Neoliberal Multiculturalism Research Articles

Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community

Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community

Race, Apology, and the Conservative Ethnic Media Strategy

As part of their campaign leading up to the 2011 federal election, four versions of a Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) political advertisement aired during “ethnic television programming.” These advertisements featured Asian CPC candidates viewing archival photographs of the 1914 Komagata Maru incident and Chinese Canadian railroad workers. These images are overlaid with neoliberal multiculturalism scripts about the Conservatives' recognition of our history and our community's sacrifice. By examining the apologies for the Komagata Maru incident (2008) and Chinese Canadian exclusion (2006) and the 2011 federal election campaign representations of historic anti-Asian regulation, this article explores how such discourses craft Conservative innocence and tell the story of the good political subject as an immigrant that integrates into the nation by putting race behind them.

The knowledge economy and its cultures

Cultural goods are increasingly significant under neoliberal conditions of regulatory restructuring that favor enhanced investments in informational capital in so-called “knowledge economies.” Linguistic difference, linguistic practice, and increasingly standardized genres of representation have been constitutive of new technologies of government and reterritorialization in Latin America in the last quarter-century as global policy regimes that valorize diversity have been interpreted and implemented. The argument is presented through a critical multiscalar survey of recent ethnographic research in Latin American contexts in which we can trace the ways and means through which international trade, intellectual property, and biodiversity regimes have influenced representations and management of knowledge to effect new forms of spatialization. Indigenous social collectives constituted as self-managing communities have embraced possessive, if not necessarily proprietary, attitudes toward traditional knowledge, plant genetic resources, and food sources, learning to mark goods and services to indicate culturally specific conditions of origin. As culturalized communities become subjects of neoliberal government, however, they are called upon to project their distinctive assets so as to make them politically and economically legible to new interlocutors. This has provoked new forms of reflexivity around assets, goods, values, and norms, and new resources for rights-based struggles in an emerging field of cultural politics in which neoliberal multiculturalism is vernacularized in more embedded markets and more pluralist polities.

Reparations and racism, discourse and diversity: Neoliberal multiculturalism and the Canadian age of apologies

Political scientists have recently noted that we live in an “age of apologies”, in which there is a surge of government apologies for certain wrongs. In Canada, there have been at least 10 major apologies since the late 1980s. This paper reviews these apologies, and the ways they articulate with multiculturalism as a state policy. While these apologies are often considered separately, and in political terms, in this paper I argue that it is important to consider them together. To do so helps illuminate some of the political economic dynamics shaping the rise in apologies and why and how this rise in apologies is co-extensive with significant neoliberal transformations in the Canadian state, and of Canadian ways of understanding diversity.

Affirmative Exclusions: The Indigenous Exception in Oklahoma’s Official English

Affirmative Exclusions:The Indigenous Exception in Oklahoma’s Official English Kathryn Walkiewicz (bio) the decade following 9/11 saw a wave of state and federal legislative efforts to secure borders and identify terrorists. As evidenced perhaps most famously by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the Patriot Act, the “era of terror” ushered in a new relationship between national security, mobility, and surveillance that functioned in tandem with decreased regulation and transparency of national security efforts. Panic about the falling numbers of jobs and resources during the economic recession that followed the 2008 housing market crash, along with heightened militarization, catalyzed a reactionary swing to the far right that assigned significant blame for these national “crises” onto the figure of the “foreigner” as the cause of this terror. As legal scholar Leti Volpp has shown in her work on post-9/11 hate crimes and racial profiling, the terrorist and the immigrant become figures of suspicion which threaten U.S. surveillance of bodies and capital that travel within its parameters unmonitored.1 Moreover, they become conflated—almost one and the same. In the post-9/11 United States, immigration has produced a correlative relationship between the “illegal immigrant” (often read as Spanish-speaking) and the “foreign terrorist” (often read as a Muslim extremist)—both seen as threats to the state’s militarized autonomy and economy, and both aligned in racially and historically loaded ways. In the mid-2000s, official English legislation (also known as the “English-only movement”) gained short-term popularity as a way for states to assert a political stance on autonomy, foreign affairs, and multiculturalism under the valence of patriotism. Thus English became a weapon in the global war on terror, and non-English-speaking individuals became suspect, made synonymous with the figure of the threatening outsider, the immigrant other. Arizona’s official English debates received the lion’s share of media attention, but Idaho, Kansas, and Oklahoma followed suit by passing legislation of their own. In this essay I argue that the Oklahoma Official Language Implementation Act, authorizing an amendment to the state constitution, marked a key rhetorical shift in Indigenous–settler relations. By including an exception for Native language use in the amendment, Native nations are understood [End Page 25] as “affirmative exclusions” (or positive exceptions) to the legislation, in contrast to the perceived foreign “other” targeted under the changes. I begin by outlining the stakes of these changes and presenting an analysis of the exception made for Indigenous languages in the amendment. I then provide historical context for current Indigenous–settler relations in Oklahoma. After situating the amendment in a longer regional history, I move into an analysis of the legislative debates and their contemporaneous press coverage, as well as a discussion of the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism that undergirded the debates. I end with considerations of the larger impact official English may have both in Oklahoma and beyond its borders. The amendment received overwhelming support in a 2010 general vote, but while under discussion in both houses of the legislature in 2009 it garnered outspoken criticism from some key constituents. English symbolically registered national and state pride for many Oklahomans, but compulsory language use also triggered memories of the state’s long colonial history. As State Representative Mike Brown (D) emphatically insisted in 2009 legislative debates, official English “reek[ed] of forced assimilation.”2 The legislation echoed language debates of a prior era in which Native peoples, particularly children, as a method of assimilation and colonial acculturation were forcibly required to stop speaking their Indigenous languages and only speak English; history threatened to repeat itself (yet again) in Oklahoma.3 But legislators who supported the bill insisted that it was not about repeating the sins of Oklahoma’s colonial past. Rather, they assured, it was about protecting current citizens from the threat of a cultural and economic terror ushered in by an imagined inundation of immigrants. The 2010 official English amendment, now Article XXX of the state constitution, was part of a post-9/11 conservative turn in state-level politics that proposed anti-immigrant xenophobic reform and asserted a return to states’ rights as necessary to...

States of violence: Indigenous women migrants in the era of neoliberal multicriminalism

The oral histories of indigenous women migrants from Latin America relate human rights violations at every step: in their homes, where violence and impunity compel them to migrate; as they cross the wide expanse of Mexico, encountering a gamut of dangers and a vast sea of impunity, and once they enter the United States, where as asylum seekers they are incarcerated under laws designed to impeded terrorism, or face new vulnerability to partners or strangers if they are undocumented. This is not what was supposed to happen. The multicultural reforms of the 1990s in various Latin American countries that recognized a range of rights for indigenous peoples generated hope and unprecedented social mobilization for indigenous women seeking to fully access their human rights. However since that time, life has gotten more difficult. The promises of neoliberal multiculturalism of the 1990s, however constrained, now seem a distant memory. Theorists have dedicated significant effort to understanding the limitations of neoliberal rights regimes for indigenous peoples, but today, the generalized irrelevance of those regimes suggests that we need to shift our lens. Based on migrant women’s oral histories, I explore how indigenous women are being interpellated by states and other social actors in ways that render even their most basic human rights unattainable. Further, I expand on that analysis to consider how state and non-state power is working in the current moment, which I argue is characterized not so much by neoliberal multiculturalism, as by neoliberal multicriminalism in which violent, corrupt, and lawless states are driven by profit motives in massive scale illegal economies that lack any reasonable regulation or protection of basic human rights.

The Western in the Global South ed. by MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi and Dayna Oscherwitz

Reviewed by: The Western in the Global South ed. by MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi and Dayna Oscherwitz Susan Kollin MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz, eds., The Western in the Global South. New York: Routledge, 2015. 264pp. Cloth, $140. This volume of fifteen scholarly essays offers a timely overview of the travels and transformations shaping the Western through its development across the Global South. With an introduction that situates this work in film history, transnational studies, and post-colonial theory, the collection addresses a tremendous range of cinematic Westerns produced in a variety of locations including South Africa, Chad, Jamaica, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Colombia, Thailand, India, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and elsewhere. As some of the contributors indicate, global film production has moved beyond the tradition of spaghetti Westerns that became popular in the 1960s and that critically challenged the US form. We in fact now have a new body of films that are affectionately described as “Cassava” and “Kangaroo” Westerns by various West African and Australian audiences (24, 130). Neil Campbell’s preface offers a useful entry for discussing this highly diverse group of films by building on Derrida’s considerations of genre as involving “participation without belonging” to the dominant tradition, extending Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “minor” literature to the field of global post-Westerns (xv), and referencing Bahktin’s idea of “re-accentuation,” a process that “rein-vigorates the American genre to show its underside” as well as the imaginative forces “driving its heroic repetition of American values and identities” (xviii). While the contributors show they have a deep knowledge about film histories of the Western as well as genre theory, their arguments find equal inspiration from frameworks emerging out of Third Cinema (189) and the critical work of postcolonial scholars [End Page 105] such as Manthia Diawara, Frantz Fanon, and Achille Mbembe. In developing a counter-archive of the Western in global contexts, for instance, author Tsitsi Jaji foregrounds the imaginative “pleasures of playing the outlaw” (33), as audience members find themselves identifying with onscreen characters, rescripting the Western’s thematics involving the law and lawlessness and “the legitimacy of the state” (26), while recasting the bad guy as a crucial vehicle for bringing about much-needed “reparative justice” in the postcolony (27, 81). Likewise, in their essay on the mash-up between the classic Western and the Asian action film, Jesus Jimenez-Varea and Milagros Expósito-Barea describe the “delirious pastiche” located in director Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger, the first Thai movie to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival (154). As the essays indicate, the Western genre has proven to be especially resilient throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, able to sustain ongoing revision or permutation across different film traditions. Extending arguments Marcia Landy has previously made about the form, Giovanna Trento suggests that this is in part because the Western, like other action genres, often takes the “social order” as its prime focus (47). In certain contexts, then, Westerns may be a useful tool for questioning ruling ideas about savage-ry and civilization, a central division fueling the genre and colonial imaginaries alike. Cinematic Westerns in the Global South may also endure, as Clifford T. Manlove aptly notes, because they frequently “inspire their audiences to critically engage with history, especially the unbearable, invisible histories of modern colonialism” (69). In this way, Brent Strang offers a transnational reading of director Tommy Lee Jones’s Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), centering on violence in the contested borderlands while examining the interactions between neoliberal multiculturalism, the global drug trade, and post-9/11 cultures of policing and surveillance. In the process, his essay illustrates how the Global South is not a distant place for US audiences after all, but already permeates the American West “through the frame” of Mexico (235). The contributors track surprising revisions and unexpected twists in the form, showcasing how ideas of modernity, the civilizing mission, and myths of progress are frequently critiqued and [End Page 106] dismantled in global Westerns such as M. Karnan’s Kaalam Vellum (1970), Perry Henzell...

Neoliberalism and indigenous knowledge: Māori health research and the cultural politics of New Zealand's “National Science Challenges”

In 2012–13 the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) in New Zealand rapidly implemented a major restructuring of national scientific research funding. The “National Science Challenges” (NSC) initiative aims to promote greater commercial applications of scientific knowledge, reflecting ongoing neoliberal reforms in New Zealand. Using the example of health research, we examine the NSC as a key moment in ongoing indigenous Māori advocacy against neoliberalization. NSC rhetoric and practice through 2013 moved to marginalize participation by Māori researchers, in part through constructing “Māori” and “science” as essentially separate arenas—yet at the same time appeared to recognize and value culturally distinctive forms of Māori knowledge. To contest this “neoliberal multiculturalism,” Māori health researchers reasserted the validity of culturally distinctive knowledge, strategically appropriated NSC rhetoric, and marshalled political resources to protect Māori research infrastructure. By foregrounding scientific knowledge production as an arena of contestation over neoliberal values and priorities, and attending closely to how neoliberalizing tactics can include moves to acknowledge cultural diversity, this analysis poses new questions for social scientific study of global trends toward reconfiguring the production of knowledge about health. Study findings are drawn from textual analysis of MBIE documents about the NSC from 2012 to 2014, materials circulated by Māori researchers in the blogosphere in 2014, and ethnographic interviews conducted in 2013 with 17 Māori health researchers working at 7 sites that included university-based research centers, government agencies, and independent consultancies.

Solidarity in diverse societies: beyond neoliberal multiculturalism and welfare chauvinism

In the postwar period, projects of social justice have often drawn upon ideas of national solidarity, calling upon shared national identities to mobilize support for the welfare state. Several commentators have argued that increasing immigration, and the multiculturalism policies it often gives rise to, weaken this sense of national solidarity. This creates a potential “progressive’s dilemma”, forcing a choice between solidarity and diversity. My aim in this paper is two-fold: first, to argue for the importance of national solidarity as a progressive political resource; and second, to discuss how it can be reconciled with support for immigration and multiculturalism. I will try to identify the prospects for a multicultural national solidarity – a multicultural welfare state, if you will – and to contrast it with the two obvious alternatives: a neoliberal multiculturalism that champions mobility and diversity at the expense of national solidarity; and a welfare chauvinism that champions national solidarity at the expense of immigrants and minorities.

Meritocracy 2.0

High-stakes, standardized testing is regularly used within in accountability narratives as a tool for achieving racial equality in schools. Using the frameworks of “racial projects” and “neoliberal multiculturalism,” and drawing on historical and empirical research, this article argues that not only does high-stakes, standardized testing serve to further racial inequality in education, it does so under the guise of forms of anti-racism that have been reconstituted as part of a larger neoliberal project for education reform. This mix of neoliberalism, high-stakes testing, and official anti-racisms that are used to deny structural, racialized inequalities are a manifestation of what the author calls, “Meritocracy 2.0.”

El programa «Juntos»: en la intersección del multiculturalismo neoliberal y del indigenismo estatal peruano

La creacion de los programas de transferencias monetarias condicionadas en America Latina se situa dentro de las politicas economicas de los anos ochenta y noventa, en los cuales las crisis economicas y financieras y los efectos de las medidas neoliberales exacerbaron la pobreza y las desigualdades. Dichos programas tienen como objetivo ayudar a las familias pobres a salir del circulo vicioso de pobreza e incentivar la inversion en el capital humano de los ninos con transferencias monetarias, a condicion de que las familias presten atencion a la salud y la educacion de sus hijos. En este contexto, el articulo propone abordar los objetivos y las condicionalidades del programa «Juntos» implementado en el Peru a partir del 2005, desde dos perspectivas de analisis. La primera es el esquema tradicional de integracion de las poblaciones indigenas dentro de la cultura politica peruana. La segunda es la concepcion de la condicion indigena por el multiculturalismo neoliberal. Se plantea que la conceptualizacion del programa «Juntos» y sus condicionalidades en materia de salud y educacion no se puede atribuir unicamente a un tipo de innovacion social dentro de la ideologia neoliberal. De hecho, se situa dentro de la cultura politica peruana que se vino formando a traves de varios siglos. A pesar de haber surgido en contextos historicos diferentes, estos esquemas de analisis se imbrican en el diseno y la implementacion del programa «Juntos». La peculiar convergencia entre todos estos elementos historicos en el contexto peruano no implica cambio sino continuacion en cuanto a la integracion de los grupos indigenas a la nacion y a su inclusion social.

Practicing autonomy: Zapatismo and decolonial liberation

ABSTRACTThe Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas has contributed to the construction of indigenous autonomy in Mexico, a process that shares similar features to the struggles of social movements throughout Latin America. This article examines how autonomy became a central demand for the Zapatistas, the practices that they have instituted, and the challenges they face. The analysis draws on recent debates over the political impact of indigenous movements, including the struggle for new models of post-liberal citizenship, the limitations of neoliberal multiculturalism, and the adoption of decolonial forms of resistance. The paper argues that Zapatismo can be understood as an expression of decolonial liberation in which autonomy is constructed through the recreation of social ties in local, national, and international spaces. In doing so, Zapatismo represents a political and theoretical shift that calls for greater attention to the processes and practices that can sustain autonomy.

Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Contract Archeology in Northern Chile

In this article I intend to contribute to the discussion of the social and political consequences of contract archeology in Chile, showing how the practice participates in the construction and reproduction of the logic and values of the market. I shall show how a neoliberal logic is reproduced in the everyday practices and discourses of both the state and archeology. In the case of San Pedro de Atacama (northern, Chile), I shall demonstrate that the link between contract archeology and heritage archeology and the mining and tourism industries forges a disciplinary practice that constructs and is constructed by the neoliberal multicultural state and its ethnodevelopment policies.

Remembering Abuela: Memory, authenticity and place in Puerto Rican Orlando

This article is one piece of a larger work that looks through the case of Puerto Ricans in Orlando, Florida, to examine heterogeneity and political presence in an emerging Latino diaspora community in the US Sunbelt. At issue is the tension between the political appeal to “sameness” as a basis for collective action and the reality of difference. Through an examination of a series of Puerto Rican cultural representations, the article looks at Puerto Rican and Latino political community formation in the Orlando area, and in particular, at the challenges posed by: (i) the racial and class-based lines of exclusion implied in the distinction between island-born and diaspora-born Puerto Ricans, and (ii) the pressure to adopt a whitewashed, middle-class version of Hispanidad, which emerges from Orlando’s post-civil rights era neoliberal multiculturalism.

A Nation of Immigrants and a Nation of Laws: Race, Multiculturalism, and Neoliberal Exception in Barack Obama's Immigration Discourse

This article analyzes the Obama administration's policy and policy rhetoric on immigration, showing that it works around and rearticulates neoliberal visions of race/ethnicity, culture, and U.S. identity. Obama's stories of exemplary assimilated immigrants foreground values such as entrepreneurialism, responsibility, and neoliberal multiculturalism. These stories idealize certain forms of subjectivity and regulate the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of citizenship. Through the logic of neoliberal exception, Obama argues that American identity is both open to all who strive for it and also limited to the “right” kinds of immigrants. Critically analyzing President Obama's celebrated immigration rhetoric, particularly in light of his administration's restrictive immigration policies, can contribute to studies of race, citizenship, and immigration in the neoliberal era.

Portraits of (Un)settlement

This essay considers the production of racialized masculinities in the contemporary artwork of the Singaporean-born queer diasporic artist Dominique Hui and the queer Aboriginal/Cree artist Kent Monkman. Recent debates in anti-racist feminist, queer, and Native feminist scholarship illuminate how diasporic and Indigenous groups are unevenly positioned within a framework of neoliberal multiculturalism and settler state colonialism in the Americas. Accordingly, there are important distinctions in the way that queer diasporic and queer Native artists respond to and challenge hetero- and homonormative models of citizenship in Canada. I examine how Hui's and Monkman's works reflect and mediate the interactions of multiple racialized masculinities in an identity-driven and individualized culture of neoliberalism and global consumer capitalism. Overall, I suggest that applying Native feminist critiques to a relational analysis of queer diasporic and Indigenous masculinities can unsettle and imagine new possibilities for “multicultural” solidarity in Canada—and beyond.

Du néolibéralisme multiculturel aux mobilisations post-multiculturelles

The notion of « neoliberal multiculturalism » has been adopted by critical anthropologists to characterize the dual movement of acknowledgement of cultural diversity and commodification. Nevertheless, in the Chilean case, it seems more appropriate to designate the multicultural mutation that took place in the 1990s, following the neoliberal revolution carried out during the dictatorship (1973-1989), by the term multicultural neoliberalism. For cultural diversity appears to be nothing more than one of the possible domains for the extension of the new neoliberal order. In this context, Indigenous peoples’ social struggle is reduced to a merely cultural or ethnic set of demands. However we shall see that in recent social and environmental conflicts, where the issue at stake has been the question of common goods (education, health, and natural resources), mobilizations have tended to be unethnic and delineate a new post-multicultural space.

Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya

Anthropological, linguistic, historical, and archeological research on the Maya proceeds today amidst public contestation, for political and economic reasons, of the identity of Maya people and the nature of Maya culture. Neo-liberal multiculturalism, struggles over dwindling land and forest resources, the intensification of international tourism, and the growth of pan-Maya movements repeatedly raise the question of who and what is authentically Maya. Our scholarship, while motivated by quite different concerns and interests, unavoidably touches on similar issues in its exploration of the forms and meanings of Maya expression, belief, and ritual from ancient times to the present.

The Reparative Politics of Central America Solidarity Movement Culture

This essay examines the affective structures of the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s. Through an analysis of movement photography, memoir, and Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees , the essay shows how the 1980s Central America solidarity movement was characterized by a disillusionment with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and a valorization of sentimental reparative modes that emphasized affective connections between US and Central American subjects. This reparative orientation often required depoliticizing racial performances from Central Americans, anticipating the demands of neoliberal multiculturalism.

The Multi/Plural Turn, Postcolonial Theory, and Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Complicities and Implications for Applied Linguistics

In applied linguistics and language education, an increased focus has been placed on plurality and hybridity to challenge monolingualism, the native speaker norm, and the modernist view of language and language use as unitary and bounded. The multi/plural turn parallels postcolonial theory in that they both support hybridity and fluidity while problematizing the essentialist understanding of language and identity. However, postcolonial theory, which has been influenced by poststructuralism, met criticisms in the 1990s in cultural studies. The notion of hybridity has been especially criticized for its privileged status, individual orientation, and disparity between theory and practice. Furthermore, the conceptual features of the multi/plural turn overlap with neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, which uncritically support diversity, plurality, flexibility, individualism, and cosmopolitanism, while perpetuating color-blindness and racism. The multi/plural turn also neglects the ways in which neoliberal competition and the dominance of English affect scholars. This article examines the multi/plural trend by drawing on some critiques of postcolonial theory and neoliberal ideologies and proposes an increased attention to power and inequalities as well as collective efforts to resist the neoliberal academic culture underlying the multi/plural turn.