Uncovering lost dreams: re-envisioning multiculturalism through post-colonial lenses

Abstract

Multicultural concepts and practices continue to inform Australian anti-racist pedagogy. Such policies and practices are understood not only as crucial to good community relations but also as controversial and as often failing to achieve their lofty aspirations. Recent literature suggests that multicultural programmes and policies must broaden the way such strategies are understood and analysed. A more critical approach to multicultural theory places before us new lenses, both conceptual and material that consider subjectivity in ways which change understandings of self, culture and the social as they are re/presented in body, space and time. This paper explores these new lenses for understanding in order to negotiate a more critical multiculturalism, which interrogates the principles and practices of multicultural expression, attends to its silences as well to its august promises, and uncovers its lost dreams.