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Issue 3/2001 (/en/2001/3/) - Global Players

Travelling Multiculturalism
A Debate in Translation
Robert Stam & Ella Shohat

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In the aftermath of the culture wars, new battle lines, this time international, are forming again around
the issue of multiculturalism. Challenged and debated from both right and left, the term itself has
become subject to diverse political force-Velds, in some ways becoming a sliding signiVer onto which
diverse groups project their hopes and fears, their fantasies and anxieties. At least since the 1980s, we in
the US have become accustomed to neo-conservative (and sometimes liberal) diatribes branding
multiculturalism separatist, tribalist, and unpatriotic, the domestic equivalent of a Lebanon-style
war of ethnic militias. For Lynn Cheney, Arthur Schlesinger, Dinesh d'Souza, Richard Bernstein, George Will,
and many others, multiculturalism is simply an attack on the West and on western civilization as an area
of study. Some left intellectuals like Tod Gitlin, meanwhile, worry less about multiculturalism dividing
the nation than about its dividing the movement, through distracting ivory-tower debates about race.
For Gitlin, identity politics and multiculturalism fracture the common dreams of real world left
solidarity. Some feminists, meanwhile, see multiculturalism as splintering feminism and therefore as bad
for women.

These debates are articulated differently in other national, institutional, and discursive contexts. In
countries like Canada and Australia, multiculturalism comes to refer to ofVcial government programs
designed to placate and to some extent empower minorities by offering some representation within the
existing political system, a form of multiculturalism challenged by some radicals as too cooptive and
assimilationist. In other sites, journalists and academics people project their fears as well as their hopes
onto the term multiculturalism, Here we will examine some international left critiques of U.S.
multiculturalism, speciVcally those emerging both from France and Brazil, but focussing especially on two
recent essays by Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, La Nouvelle Vulgate, published in Le Monde
Diplomatique, and The Cunning of Imperial Reason, published in Theory, Culture, and Society (1999).

[b]Multiculturalism: A Tentative DeVnition[/b]

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Before getting to the details of the Bourdieu/Wacquant critique, however, we should briegy clarify what we
mean by multiculturalism. Although we cannot control the meaning of such a slippery and polysemic
concept, we can at least schematize some of the diverse and even contradictory discourses that Vnd
shelter under its broad umbrella, while also clarifying what we ourselves mean by the term.1 Since the
Bourdieu/Wacquant polemic is largely addressed to academic multiculturalism, we will limit our
discussion to that dimension of the multicultural project, setting aside its relation to artistic production,
curating, community activism and so forth. For us, multiculturalism designates a complex social and
intellectual movement and debate produced at the intersection of critical knowledges. The term functions
as convenient shorthand for a body of scholarly work that critically engages issues of power relations
rooted in the practices and discourses of colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

In Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media2, we distinguish between the multicultural
fact and the multicultural project. The fact references the obvious cultural heterogeneity of most of
the world, but especially of the Black Atlantic (R.F. Thompson, P. Gilroy) and the multi-nation states
(W. Kymlycha) of the Americans. What provokes the howls of execration against multiculturalism3 is not
the indisputable fact of cultural heterogeneity, but rather the multiculturalist project, because it calls for
reinvisioning world history and contemporary social life from the perspective of the radical equality of
peoples. The multiculturalist project, in this sense, entails a profound restructuring of the ways knowledge
is produced through the distribution of cultural resources and power. But multiculturalism can not be a
purely celebratory form of national/ethnic narcissism. Multiculturalism as a positive project needs to be
articulated in intellectual terms together with a critique of colonialism, racism, as well as of Eurocentrism
as a substratal set of axioms of undergirding conventional ways of mapping history and reading the
world. Furthermore, it needs to be articulated in political terms with projects of justice and
empowerment, always in relation to other axes of social stratiVcation having to do with race, class,
gender, sexuality, and nation.

What we call Polemic Multiculturalism is actually an assault not on Europe or Europeans European-
Americans but on Eurocentrism - the view which sees Europe the world's center of gravity, as ontological
reality to the rest of the world's shadow, as the fountain from which all good things gow. (We use
Europe not to refer to Europe as a political or geographical unit per se but rather to refer to the neo-
Europes and to European hegemony around much of the world, for example in the Americans). The
residues of centuries of Euro-colonial domination have seeped into the everyday language, and media
discourses, engendering a Vctitious sense of the axiomatic superiority and universality of Western culture.
Eurocentric discourse projects a linear (Plato-to NATO) historical trajectory leading from classical
Greece (constructed as pure, western, and democratic) to imperial Rome and then to the
metropolitan capitals of Europe and the U.S. Eurocentric discourse is diffusionist, it assumes that
democracy, science, progress all emanate outward from the originary source which is Europe and
Europeans. Eurocentric discourse embeds, takes for granted, and normalizes, in a kind of buried
epistemology, the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism and imperialism.

Although complex, contradictory, and historically unstable, Eurocentrism as a mode of thought engages in
a number of mutually-reinforcing operations.

1) Eurocentrism attributes to the west an inherent trajectory toward democratic institutions

(Torquemada, King Leopold, Mussolini and Hitler must be seen as aberrations within this logic of selective
amnesia and legitimation).
2) Eurocentrism elides non-western traditions, while a) obscuring the limitations of western formal
democracy, and b) masking the West's part in subverting democracies around the world.
3) Eurocentrism appropriates the cultural and material production of the non-west while denying both the
non-West's achievements and its own appropriation, thus consolidating its sense of self and glorifying its
own cultural anthropophagy.

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In sum, Eurocentrism sanitizes history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-west, it thinks of
itself in terms of its noblest achievements - science, progress, humanism - but of the non-west (variously
known as the Orient, the Third World, or the South) in terms of its deVciences, real or imagined. The
celebration of multiculturalism and the critique of Eurocentrism are for us inseperable concepts, each
becomes impoverished without the other. Multiculturalism without the critique of Eurocentrism runs the
risk of being merely accretive - a shopping mall summa of the world's cultures - while the critique of
Eurocentrism without multiculturalism runs the risk of simplify inverting rather than profoundly unsettling
and rearticulating existing hierarchies. The goal of what we call polycentric multiculturalism is to
eliminate, as far as possible and in our own speciVc sphere of action, the long-term cultural legacies of
colonialism, Eurocentrism and white supremacy.

[b]Multiculturalism as Project[/b]

The Bourdieu/Wacquant essay is riddled with false dichotomies: academics must either do real politics or
do multiculturalism; the oppression of blacks in the US is either about access or it is about recognition
and identity. Whereas they favor/or thinking, we favor both/and thinking. It is always easy, furthermore, to
condemn academics for their lack of power in the real world, to point out that oppression continues in
the streets while academics philosophize in seminar rooms. The logical tricks here are multiple:

1) the buries assumption that the academe is not also part of the real world,
2) the extrapolation of the feature of the academic life in general - the relative political powerlessness of
academics - so as to apply exclusively to one group, here academic multiculturalists;
3) the lack of any empirical evidence for the idea that multiculturalists are less politically active than other
academics, when in fact they are probably more acitvist;
4) the facile juxtaposition of injustice in the world with the proclamations of academics (which would
apply to all academics, including French sociologists) as if the latter were somehow responsible for the
former. Finally
5) the imputation of some sort of sexualized pathology - libido wasting academics - onto a large and
diversiVed array of scholars, as if the accusers had researched the psycho-biographies of the scholars in
question. This completely gratiuitous sexualization of the charge reeks of prejudice a l'etat pur, and
perhaps says more about the accusers than about the objects of their attack.

But let us Vrst address the grain of truth in the Bourdieu/Wacquant critique, if one is to dignify by that
name which is little more than a cri de coeur based on doxa and prejudice. Multiculturalism is sometimes
rightly criticized for its cooptability. Although Bourdieu/Wacquant do not use this word, it is implicit in
their charge that multiculturalism forms part of an imperial arsenal of doxa, along with such concepts as
globalization, markets, gexibility, and so forth. And while it is difVcult to see multiculturalism as
imperial - since so much of the work has been explicity anti-imperialist - the cooptability charge does
a certain ring of possibility. We ourselves have often pointed out that multiculturalism can be coopted,
that it can degenerate into a United-Colors-of-Benetton pluralism whereby established power promotes
ethic gavors of the month for commercial or ideological purposes. Transnational corporations have
sometimes devoured the concept to multiculturalize their image and sell products through a skin-deep
display of exoticism, while simultaneously abusing the disposable laborers (largely women of color) that
help produce their proVts. Recently, even right-wing political parties have scrambled to create a
multicultural faade, which Jesse Jackson has called inclusion as illusion, although Republicans never
use the word multiculturalism except to denounce it. Here we Vnd public-relations multiculturalism at its
most cynical; a parade of epidemic difference meant to hide a racist agenda.

It is precisely this danger of co-optation that leads many U.S. scholars on the left to applaud radical,
critical and polycentric multiculturalism, on the one hand, while critiquing corporate, liberal and
pluralist multiculturalism on the other. But even co-optive multiculturalism, is co-opting something, and
that something is, ultimately, what began as the political and cultural mobilization of minoritized and
racialized communities. That Republicans have abandoned race-baiting (as the notorious Willie Horton

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ads) in favor of epidemic multicultural exhibitionism, shallow as it is, is on another level a sign that the
multiculturalists have managed to move the racial discourse to the left. One cannot always blame a
movement, moreover, for others' attempt to coopt it. In the 1960s and 1970s, Richard Nixon, the lethal
archenemy of the Black Panthers, adopted their slogan: Power to the People. But that was hardly the
fault of the Panthers. While the word multiculturalism might soon pass, the issues to which it points will
not soon fade, for these contemporary quarrels are but the surface manifestations of a deeper
seismological shift: the decolonization of Eurocentric power structures and epistemologies, and that
shift is ultimately more important than the word multiculturalism.

We ourselves have criticized certain strands of multiculturalism 4 that seem to us covertly nationalist and
Americanoentric. The small grain of truth in some left critiques of multiculturalism is the fact that at times
the issues are glimpsed in the US through a narrowly national grid, as when well-meaning curriculum
commitees call for courses about the contributions of the world's diverse cultures to the development
of American society, blithely ignoring the nationalistic teleology underlying such a formulation. Although
nationalism is often seen as a speciVcally Third World malady, the term is no less relevant to the labor,
feminist, queer, and multicultural movements within the U.S. This submerged American ethnocentrism
has sometimes given us what we call star-striped multiculturalism, or nationalism with a tan, or
rainbow nationalism, or nationalism in drag. But for us, multiculturedness is not a United
Statesian monopoly, nor is multiculturalism the handmaiden of U.S. identity politics. Educational
institutions concerned about diversity often glimpse multiculturalism through a largely unconscious
national-exceptionalist lens that celebrates difference but which does not necessarily deconstruct the
nationalist paradigm.

[b]Multiculturalism: An American discourse?[/b]

On one level, of course, multiculturalism is indeed not a theory, just as French sociology is not a
theory; both terms refer not to theories but to rubrics, umbrella terms covering many theories.
(Similarly, multiculturalism is not a social movement, but it is a project allied with a number of social
movements, forming part of a loose coalition for social/racial/cultural justice). Like any complex critical
formation, multiculturalism is not a single discourse, but rather a constellation of discourses. It is a
heteroglossic (many-languaged) arena of competing and sometimes contradictory currents. And
multiculturalism cannot be reduced simply to the national banner of the nation-state within which it is
produced. Even if multiculturalism in the US was shaped by public debates about exclusionary practices
and discourses rooted in colonialism and slavery, it still cannot be congated with a monolithic national
essence. The US, in this sense, is just one of many arenas for the multicultural debate; it is a
multidirectional terminal in a network, not a point of origin or Vnal destination. We are not proposing a
stagist, diffusionist narrative that has multiculturalist gospel beginning in the US and then travelling
elsewhere, diffusing a redemptive dogma. As a result of colonial karma, many ideas and people traveled
back and forth between the US and other geographies and came to mould US-style multiculturalism, just
as they shaped analogous movements elsewhere. To situate multiculturalism historically, then, requires a
relational approach to the unequal ways in which populations and ideas travel. The Voyages of
Discovery, for example, turned indigenous Americans into internal exiles, made Africans forced migrs,
and generated a multitude of criss-crossing diasporas. Later developments, - US imperialist policies,
military interventions, expulsions, detentions, immigration, refugees, the brain drain - also brought a
hybridized mix of people and ideas, all of which helped shaped multiculturalism as both fact and
project.

Not only is multiculturalism animated by scholars of the most diverse national/ethnic origins, it also
draws on a wide range of international theories, such as dependency theory (strongly associated with
Latin America), subaltern studies (associated with India, hegemony theory (associated with Gramsci
and Hall), post-structuralism (associated with France), along with all sorts of Afro-diasporic, third
woridist and postcolonial trends. For complex historical reasons, including the Civil Rights movement,

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minority activism, changes in immigration laws, and the neo-imperial brain drain, the US academe has
become a clearing house for intellectual tendencies of all types, a magnet for what George Yudice calls
centripetal and centrifugal academic desires.5 Postcolonial theory, for example, gained strength in the
US academe not only because a number of well-known diasporic intellectuals moved here, but also
because other difference-afVrming movements - ethnic studies, third world studies, multiculturalism - had
already created a hospitable space for it. At the same time, U. S. geopolitical interventions and neo-liberal
globalization also resulted in the movement of political refugees and economic immigrants- a process
that could be summed up in the postcolonial maxim: We are here, because you were there. 6

The Bourdieu/Wacquant essays are riddled with dichotomous thinking. According to Bourdieu/Wacquant,
multiculturalism hides social crisis by depoliticizing a struggle which isn't really ethnic or racial but has
to do with access to the instruments of production and reproduction. It seems never to occur to
Bourdieu/Wacquant that many multiculturalists are also opposed to the oppressive aspects of
globalization and in favor of class militancy, unions, and access to power. (Although the notion of
access implies mere insertion of the dominated into pre-existing structures, without exercising agency
in changing those structures). Bourdieu/Wacquant project their own dichotomous thinking onto
multiculturalism. But if for the radical wing of multiculturalism the struggle is about access, it is not only
about access. And while it is certainly about class, it cannot be reduced simply to class. It is also about
race and gender and sexuality and other axes of social difference such as religion and region, which all
come into play with a complex intersectionality (Kimberley Crenshaw), especially since race in the US
has often played the role of hiding class. And even class is not a Vxed pre-ordained position, but a
space of negotiation strongly mediated through race and gender, which is why we argue for a discourse of
relationality. In the Bourdieu/Wacquant analysis, one cannot think race and chew class gum at the same
time, while gender and sexuality are not there to chew at all. Class trumps race, rather than race itself
being, as Stuart Hall famously put it, the modality in which class is lived. And in the US, the struggle for
justice - the struggle for entitlements, the broadening of what is too often a white left - the anti-war
movement, the greens - invariably passes through race.

Bourdieu/Wacquant also ask us to choose between analysing structures and the mechanisms of
domination or celebrating the culture of the dominated and their point of view. It seems never to occur
to them that the two issues might be related, that it is precisely the structures of domination that make it
necessary to also celebrate the culture of the dominated, since one of the mechanisms of domination is
precisely to hide and denigrate the culture of the dominated while normativizing the culture of the
dominant. Only those accustomed to enjoying hegemonic cultural privilege, used to having their point of
view be the normative one, one suspects, could be so dismissive of the culture of the dominated and
scornful about their point of view. Fanon and Cesaire and Malcolm X saw nothing wrong with
articulating the point of view of the dominated, in counterdistinction to an objectivity which always
works against the native. Here as elsewhere, the very words in which the Bourdieu/Wacquant critique of
multiculturalism is formulated reveal, ironically, the validity and indeed the necessity of a multicultural
critique. Multiculturalism, furthermore, does not exist as a product of national vices but because of the
concrete historical conditions we outlined earlier, most notably a complex overlay of cultures, existing
within relations of subordination and domination, and the copresence of academics knowledgable about
those cultures, operating in a congictual space where it is possible to articulate those issues.

The Bourdieu/Wacquant approach to politics is reminiscent of that of some class-based US leftists. In his
1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams, Tod Gitlin characterizes identity politics as groups overly
concerned with protecting and purifying what they imagine to be their identities. Only someone
unfamiliar with the corpus of multiculturalist writing could come up with such a prejudicial deVnition. The
approach to alliance, then, seems to be: insult your potential allies, ridicule their concerns, show complete
ignorance about their histories and positions, and then blame them for dividing the left. Unity is invoked
at the cost of erasure, a melting down of difference rather than a coalitionary ochestration of difference, a
jazz-like ensemble of differentiated voices.

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[b]Bourdieu/Wacquant's chinese Encyclopedia[/b]

In their co-authored essays, Bourdieu/ Wacquant powerfully denounce globalization and the new doxa of
the globalized order, in terms with which we largely agree. They wisely call for resistance against the
blandishments of a model which would undo the social welfare state in the name of the market,
modernization and globalization. The dominant US political model, as articulated by the two major
parties, is one in which the government has so far not managed to provide basic public goods such as
comprehensive health care, inclusive voter registration procedures, free or at least affordable higher
education, a high standard of public safety, and a reasonable protection from police abuse and
unnecessary imprisonment. While the media debate usually consists of a shouting match between a
centrist Democrat (the left) and a right-wing kook (the right), both major parties stand complicit with a
racist justice system and its veritable cult of industrialized incarceration. And that model not only should
not be exported to France, as many of us have suggested, it should be deported from the US.

But unfortunately Bourdieu/Wacquant amalgamate this completely legtimate critique with a misVred
attack on multiculturalism. For Bourdieu/Wacquant, the terms and tropes of the new planetary doxa
include globalization, markets, multiculturalism, racial minorities and identity, terms which
impose on all societies speciVcally American concerns and viewpoints, which naturalize one particular
historical experience, tacitly instituted as a model for humanity in general. But this lexicon of the new
vulgate constitutes an update of Borges' Chinese Encyclopedia. The inclusion of multiculturalism and
identity in their surreal heterotopia comes as something of a surprise, rather like listing the proponents
of National Socialism as Hitler, Goebbels, and Brecht, or citing the doxa of Nazism as lebensraum,
blitzkrieg and ideologiekritik. Since the more radical wing of the multiculturalist movement in the US,
subscribes to the critique of globalization as false universalism, one wonders what International House
of Unprogressive Activities has put multiculturalism on this list? The same movement called anti-
American in the U. S., seen as unpatriotic, as conducting an America Sucks Sweepstakes! (and
sometimes, ironically, as too French), is paradoxically seen by these French left intellectuals as
quintessentially American, an extension of U. S. imperialism rather than a critique of it.
Bourdieu/Wacquant move from a completely valid, even indispensable critique of globalization to a
clumsy and misinformed slander of US multiculturalism, which puts in exactly the same sack neo-liberal
terms like gexibility and globalization and oppositional terms like identity and multiculturalism.7
The authors manage this congation of globalization and multiculturalism through a series of rather
abstract and rhetorical links between the efVcacy of the market, the recognition of identities, and the
notion of individual responsibility. In the US, ironically, multiculturalism is usually criticized as promoting
group rights rather than individual responsibility, but that is only the beginning of the problem in terms
of translating debates and discourses.

1 Although multiculturalism operates within very diverse arenas of struggle, we will limit our discussion on the academic/scholarly
incarnations of multiculturalism which form the target of these polemical essays.

2 Ella Shohat/ Robert Stam Unthinking Eurocentrism (London: Routledge, 1994)

3 At least on the part of neo-conservatives.

4 We are not rehearsing here all our various critiques on multiculturalisms. This is undertaken in previous works including
Shohat/Stam Unthinking Eurocentrism; Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 1997); and Shohat, Talking
Visions (MIT Press, 1998).

5 See George Yudice, A Globalizacao e a Difusao da Teoria Pos-Colonial, Annals of Abalic (1998)

6 Shohat/Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, p. 17

7 In the gendered language of these two co-authored essays - and here we Vnd a departure from Bourdieu's work in general, with
its softer language of Velds - the theoretically good is seen as hard and the theoretically bad is soft and wooly and
spongy.

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