'Multiculturalism' by Vijay Mishra

10
Multiculturalism Multiculturalism
vijay mishra
This years review of multiculturalism looks at the ways in which it continues
to be an umbrella term under which a diverse number of issues related to
race and ethnicity are discussed. The great works on multicultural theory are
a thing of the past and what we are now seeing are either books which take
up quite specic issues or books which use multicultural ideas as ideas of and
from the margins which have now been taken over by mainstream liberal
intellectuals. In this context it is only proper that a book published a year
later (in 2009) is also discussed as part of the 2008 output. Two issues stand
out: the rst relates to the ways in which a European critical modernity can
take us back to a more enlightened way in which matters of cultural dif-
ference may be addressed; the second, in an uncomfortable fashion, suggests
that multiculturalism as a social practice now deals primarily with the
Muslim as the other in need of critical engagement. The latter, disturbingly,
takes us to a reformulation of social practice as no longer a matter of
diversity 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 diversity
and end with a book published a year later (2009) which suggests that a new
marginalism has now become the dominant liberal discourse. The book with
which I begin1|. Mo!..o!o.o! M,.o. by H.E. Baberasks the question:
Is multiculturalism good for anyone at all? In a slightly different vein Susan
Okin had asked the same question in respect of women (Is multiculturalism
bad for women?). Whereas Okins question arose out of unease with de-
mands for difference recognition even when these demands were detrimental
to women generally, Babers question emerges out of recent Jihadist attacks
on New York, London, Madrid, Bali, and other places. With a further
reading of terrorism as a primarily Muslim phenomenon (Baber paraphrases
the common cry: Not all Muslims are terrorist but all terrorists are
1|. 1.o. Pc.| . c....o! o1 co!o.o! 1|.c.,, The English Association (2010)
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
doi:10.1093/ywcct/mbq009

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Muslims) which is then linked to a religion which is by denition militant
(Islam means peace but it is a peace only for the community of Muslim
believers), 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 multicultural
bibliography; Baber gives it a more passionate twist by locating it as well in
her own life-world experiences. Her argument though does not seem to be
totally anti-multiculturalist if, by the latter, one simply means liberal ways of
engendering a more equitable society. Since, however, the latter denition is
not the one in common currency but is conversely identied with a plural
monoculturalist salad bowl doctrine (pp. 89), her argument is that such
an understanding of multiculturalism as both theory and practice is no good
for anyone since no one really wishes to live in such a salad bowl denition
of society.
The book, however, could have been dismissed as old hat if it were not
for the passion with which the writer composes it and the argument she
advances, the latter taking us to multiculturalism as a way of repressing or
silencing some of the excesses of western culture, both economically and
militarily. A key chapter here is Identity-Making (Chapter 9) to which I
want to turn my attention. Here Baber locates modern multiculturalism
neither in the countercultural 1960s nor in the Canadian recognition of
racial communities in the 1970s. Instead she goes back even further and
suggests that it was born in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century
when 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 a
pre-given ethos or culture of separateness already present in the nation as
something akin to a national creed or a national way of accommodating
difference. Left alone in their own private worlds, and supported by a
nation foundered on an ethos of separateness, migrants simply existed as
autonomous groups no different from the earlier Catholic and Protestant
pillars. In this respect migrants from former Dutch coloniesIndonesia and
Surinam for instancesimply became Surinamese or Javanese pillars. With
the arrival of Maghrebi Arabs, another pillar was created. These pillars
which collectively constituted the multicultural mosaicwere relatively
placid groups which went about their business like any migrant group.
In Babers argument, though, recent events which culminated in 9/11
began to radicalize one of these pillars as Muslims regardless of their ori-
ginsSurinam, Java or the Maghrebdeveloped a grand narrative of
2 | Multiculturalism

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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 for
different historical reasons became a feature of European nations as well as of
America and Canada. In the UK it is argued that multiculturalism was
instrumental in shaping, if nor creating, Muslim identity, a point made in
the 2007 report of the British Policy Exchange, t.. +o. 1c.|.. (p. 188).
In America multiculturalism became an escape from a misguided patriotism
which had led to the creation of the ugly American. America became an
ideological symbol, a ravenous imperialist beast with no moral or spiritual
core. 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 context
writes Baber:
American identity had become polarized. America had ceased to be a
piece of land with a history where people livedit had become an
ideology. America was racism, grasping materialism, international
aggression, neocolonialism, and above all the war in Vietnam. No
one I knew wanted to be American. It should hardly be surprising
that there was an interest in alternative identities and afnity groups,
and Americans who hated the conservative political agenda preferred
to identify as female, black, Hispanic, deaf or disabled, or, for that
matter, as Capricorns, vegetarians, or Hare Krishnas. Anything but
Amerikan! (p. 190)
The prose style here is crudely polemical and the generalizations far too
sweeping 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. For
the point is that difference rather than solidarity in the US grew out of
unease about self-projection as national character. In other words, if the bad
press that America receives is a result of the collective ugly American
image then its opposite would be a differentiated and multiply accented
face where the collective (patriotic or nationalistic) American is under eras-
ure. In this respect every citizen is hyphenated, from the rst nation
Americans (Indian-American) and slaves (black-American) to migrants
(Irish-American, Italian-American, Japanese-American, and so on). What
may have begun as a simple gesture to erase a false reading (of the imperialist
American) soon became a celebration of difference. This celebration in the
end, though, left white Americans relatively untouched since they could
enter the grand narrative of assimilation quite easily. It was visible minorities
whose difference became accentuated and ethnic and racial stereotypes began
Multiculturalism | 3

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to rear their heads. In Babers argument the salad bowl which was meant to
replace the melting pot failed. We should therefore discourage practices that
promote cultural diversity, because such practices render ascribed, immut-
able identities salient, impose scripts on members of minority groups, and
restrict 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 with
multicultural theorists. It is, in the end, an assimilationist theory which is
based on the premise that immigrants come to a nation by choice and they
come to it because they wish to embrace its values. By and large this is true
of 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 of
recognition, racism, exclusion from the symbols of the nation, hyphenated
identications, and so on. It is the latter group which now constitutes the
real object of multiculturalism. Baber, along with many liberals, believes that
recognition of diversity makes matters worse; others nd recognition of
difference and degrees of accommodation critical to the well-being of the
modern nation-state.
In 1|. too.. c Mo!..o!o.o! i..o. Pathik Pathak argues that communi-
tarian difference is a cultural fact and should be acknowledged. Drawing
parallels between events in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley (in the summer of
2001) and in the Indian state of Gujarat (in spring 2002), Pathak argues that
the racist nature of these events signify a common reex of the nation-state
to demonize minorities as inassimilable communities and a disinclination to
recognize as citizens (p. 7). A declining multiculturalism, as the argument
goes further, has led to an ascendant majoritarianism. Pathaks book teases
out this link but places the blame on the Left who Pathak suggests have
simply failed to recognize the role of cultural difference and communitarian
sense of solidarity. In their emphasis on class (race, ethnicity, community do
not matter) and then in their uncritical deference to cosmopolitanism, the
Left simply left the entire discourse of multiculturalism in the hands of
liberal neo-conservatives. Nowhere is this more marked than in the writings
of someone like David Goodheart. What then is Pathaks contribution to the
debate and the importance of discussing a worn out theme with reference to
two quite disparate cultures? Even before we examine the thesis, a number
of things strike us. First, there is the question of the historical archive. While
both the British and Indian cases show the ills of a majoritarian ascendancy,
we are not told the very different historical experiences of minorities in
these 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 of
itself 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 reects another history. Pathaks work seems not
to register this difference. The second question relates to the ease with
which the Left is invoked throughout the book. It leads the reader into
thinking that somehow if the Left adopted a more nuanced understanding
of multiculturalism or if they left behind the heavy burden of Marx and
admitted the power of communitarianism all would be well. The argument
concedes too much power to the Left which simply has little if any input in
the workings of the liberal state. Even if the Left adopts Pathaks plea
towards communitarian aspirations, one doubts very much if things would
change. Finally there is Pathaks own thesis which in the end simply becomes
a statement about multicultural recognition of difference and the adoption of
a non-majoritarian world view where the grand narrative of a nation has no
credence whatsoever. The sad, uncomfortable thing is that democracy always
panders to majoritarian views, which is why the Jewish people always felt
uncomfortable with it.
Let us get back to the book if only because it shows how exhausted the
eld has become. What we nd 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 India
and Britain have been consigned to the realm of personal politics and not
considered, 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 collectively
without too much concern with the ways in which it is an expression of a
particularly pernicious world-view at the heart of a culture of exclusion and
xenophobia. In India it has taken the form of the rise of Hindu fundamen-
talism which has constructed an imaginary Hindu nation from which the
Muslims 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 entire
Indian nationalist movementfrom Vivekananda to the Mahatmaused
Hindu discourses to construct the nation. The political terms of all the
nationalist leaders were Hindu, the revolutionary anthems (from oo oo
oo to /o1. o.o) were Hindu as were all the outward signs of the nation.
These signs began to take hold of colonial India even before partition and had
already begun to exclude the Muslim other. Nehruvian secularismmuch

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made of in Pathaks booksimply turned a blind eye to these symbols
without in any way challenging them. In the great Bollywood epic about
India, Mc|.. i1.o (to celebrate the tenth year of its independence), the
Muslim does not exist except as a lone member of a village Panchayat, or the
Urdu speaker whose voice frames the producers logo.
If the Indian section does not work too well as a parallel allegory of the
demise 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 is
that multiculturalism as anti-racist praxis is bereft of an adequate critique of
o. 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 in
its attempt to rid itself of its own investment in race. The challenge to the
state of affairsthe adoption of multiculturalism as a liberal creedneces-
sitates the creation of a coherent strategy which would resist majoritarian
reication of multiculturalism. To mobilize resistance multiculturalism
should return to its philosophical roots (not its institutionally prescribed
forms) and reinvigorate questions of identity and belonging. The latter
would include some kind of political autonomy for minorities as well as a
radical dismantling of power structures both within diasporic and majority
cultures. Here, of course, the failure of the Left is spectacular, and for Pathak
salvation lies in the Lefts rethinking of their hitherto conservative and un-
critical understanding of communitarianism. Pathak makes his own position
clear:
What I will argue here is that multiculturalism is as much a part of
the problem as it is part of the solution, but that its aws are
completely misrepresented by the established Left. (p. 170)
We live in new times, times marked by cultural diversity. The challenge
facing the Left is how to rethink class, redistribution (the greatest good for
the 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 sense
of citizenship along the lines of the American model where the ag, the oath,
the creed, and so on are given prominence. The difculty with such a
proposal is that it denies what Pathak calls the reciprocity of belonging
in favour of the special sensibilities of ideological majorities (p. 189).
A number of consequences follow: cultural diversity and multiculturalism
are 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 the
same process has taken the form of a state communalism which celebrates
the Indian as a Hindu corporate personality (p. 192) against a pluralist and
diversied set of communities. In Britain communitarianism is most marked
among Muslims, a good number of whom see religion as the dening char-
acteristic of their lives. Multiculturalism has obviously failed to deliver the
goods since the form which has triumphed is precisely that endorsed by
someone like Goodheart. How then should one respond to the very real
presence 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 without
pre-empting the ascendancy of a majoritarianism that masquerades
under the equitable language of social or community cohesion that
threatens to stigmatise all expressions of cultural difference and
identity. (p. 196)
Culture therefore becomes important. Its recognition and acknowledgement
are central to any empowering oppositional politics. To the Leftoften
Pathaks primary target as well as the nations likely saviourculture is a
nuisance and an impediment to the democratic society. This should not be so
because culture and cultural difference are important. There is no contra-
diction between adherence to culture and the need for material distribution
since people can aspire to the common good and remain close to their
cultures. Against Goodhearts universally endorsed state citizenry there is
the 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 to
state multiculturalism. The latter, in the end, always endorses a majority
point of view as it seeks to construct a national subject. The former would
confront the reality of modern nations where so many minorities remain
deantly attached to their cultures. The solution, if this reading of Pathaks
book is correct, lies in a nations generosity of spirit, in its acceptance of
varieties 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 its
replacement by uid, competing and minor narratives without any having
the power to become normative? Pathak, it seems, comes pretty close to
endorsing this position.
At the heart of cultural difference is language. The critical bibliography
on 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 key
constituent of identity politics. Stephen Mays book, tooo. o1 M.c..,
r.|, attempts to explore this link. The obvious is dealt with rst.
Nation-states have an investment in language as the adoption of a common
language and culture is one of the cornerstones of the old denition of the
nation: 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 as
impediments to a robust citizenship. This process usually involves the le-
gitimation and ..o.co!..o.c of the chosen national language, writes
May (p. 6). With minorities seeking greater rights in nation-states, linguistic
human rights are now gaining prominence as an important agenda in debates
about multiculturalism. Ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic democracies are
now being spoken about and indeed the argument of Stephen Mays book is
that ethnic and national conicts are most often precipitated when
nation-states .c.. demands for greater cultural and linguistic democracy
(p. 17). One of the more valuable contributions of this book is to debates
about bilingualism and biculturalism. May uses the case of Maori claims to
greater self-determination as the source for a discussion of the ways in which
a 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. Other
races came to its shores, especially from the Pacic, and they too effortlessly
integrated. Things changed in the last decades of the twentieth century with
greater demands made by the nations Maori people for self-determination
and acknowledgment of their own thousand-year history, their language and,
in terms of colonial history, their rights under the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi
which brought to end internecine Maori-settler wars. The Treaty itself exists
in two languagesEnglish and Maori (1. 1.... c Po.o.)and this fact is
itself pivotal especially in the wake of a consciousness about the declining
importance of Maori as a living language. Reading the Treaty in Maori began
to show a different understanding of the rights which the Maori chieftains
had 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 Maori
equivalent, hence Aotearoa/New Zealand) history Maori linguistic recog-
nition was important. This was a natural consequence of rethinking the place
of the Treaty of Waitangi in Maori life-worlds: As a result of the Treatys
return 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 had
become established in political and public discourse . . . and institutionalized
to some considerable extent in law (p. 290).
For multicultural theory, though, New Zealand biculturalism raises some
very fundamental issues, both in respect of principle and the place of other
minorities in the nation. With increasing numbers of Chinese, Indians,
Indo-Fijians, Koreans and Samoans in New Zealand (the Pacic Islander
community getting to be as large as Maori) multiculturalism has been
advanced as a fairer and more inclusive policy than biculturalism. From
the Maori side (both from individuals and from tribunals) have come strong
defense of the special place of Maoris in the nation, a place which multicul-
turalism, by denition, would inevitably dilute. May quotes two studies: the
rst from R. Benton, [multiculturalism] denies Maori people their equality
as members of one among two (sets of) peoples (p. 290) and a second from
the Waitangi Tribunal, we do not accept that the Maori is just another one
of 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 nd disturbing. To them
Pakeha support for multiculturalism has another agenda: to ensure that
Maori bicultural aspirations are, in reality, not fullled. Among these aspir-
ations are: Maori as an ofcial language of the nation (a recognition given in
1987 by the Maori Language Act); Maori as co-owners of the land; Maori as
arbiters of decisions which may affect the nation as a whole. It is unease with
the implicit idea of equal partnership across the board which many Maoris
fear is at the heart of Pakeha interest in multiculturalism. What the unease
and suspicion demonstrate in a very stark and binary form is the whole issue
of liberal white investment in multiculturalism generally. What is true of
New Zealand may be true of all settler nations. Is multiculturalism a way of
diffusing bicultural claims which rst nation peoples in settler nationsthe
US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin Americaare making?
Stephen Mays study of language and minority rights takes us to other
books which deal with specic minority groups as ethnographic rather than
multicultural objects of knowledge, although the two modes of academic
practice are not mutually exclusive. I want to address, in succession, two
books now: Ruth Mandels cccc!.o +.... which looks at the Turkish
diaspora in Germany and Shalini Shankars .. to1, a study of the lives of
South Asian teens in the San Francisco Bay area. Mandels book looks at the
implications of some of the current readings of the Turkish diaspora in
Germany. This diaspora, in recent times, has become a signier of instability

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and anxiety, in national, sub-national, and transnational narrations. Mandel
continues:
These narrations are also invested with competing ideologies,
whether nationalist, religionist, or secularist. Thus the ideological
referents 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 minority
organizations in Germany and civil war in Kurdistan; the ideologies
of transnationalism imply social mobility as well as social and political
marginalization outside the homeland. (p. 3)
There are now some three-and-a-half-million Turks in Germany (out of an
immigrant population of some seven million) making them a very sizeable
minority. The Turks, however, demonstrate an important aspect of diasporic
lives: whereas expressions of ethnic difference were not a feature of their
lives in Turkey (either through state insistence on secularism or through
personal preference), in Germany the Turkish diaspora, right from the start,
began to refashion itself in explicitly nonsecular terms (p. 7). Referred to
as the +o!o1...c/!.o.|, the foreigner question refers not simply to the
Turks (or visible minorities) but to German identity per se: are Germans
from the former Soviet Union truly German or what are the characteristics
of the German? With a horric Nazi past the outsider question has traumatic
implications because it carries signs of an earlier presumption about the
existence of a pure Aryan race. In this context any unease about an inassi-
milable race (Muslim Turks for instance) re-echoes an attitude so deeply
embedded 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 of
citizenship may be one way of rethinking the general question about inclusion
into the nation as denizens. Since Turks (and others) have not been readily
naturalized, it follows that Germanys own unitary history and
quasi-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 return
to a homeland for the Turks; it has either been deferred or exists only as a
frame of reference for identity politics.
In the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 Islam, of course, has been demonized. The
2004 killing of Dutch lmmaker Theo van Gogh provided many Germans
with further evidence of Islams intractability (p. 248). The riding tide of
unease 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 of
this book, of Turks in Germany in particular. Her extensive research into the
life-worlds of Turks in Germany shows that Turks do not speak about Islam
with one voice and Islamic practices themselves nd a variety of expressions
in their daily lives. Writes Mandel:
The assumption that all migrants from Muslim-marked countries by
denition are religiously observant is misleading at best. Many hun-
dreds of thousands of migrants only on the most cursory of levels
identify 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 a
place is found for the migrant other without dismantling the boundaries
which dene difference. In other words the enlightened form of liberal
multiculturalism remains boutique in form as it leaves power relations vir-
tually intact. There is a need, after Derrida, to create an enabling ethics of
hospitality which might decenter the structure of the state (p. 324). Here
Mandels concluding remarks are worth quoting in full:
What then could effect a public recognition that the obsolete
+o!o1...c/!.o.| instead might better be approached as an
i!o1...c/!.o.| to be overcome? Legislation leading to the adop-
tion of a less conditional law of hospitality would pave the way for the
redenition of Germanys relationship to its own outsiders inside.
This might imply, for instance, overcoming the fears of permitting
dual 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 represent
a critical step toward the democratization of cosmopolitanism, where
world-openness necessarily would include the local as well as the
global. (p. 325)
The outsiderinsider question, in a markedly different critical discourse may
be found in Shalini Shankars book to which I now turn my attention. The
book deals with an emergent demographic identity: Desis. Shankar denes
it as countryman although the word itself (the dental s more common in
its palatal s form: 1. ) also has the meaning of indigenous and enters, in
the diaspora, into interesting hyphenated combinations such as 1. .1.
(ones own country and others), 1. .|o!o (banishment, exile) and so
on. Although Shankar denes Desi as the newest in a long line of names to
refer 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 in
the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In the old Indian diaspora a
variant form of desi, o , has been used for indigenous people. This is
certainly true of Fiji. From Shankars own study, it is clear that the term is
most comfortably used by young Indians (or South Asians generally) as a
marker of cultural solidarity and even difference from other groups. But
built into the whole concept of Desi is the idea of the diaspora because for
Desi quotidian life worlds the term signies a way of establishing Indianness
by superimposing Indian modernity onto ones lives in America. In this
context the symbols which bring this modernity into their lived existence
in America are of course Bollywood lms. This is especially true of the target
groups which form the archive of Shankars research. This target group
primarily Indian/South Asian teens in high schools in the Silicon Valley
uses Bollywood creatively to mark out symbols of cultural belonging which
Desi children alone understand. This is not to say that Desi children do not
have other modes of connecting among themselves or with others. Given
that Indians generally pride themselves to see themselves as an upwardly
mobile class, it is not uncommon to nd Desi kids socializing with others
who also aspire to this kind of upward mobility. Of course, skin colour plays
a part and in Shankars study it is not uncommon to nd instances of Desi
children aligning themselves with Mexican teens because they look alike. The
ambiguous position of Indians (especially North Indians who constitute the
vast majority of teens in Shankars target group) in respect of ethnicity
(Caucasian looks with fair skins) also makes it a little easier for them to
enter into relations with white kids too. The fact that the latter is not as
common as it could be, reects the specially hegemonic presumptions which
bind white children in America in as much as they see themselves as being
the ideal or foundational group which has given the nation its grand
narrative. Post-9/11 has also created a climate in which the threat to
America is read in terms of a threat to liberal white values for which
whites (and blacks let me add) alone have made signicant blood sacrice.
Much of what happens in Desi land may be understood in terms of Pierre
Bourdieus denition of the habitus: what is essential c. .|co o,.
/..oo. . .c. .|co o,. (p. 169). Shankars own research into the lives
of Desi teens endorses this point as living in habitus explains why so many
actions are self-evidently followed even when cultural theory would suggest
otherwise. Arranged marriages, religious practices, intergenerational view-
ing of Bollywood, language use at home, code-switching and varieties of
English usage among Desi teens, all these exist and are followed because
they are habitual. Thus notions of hybridity or Salman Rushdies

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mongrelization are not so much a matter of internalizing the dominant
culture and translating it, as ways of glossing ones life-world in a habitus
which has its own socio-cultural dynamic. In this dynamic, the Desi may be
outwardly postmodern and inwardly conservative. Shankars study explains
this 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 aws, multicultural programs are valued spaces of
representation for Desi youth. Indeed, these spaces are rare and
cherished opportunities for Desi teens to dene themselves to their
peers. Choices of music, costume, choreography, and other stylistic
elements enable them to display Desi teen culture in their schools.
Such choices are far more complex and nuanced than the reductive
stereotypes of Desis in the media or in their curricular lessons about
Indian Culture. Yet it is often this very essentialist nature of South
Asian culture that their peers and school faculty expect to see during
these programs. Indeed, the reductive character of multiculturalism
often 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 these
programs, as do broader questions of race, class, and gender equity.
(pp. 1212)
The passage is taken from Shankars chapter on High School Desi students
participating in Multicultural Week. As she points out, in actual practice
when Desi or any other ethnic youth group is asked to perform during a
designated multicultural day or week, all the essentialist assumptions about
ethnicity and culture come to the fore. Expectations remain locked into
prior or received hegemonic presumptions but these expectations are now
being critically interrogated and not silently set aside as Desi teens project
themselves as fully-formed and complex people rather than as symbols of a
particular ethnic group. Shankars study therefore tells us about the everyday
life-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 the
issue in the context of what he calls Mediterranean Crossings, which is also
the title of his new book. Chambers is an extraordinarily gifted writer,
arguably among a small group of impressive stylists in the area of cultural
studies. He writes with a rare facility; he is always remarkably lucid and
clear; 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 obvious
means of charting modernity, their contemporary restriction and
blockage simultaneously also suggest another, darker and more dis-
quieting account. The very right to travel, to journey, to migrate
today increasingly runs up against the borders, connes, and con-
trols of a profound unfreedom that characterizes the modern
world. (p. 3)
Today walls and fences restrict and conne 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 as
chartered street and mind-forged manacles, in our contemporary
world. Whereas once the Mediterranean was a uid, mobile space without
national boundaries and covered all the littoral lands, now it has been
bounded and worlded in a very different manner. What has emerged
now is a hegemonic Mediterranean which excludes its subaltern other; it
is a Mediterranean which has lost its older legacy of interconnectedness and
openness. An Occidental modernity (varied to an Occidental humanism)
now sees itself as a defender of a world from the onslaught of Islam, from
the Ottoman Turks who for centuries were in fact part of the Mediterranean
world and its most important imperial power, having dislodged the Romans
along the way. The Mediterranean has to be recovered, its poetry found
again, 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 ragged
narrative that arrives through a rent in Occidental sense to insist on
another way of telling, another way of being, in which the gesture of
the body, the performance of poetics, the distillation of being in a
sound exceeds the conclusive logic of a monument, a book, a map, an
archive, a law. (p. 10)
The Mediterranean has been reduced to a monophonic discourse, to a world
bound by principles of exclusion and contained within a spurious occidental
humanism and instrumental rationality. But was the Mediterranean (and by
extension Europe and the world generally) ever so hermetically sealed?
Chambers rhetorical question Whose Mediterranean? requires the logic
of 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 centre
of the Ottomans, is seen as a country which should be excluded from the
European imaginary. And this when Turkey has been such a central part of
Europe having its own positive as well as negative histories: the glories of
Istanbul alongside the horrors of the Armenian massacres between 1915 and
1922. Chambers makes the latter point to establish that the illnesses and
diseases of the Mediterranean/Europe are shared equally by Turkey and yet
its exclusion from the European Union is based on the Gramscian dichotomy
of hegemony/subaltern groups which now frames a European world-view
generally. This being so what is needed is a return to the Mediterranean as an
unstable site with rhythms of a different kind. These rhythms, marked by a
multiplication of tempos, textures and temporality (p. 19), require a dif-
ferent scansion of history, a more nuanced, poetic reading of the space of the
Mediterranean. The unraveling which becomes necessary (and which takes us
back to the real legacy of Europe) is one which would dismantle the current
paranoia with differences and with the extension of the values of the West as
being self-evidently universal. Adorno had written about creative hatred of
tradition; Chambers, after Pasolini, writes about the need to cultivate an
atrocity of doubt (p. 21). In this way alone can one avoid reducing the
world to the intolerant straitjacket of instrumental reason (p. 22).
The maps of the Mediterranean are therefore a lot more complex, its
histories showing considerable intermingling which is being denied in the
current political climate of division, absolute difference and exclusion. So
Chambers language is one which uses metaphors of ruin, the waves and
currents 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 and
polycultural (p. 32) understanding of the Mediterranean can dismantle a
European subject-centred objectivity or world picture (after Heidegger)
and accommodate alternative reasons. If there is a unity of the
Mediterranean, concludes Chambers, it is perhaps a hidden, critical
unity where the sea itself, as the site of dispersion and drift, exposes
the fragility of inherited congurations (p. 149). What is therefore proposed
is a new poetics of interpretation which would, like the romantic lamp,
illuminate new areas of meaning and not, like a mirror, simply reect its own
prosaic and highly paranoid drama. Such an interpretation would require a
return of the Mediterranean to its historically and culturally contaminated
roots and routes; it would require the metaphor of the icy current and
compulsive course of the Pontic sea rather than the prosaic language of a

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handkerchief spotted with strawberries with which to reect upon its own
traumatic past.
Chambers has written an unusually poetic book for a cultural theorist. As
his literary metaphors show the enabling intertext here is not so much
historical archives as a creative rendition of that archive along the lines of
works such as Amitav Ghoshs i o +.o. to1. And this connection ex-
plains why there is a nostalgia for a boundaryless world which existed before
European imperialism began to break the world up with a masculine evan-
gelism in one hand and instrumental reason in another. In this post-colonial
take, for Chambers, that lost world has to be found again and freedom made
a 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 rather
than in uid, hybrid states. So that in the end Chambers persuades not by
force 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 the
evidence to the contrary. By a sleight of hand and through the construction of
a romantic Ottoman/Islamic other in the littoral Mediterranean states,
Chambers recalls a lost world of interconnectedness and old-fashioned
humane values which he then recommends as the answer to the economically
uneven and racially divided world we inhabit. That there are different rea-
sons and different kinds of modernities is something which is self-evidently
true. That they are equally self-reexive and accommodating is not neces-
sarily true. When a culture or religion, for whatever reason, refuses to
countenance 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 and
lesbiansalternative life-styles generallythen recourse to liberal ghosts
of yesteryear does not help. Chambers has written a poetic book; it is,
however, about the past as a kind of nostalgic literary-cultural history
rather than as a meditation on the immensely urgent political problems
facing 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 the
world as it once was, if there is a sense in which the West has lost its values
of enlightenment and liberal democracy, in Robert Youngs book there is one
portion of the world (albeit beyond the narrow connes of the
Mediterranean) out of which grew the idea of decency and respect for
other cultures. Strange as it may sound in the context of a critical survey
of 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 u,.
|. 1. (1981). In 1|. i1.o c i!.| i|..., Young is about his best largely
because it is focused and his conclusions are uncluttered. We may enter this
book through a citation from its rst pages.
Englishness was created for the diasporaan ethnic identity designed
for those who were precisely not English, but rather of English
descentthe peoples of the English diaspora moving around the
world: Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South
Africans, even, at a pinch, the English working-class. Englishness was
constructed 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 identication with a
homeland that had often never been seen. Englishness paradoxically
became most itself when it was far off. (pp. 12)
This is prose written with condence, the kind of condence lacking in
Youngs post-colonial work where as it is not uncommon with many
non-native informant writers, discriminations are not as precise and enthu-
siasm often mars the recognition of cruel facts, facts such as the uneven and
often 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 denition of
Englishness beyond its compass as a marker of the English out there in the
colonies 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 generally
for without an established location, the sense of an ethnic identity is an
uneasy 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, Matthews
dad, who had lectured at Oxford on the grand Teutonic/German ancestry of
the English and had indeed declared, half of Europe, and all America and
Australia, are German more or less completely, in race, in language, or in
institutions, or in all (p. 27). Youngs own argument nds support in Kipling
in as much as England had now become that vaster civilization, encountered
all over the globe (p. 230). There were, of course, specic 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 on
to 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 of
current debates about a British multicultural identity. As a general rule (and
this rule being general may not be true) multiculturalism locates itself in a
binary of diversity versus a homogeneous, identiable and hegemonic uni-
formity. The fact, however, in the British context is that there was never a
homogeneous traditional Englishness which because it happened elsewhere
was therefore in no urgent need for multicultural theorizing. The curious
emptiness of Englishness because it could never be located here (it was
always there as Rushdies S.S. Sisodia stutters about English history) meant
that for many in Britain there was no need for a multicultural theory because
a localized dominant group never existed. In other words the English never
saw themselves as an ethnic category. From the Naipaul brothers, Nirad
Chaudhuri and Salman Rushdie to the many Indian critics and writers
what we nd is a conrmation of Youngs observation that Englishness was
an invisible norm against which all other ethnicities were measured and that
non-white people would also be able to respond to the idea of Englishness
and be able to negotiate their own identications (p. 239) because of the
English 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. Youngs
understanding of the Englishin places romantic, in other places a study of
the return of the ethnic repressedwill not go unchallenged by multicul-
tural scholars for its failure to address how racism emerges in spite of a
groups (a group because the English, in this argument, neither constitute
an ethnic collective nor a race) refusal to see itself as a homogeneous foun-
dational constituent of the national polity. Nevertheless for anyone familiar
with 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 the
cultural apparatus developed for the English diaspora of the colonial
settler empire was successfully translated and reincorporated into a
modern ideology of a tolerant multiracial society . . . England and the
English have always involved a syncretic community of minorities,

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then as now. There can always be one more. This is the synthetic
secret of English society . . . whose tolerant liberalism is actively
inclusive, self-critical and, in what is probably now yesterdays par-
lance, multicultural . . . (p. 239)
Multiculturalism, a word in yesterdays parlance is now being rethought
through different paradigms and through different ways of assembling know-
ledge. Both Iain Chambers and Robert Youngs books bear testimony to the
shift 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 presumed
ideological binaries of the multicultural have now shifted so dramatically.
It is this shift which has led to the writing of books that examine, case by
case, quite specic inter-cultural issues without necessarily either offering
solutions to the multicultural problem or different ways of theorizing it.
One such book published in 2008 is 1|. :. c..o j.., o1 |. io.c.o
cc.. We have got so used to a decidedly American-Israeli world view of
Jewish life generally that other ways of thinking through recent Jewish his-
tory is not seen as legitimate. To see Israel, for instance, as Daniel and
Jonathan Boyarin have done, as a subversion of Jewish culture and not its
culmination (p. 2) is an act of betrayal. Less dramatically to see Jewish life
from a European perspective is considered to be equally inadmissible. What
this collection of essays edited by Y. Michal Bodemann proposes to do is to
bring back Europe as an important factor in our understanding of contem-
porary Jewish history. To do this one has to nd release from a hegemonic
(that is Israeli and American Jewry) reading of Europe as irredeemably
connected to the Shoah/Holocaust and hence either perpetrator or guilty
accessory to an unspeakable evil. Diana Pinto in her essay in the volume
explains the reading of Europe as follows:
the American interpretation comes together with the Israeli vision of
Europe as a continent eager to dispense teachings about the Middle
East without, however, ever having confronted the horror of its own
past. (p. 17)
It follows that European responses to the Jewish dilemma cannot be delinked
from the state of Israel whose survival is seen as the unending struggle of
Jewish people. If on the one hand there is European guilt (which it is asked
to forever afrm) and on the other a European commitment to a liberal
world order in which the Holocaust can never happen again, then what does
one do with this rather dangerous breach between Europe and the Jewish
world? 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 liberal
questions cannot be raised without Europe being constantly reminded of its
past. Further, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and massive migration of
Muslims and other non-Europeans to Europe, a fact which led to ethnicities
being dened along multicultural lines, European Jews not only feel desta-
bilized and fragile but also unable to shake off their reconstruction as a
homogeneous 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, is
not in Europe. A people of memory rather than history now nd them-
selves abandoned; their own lives often seen in terms of paranoia and
border security (of Israel) and not through a multicultural, porous under-
standing of national boundaries. In this reading the Jews are becoming the
exact antithesis of the European. Of course, Holocaust commemorations
seen by many Jews as a means of making this evil solubleonly exacer-
bated the wounds in as much as these commemorations tried to explain away
acts and exculpate the perpetrators. For Jews not living in Europe memory
of the holocaust has been fossilized so that they are eternally present with
themselves as eternal victims. Pinto writes about this millennial anguish
which makes Jewish reconciliation with Europe so difcult but she also
suggests that two key conceptsthe idea of the Judaeo-Christian tradition
and 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 Europe
where Jews as a minority are outnumbered by the larger Muslim minority
10:1 it would stand to reason that the stridently anti-Jewish attitudes of
Muslims would carry greater political mileage. In this reading of democracy,
Jews can feel safe only in their homeland where regardless of demographic
shifts the pre-eminence of Jews will remain unchallenged. So can Europeans
reconcile themselves with the Jewish world and vice versa? There are dif-
culties on both sides. First, Europe will never be able to act as honest broker
over the IsraeliPalestinian crisis if Jews cannot reconcile themselves to
European history. Second, Jews see post-2000 Europe as they did
pre-democratic Eastern Europe: unable to rein in its anti-Semitism and
unable to integrate its recent migrants. Third, there is a sense in which
the old Toynbee or Spengler cyclical readings of history are at work here as
Europe 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 European
Jews themselves who are now very much in a minority but signicant enough
as European citizens with a long past to be able to change general Jewish
perceptions of Europe. European Jews should know only too well Europes
commitment to never again is carved out in stone, its commitment to a fair
and 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 of
achieving a correct ethical ground of existence between Jews and Europe; a
co-existence made even more urgent in a new multicultural Europe where
the latters own tragic treatment of Jews is both a haunting presence but also
a 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, in
more general terms, this is true of religion (to rephrase Dostoevsky on
Gogols cloak, all monotheistic religious have grown out of Abrahams
cloak) Diner is here speaking about the Jews and Europe where they were
a European population, indigenous Europeans oo !o !... (p. 35). The
point is that the Jews were transnational and lived without a dened 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 the
nation-state (p. 35). In present day Europe, where borders are uid and
currencies unied, the Jews were modern in as much as they were children
of the law of reason, and pre-modern in as much as they had no under-
standing of the forces which create unied nation-states. In this respect
Europe 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 nal time through Sander
Gilmans brilliant essay on the Jewish diasporic experience and Islam in
todays multicultural Europe. Secular Europe, suggests Gilman, has its
roots in the manner in which Europe came to terms with Christianity in
the wake of its own post-Reformation wars. For Gilman it is not a matter of
now making connections between Judaism and Islam as Abrahamic reli-
gions; rather it is a matter of thinking through the entry of Muslims into
Europe in ways not dissimilar to Jewish entry into Europe many generations
before: a religious minority enters into a self-described secular (or secular-
izing) society that is Christian in its rhetoric and presuppositions and that
perceives a special relationship with this minority (pp. 567). Gilman
makes comparisons between Jewish presence in Europe in the nineteenth
century 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 alongside
Christians. With or without Albania and Turkey as part of a unied Europe at
some future stage, Muslims have to do the same. Gilman also understands
that in the Europe of today it is the concept of multiculturalism that seems
to provide a new model for understanding ethnicity and religion (p. 61).
Built as multicultural theory is on notions of hybridity, on the role of culture
in our lives, on pluralism and the critique of nationalism, on subcultures and
identity politics, on diasporic alliances and, nally, on debates as to whether
cultures should exist as autonomous or integrated collectivities within
nation-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. And
yet the history of the Jews in Europe takes one back to the corporeal, the
body. In Germany, Jewish bodies did matter even when outwardly there was
no difference, and they did so hard to become Germans. At this point
Gilmans citation from the Turkish-German Zafer Senocaks novel
o..co r.!o.c (c.o|.!..|. ..o1.|o, 1998) may be quoted.
Many orientalists were German Jews. They attributed to the Orient
eternal tyranny, fatalism, immutability, and difference. Who would
have thought that their grandchildren would become Orientals like
their ancestors? (p. 67)
The ironynoted by Gilmanis that the Turks are trying desperately to
become Germans while the Jews are becoming Israelis. The Jews had tried it
all in their attempts to become Germans and failed miserably. Can the Turks,
through this new multicultural celebration of hybridity, be more successful
or is it that even after language has been mastered, the Oriental Turk will
only be just that, an oriental, and hybridity will expose him or her to a
double risk? It is a pessimistic view of a multicultural Europe which can only
work if we are to read only one version of Jewish-European history, the
version which ended in the catastrophe of the Shoah (p. 70). There are other
histories, other negotiations which can be of value to German-Turk relations
in Europe. These and other issues are taken up in Bodemanns very ne vol-
ume, and especially in Bodemanns own chapter in the volume co-authored
with Gokce Yurdakul.
Multiculturalism has it and so does secularism: there is a sense in which
accommodation must take the form of incorporation into some idea of a
transcendent subject or at least the transformation of the minority subject
into one. While minor narratives and difference are encouraged and even

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celebrated (symbolically in most instances) minoritarian world-views are
never brought into mainstream thinking as such and pushed to the periphery.
Priya Kumars highly intelligent book t... :..o!o.. addresses some of
these issues with reference to the case of Indias relations with its own
signicant minority and their demonization as a threat to the liberal values
of Indian secularism. What is needed in this carefully crafted and stylistically
impressive book is in fact, after Derrida, an ethics of hospitality (a point
noted by Mandel in her book on the Turks in Germany) which transforms
tolerance (absolute tolerance is one of the many catch phrases of multi-
culturalism) into forms of peaceful co-existence and power sharing, without
attempting to either bring the minority into the fold or dene them as
inassimilable people who just happen to inhabit the nation-state. The case
of the Muslims in India is especially vexed in the wake of the partition of the
subcontinent in 1947 into a Muslim majority and a Hindu majority nation.
Kumar argues that the trauma of partition has been a signicant factor in
communal relations and suggests, even if in passing, that perhaps the call for
a separate homeland for the Muslims by Jinnah was more a ploy to gain
concession from Gandhis Congress Party than an actual gambit position with
which to win a real nation. Regardless of what Jinnahs aims were, and
indeed whether in fact Jinnah was simply a function of a discourse whose
master practitioners were people like the poet Iqbal and Muslim civil ser-
vants, the fact remains that the partition did take place and its consequences
were such that they reverberate to this day. Indeed until very recently the
Western view of India was always through a coupling of India with Pakistan
and both were seen as equal basket cases marked by underdevelopment and
poverty.
Priya Kumar is aware of the post-partition history of India but does not
wish to simply rework the archive, as is not uncommon, with a view to
lamenting a loss of the Nehruvian ideal of India secularism. In fact, she makes
it quite clear that the ideal itself was quite possibly a myth and even if it were
not, it has not been particularly helpful in what remains the crux of Indias
social dilemma: HinduMuslim difference. What is needed is ethical respon-
sibility or an ethics of existence, a version of the words of the gure who
claimed in Judaea, love thy neighbour as you love yourself. For Priya
Kumar, as her literary and lmic texts point outfrom Salman Rushdies
1|. Mcc. to :.| to Shyam Benegals Mocit is in these cultural texts
(notably in literature) where ethical work takes place (p. 237). The idea of
ethical responsibility, formulated by Spivak in terms of a culturally caught
discourse of ethics (p. 235), by Richard Eldridge as the capacity to pro-
ductively engage in . . . the formation of deeper, subjectively fuller senses of

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self and shared commitment (p. 26) and to which R. Radhakrishnan also
returns in his work, is one of many legacies of Derrida. Priya Kumars work
is written in that deconstructive vein but as with deconstruction generally,
the dominant genre, the dominant group often gets short shrift, and the
latters own agony, its pain, its incapacity to mourn collectively, indeed the
trauma of the perpetrator is often overlooked. In the end the Indian tradition
of modernity, its version of the Enlightenment (from Ram Mohun Roy to
Swami Vivekananda) never took into account Muslim presence in India. And
the Mahatmas own discourse was notably devoid of any sustained references
to texts outside of the Vedantic-bhakti traditions. In a way Priya Kumars
own work, wonderfully accomplished as it is, shows no understanding of
either the Quran or the i|ooo1 o.
Sander Gilman had cited from Zafer Senocaks novel to show the agony
of the writer who had mastered the German language and who had
German-Jew ancestry but whose body could not be incorporated, unprob-
lematically, into that of the German c!|. In 1|. P.... o M..o, Ha Jin
writes concise, elegant essays to examine the place of a number of migrant
writers, among them Joseph Conrad, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S.
Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In the case of
Solzhenitsyn and Yutang, they never became US citizens and Solzhenitsyn,
of course, nally returned home although not a happy man. For some like
V.S. Naipaul rootlesseness is accepted as ones existential condition (p. 23).
Gradually, of course, it dawned on Ha Jin that as a writer he could not be a
spokesperson simply for his own race, the Chinese. Naipaul had made a
distinction between the writer as a social being and the writer who writes
(p. 28) and for Ha Jin the migrant writer too must accept this but without
taking the extreme position of being answerable only to art and not to the
conditions which produced that work of art. Even great writersJoseph
Conrad for onecannot escape from their condition as migrant if they are
one. Conrad not only missed out on a Nobel Prize (perhaps because no
nation would acknowledge him as its ownPoland couldnt as he did not
write in Polish) but he also rejected a string of honorary degrees in the UK
and a knighthood because he always felt a foreigner there. The writer as
migrant: a painful state as he or she represents no country, and although the
desire to return is there few like Solzhenitsyn ever return. Naipaul had
written about the trampling on the past (You trample on the past (p.
75)) and since most of us never return, unlike Odysseus we have to look
for our own Ithacas.
Sometimes an ethnic group nds itself located in a context where mul-
tiple power centres are in tension. Such an ethnic group are the Indians in

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South Africa whose literature is treated with encyclopaedic thoroughness by
Pallavi Rastogi in her +..1.o t...c. The ambivalent location of Indians in
South Africa, many of whom trace their arrival to Indian indenture in the
late nineteenth century, meant that they were neither the dominant group
against which white hegemony had to be maintained through apartheid nor a
group which could enter into coalitional politics with Africans unproblem-
atically. Their writing therefore had to rework what Rastogi refers to as the
traditional post-colonial combat between white settler and black native
(p. 8). So, Indian South African writers, even when they showed solidarity
with black South Africans, continued to display an unease which surfaces
strongly in the post-apartheid writings of Ahmed Essop. If an ethics of
collective solidarity against racism should be a feature of post-colonial writ-
ing, then South African Indian writing does not demonstrate it as it should.
Instead Indians in South Africa continue to linger after a kind of exclusionist
existence where mythologies of their Indian homeland remain strong.
I conclude this years review with a book published a year later in 2009.
Peter McCarthys P... .oc.o . |. P. i.o.,, i1.., o1 |. :.
Mo..o!., for a reviewer of works on multiculturalism is at once a challen-
ging and an unsettling work. Its title declares an area of study or a eld which
underpins post-colonial theory. For many, diaspora is the exemplary condi-
tion of late modernity and heralds or stands for a global, post-national world.
In its emphasis on passing, transnationality and indeed the condition of
always becoming (a non-identitarian subjectivity) diaspora celebrates mar-
gins but also functions as an allegory of what communities were like before
their creations (or constructions) into nation-states. But the book is not
about diaspora as we know it; it is about something else. A reviewer of
course should be able to spell out what this something else is. In the case of
this book, the task is difcult because the theme of the book is not only a
little slippery, its points of entry many, its centre always displacing itself. It
would follow that a book of this nature can be easily misread and my worry is
that this review may well be symptomatic of a misreading of the book. We
may proceed with this latter proviso and with caution.
The book begins with a reverie on Gayatri Spivaks well-known and
oft-quoted essay Can the Subaltern Speak? Peter McCarthy, however, is
not particularly interested in the subaltern as we have come to know him/
her after the work of the primarily Indian scholars of subaltern theory.
Rather, the point he wishes to make, I think, is the way in which western
intellectuals are identifying themselves as subalterns. The word is used loose-
ly here because the subaltern is collapsed with the marginal, which is then
collapsed with diaspora. In other words, it seems to me that the book argues

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that western intellectuals (who are in fact operating from the centre and have
their grounding in the grand narrative of the Enlightenment) are embracing a
subaltern, marginal politics because it is fashionable to do so in the wake of
the so-called hegemony of marginal theories such as post-colonialism, dias-
pora, and multiculturalism. There is then an unstated contradiction in that a
majoritarian culture appropriates a minoritarian discourse for reasons of
postmodern expediency rather than belief or conviction. Some quotations
are in order to ensure that the thematic paraphrase offered here is not
inaccurate. Here is one: I would argue that the major language (the nor-
mative, the dominant culturethe Centrecall it what you will) has indeed
spawned a minority canon, affecting its own coefcient of ....c..o!..o.c in
the groves of Academe, and elsewhere. And here is another: As if in order
c /. or c |o. the dispersed, the deracinated and the oppressed, these
students of the margins, of c|.. and minority cultures construct an experi-
ence of the margin or the outland had entirely from the centre, the home-
land (p. xvii). The use of they have had instead of simply had may have
made the last passage a little more accessiblea similar attention to style
and syntax in other parts of the book would have made reading the book as a
whole a lot easier too.
Who are the students of margins? Well we can name virtually any of a
number of cultural theorists: Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, Bhabha,
Said, members of the Birmingham School, Derrida among others. So what
happens is that a new marginalism is fostered, it is carefully tendered and
then made into critical systems of thought forgetting that the experiences
which underpin the theories (experience of the minority, of diaspora) are in
fact no more than centrist constructs. Further, the experience of the
marginal is never part of the life of the theoretician, which leads to the
crux of McCarthys work: The . o..o!. has been usurped by
the theoretician, whose various theories are now mobilized only to further
forge an identication with their nominated other, an alterity that, in this
milieu, gives them an unassailable cultural and political cachet (p. xx). The
difculty is a kind of schizophrenia in that the marginalist wishes to identify
with the other (exilic, diasporic, and so on) without becoming the other. So
while hybidity, the post-colonial, and the like are reied, placed as the
desirable condition of the post-nation, there is a schism between the meta-
physical centrality of the West (its post-Enlightenment bias) and the incorp-
oration into its grand humanist narrative, the minor narrative of the other.
This is an unresolvable tension which the book, correctly, cannot resolve,
because the aim of McCarthy is to open up the contradictions of the new
marginalism.

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It follows that the new marginalism is presented as a politically proactive
condition of modernity even as its metaphysical disposition is essentially
pathological. It is symptomatic of a malaise, of a deep seated unease with
the self, perhaps even a guilt which is resolved theoretically (not practically)
through an act of what is essentially a mystical appropriation of the presumed
condition of the other without internalizing the others real conditions of
alienation and sense of exclusion from the nation-state (the condition of the
real not imagined diaspora). This to McCarthy is nothing less than bad
faith and needs to be articulated as such. In doing so McCarthy offers some
astute readings of the new marginalism and its proponents. The theoretical
culprit here is structuralism which, by denying agency to the [historical]
subject, created the condition of a decentred world where structures simply
replicated themselves without the intervention of human hand. In dehistor-
icizing the subject, structuralism in fact spawned conditions which created
the marginal fetish. In places the argument is made with incisive and original
readings of texts. One such reading is to be found in Chapter 4 where
McCarthy examines Vincent Wards 1993 lm Mo c |. uoo u.o..
The lm is about the relationship between the cartographer Walter
Russell and a half-caste Inuit boy, Avik. For McCarthy what is of interest
though is not the dynamics of the relationship itself but the manner in which
the lms rendition of both human lives and stark, threatening spaces (the
Arctic) serves the marginalists argument (p. 91). The marginalist (or the
diasporic) thus reads texts through a metaphysics of liminality, and uses the
human drama of the deterritorialized as an allegory of the manner in which
the marginal point of view becomes compulsive. An uneasy fact remains
and this fact is at the heart of the bookeven as marginality usurps the
centre, metanarratives retain their driving force: The anti-identitarian
pledge in the marginalist is equal to the counterhegemonic and both are
necessarily well-known and embraced terms within the marginalist lexicon.
But the very theoretical application required to critique their world . . . and
the |oo .oco o..., that inhabits it are located within the very meta-
narratives they must eschew (p. 120). It leads to a new self-consciousness
of the marginalist . . . the new merchants of the marginsdivided . . . dif-
dent but mercenary (p. 136).
I do not know if I have got McCarthys argument right but it seems to me
that the book (in places a little too turgid and unnecessarily heavy in style)
addresses a contradiction at the heart of what McCarthy terms diaspora in
the West. By this he means, I think, the degree to which intellectuals in the
West have appropriated marginalist theories (diaspora, post-colonialism,
transnationality, multiculturalism and the like) and brought them to the

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centre of debates without forgoing the grand narrative of the Enlightenment.
There is something not quite right here as writers in the West are pretending
to be something that they are not and this pretence becomes a lot clearer
when one discovers that in the end the longing for the centre, for the grand
narrative of western reason, remains the driving force behind their engage-
ment with the other. McCarthy dares spell this out and herein lies the books
challenge: are western critics and writers on multiculturalism (and related
elds) like the misguided emperor, really without clothes? This is a question
which seems to underpin a lot of recent work in the area of multiculturalism.
As a challenge it warns that unless multicultural theory is reinvigorated, it
too may well become a cultural theory of the pastyesterdays parlance
with future work returning to discipline-based sociologists, ethnologists,
linguists and the like.
Books Reviewed
Baber, H.E. The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case against Diversity.
Prometheus. [2008] pp. 260. hb US$25.95 ISBN 9 7815 9102 5535.
Bodemann, Y. Michal, ed. The New German Jewry and the European Context: The
Return of the European Jewish Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan. [2008] pp. 201. hb
50 ISBN 9 7802 3052 1070.
Chambers, Iain. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity.
DukeUP. [2008] pp. 181. pb US$21.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234 1505.
Eldridge, Richard. Literature, Life, and Modernity. ColumbiaUP. [2008] pp. 178. hb
US$32.50 ISBN 9 7802 3114 4544.
Jin, Ha. The Writer as Migrant. UChicP. [2008] pp. 96. hb US$14 ISBN 9 7802 2639
9881.
Kumar, Priya. Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and
Film. UMinnP. [2008] pp. 299. pb US$24 ISBN 9 7808 1665 0736.
McCarthy, Peter. Writing Diaspora in the West: Intimacy, Identity and the New
Marginalism. Palgrave Macmillan. [2009] pp. 179. hb 19.99 ISBN 9 7802 3021
8871.
Mandel, Ruth. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and
Belonging in Germany. DukeUP. [2008] pp. 413. pb US$24.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234
1932.
May, Stephen. Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics
of Language. Routledge. [2008] pp. 384. pb US$31.99 ISBN 0 4159 6489 X.

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Pathak, Pathik. The Future of Multicultural Britain: Confronting the Progressive
Dilemma. EdinUP. [2008] pp. 209. pb 18.99 ISBN 9 7807 4863 5450.
Radhakrishnan, R. History, the Human, and the World Between. DukeUP. [2008]
pp. 285. pb US$22.95 ISBN 9 7808 2233 9656.
Rastogi, Pallavi. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South
Africa. OhioStateUP. [2008] pp. 290. hb US$46.95 ISBN 9 7808 1420 3194.
Shankar, Shalini. Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley.
DukeUP. [2008] pp. 275. pb US$22.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234 3158.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Other Asias. Blackwell. [2008] pp. 365. pb 17.99 ISBN 9
7814 0510 2070.
Young, Robert J. C. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Blackwell. [2008] pp. 291. pb 15.99
ISBN 9 7814 0510 1295.

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'Multiculturalism' by Vijay Mishra

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