory it has often been an embarrassing term to invoke partly because it is seen as automatically aligned with and hopelessly co-opted by the state in certain kinds of conscious nation-building. As a result, for example, it is consistently rejected by anti-racist groups in Great Britain.' In the realm of theoretical debate it is often associated with an identity politics based on essentialism and claims for authenticity which automatically reinstate a version of the sovereign subject and a concern with reified notions of origins. Thus it becomes impossible, it seems, to mention multiculturalism and socially progressive critical theory in the same breath. But it is for all those reasons, precisely because it is a contested term, that it is crucial to continue to scrutinize the discourses and practices mobilized in the name of multiculturalism.