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The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age
Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Regarded as the failed experiment of liberal elites, commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies; parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national 'ways of life' and universal values.
This important new book challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by challenging the existence of a coherent era of 'multiculturalism' in the first place. The authors argue that what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a projection of neoliberal anxieties onto the social realities of lived multiculture. Nested in an established post-racial consensus, new forms of racism draw powerfully on liberalism and questions of 'values', and unsettle received ideas about racism and the 'far right' in Europe.
In combining theory with a reading of recent controversies concerning headscarves, cartoons, minarets and burkas, Lentin and Titley trace a transnational crisis that travels and is made to travel, and where rejecting multiculturalism is central to laundering increasingly acceptable forms of racism.
This important new book challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by challenging the existence of a coherent era of 'multiculturalism' in the first place. The authors argue that what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a projection of neoliberal anxieties onto the social realities of lived multiculture. Nested in an established post-racial consensus, new forms of racism draw powerfully on liberalism and questions of 'values', and unsettle received ideas about racism and the 'far right' in Europe.
In combining theory with a reading of recent controversies concerning headscarves, cartoons, minarets and burkas, Lentin and Titley trace a transnational crisis that travels and is made to travel, and where rejecting multiculturalism is central to laundering increasingly acceptable forms of racism.
298 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 12, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 24, 2013
Multiculturalism has come under increasing attack in the past two decades. It began with a backlash against affirmative action in the US in the 1990s, and intensified after 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe. Now it’s routine to see multiculturalist excess derided and mocked.
In this book, Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley do a good job of charting the process, and also exposing the true reasons for it. Multiculturalism is a straw man, the authors argue. Despite what you read all the time in outraged newspaper columns, there was never a concerted government policy to promote other cultures or encourage difference.
The current threats, too, are overblown. When the French Parliament voted to ban the burka, only 0.1% of Muslim women wore it. When Switzerland banned the construction of minarets, there were only four in the whole country, and they were already prohibited from issuing a call to prayer. Yet a Swiss MP still warned that minarets could lead to sharia law in Switzerland, with “honour killings, forced marriages, circumcision, wearing the burka, ignoring school rules, and even stoning.”
Attacking multiculturalism is also used as a covert way of expressing racist opinions in societies where overt racism is no longer acceptable in the mainstream. So when Sarkozy attacks the Roma and links rising crime with immigrant “scum”, it’s apparently not racist, but merely a reaction against the politically correct excesses of liberal multiculturalism. Lentin and Titley do a good job of tracing in detail how thin the division is between race and culture, and how racism can often be smuggled in under the guise of legitimate cultural criticism.
This is not to say that they propose complete cultural relativism – it’s not racist to have a problem with stoning or forced marriage – but merely to point out how often cultural issues are used as a cover for underlying racist actions. Progressive causes are often co-opted, too, as the English Defence League presents itself as a champion of gay rights, or Donald Rumsfeld claims to care about the oppression of Afghan women.
Meanwhile, impossible demands are placed on minority cultures within Europe and the US. There’s a chapter on “good and bad diversity”, illustrated with a reference to Ibsen’s play The Doll House, in which a man sees his wife as a doll to be manipulated and treated in a patronising way.
This is supported by a great quote from Gary Younge:
"Somewhere out there is the Muslim that the British government seeks. Like all religious people he (the government is more likely to talk about Muslim women than to them) supports gay rights, racial equality, women’s rights, tolerance and parliamentary democracy. He abhors the murder of innocent civilians without exception – unless they are in Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq. He wants to be treated as a regular British citizen – but not by the police, immigration or airport security. He raises his daughters to be assertive: they can wear whatever they want so long as it’s not a headscarf. He believes in free speech and the right to cause offence but understands that he has neither the right to be offended nor to speak out. Whatever an extremist is, on any given day, he is not it."
Lots of good points, then, but the one downside of this book was the occasionally stultifying language. Take this sentence, for example:
"In a prescient passage in Even in Sweden, Allan Pred (2000) poses a series of questions probing the ways in which the uncritical ontological and discursive overlaps between mainstream multiculturalism and its strategic racist appropriation may serve to further produce racialized populations as subjects of problematization and regulation."
The problem for me is not that I don’t understand the words, but that the order in which they are presented makes my eyes glaze over. If I read the sentence a second time I can work out its meaning, but I’m left with a sense of frustration at being forced to do this unnecessary work. I’m happy to use my brain while reading, but prefer to reserve it for understanding complex arguments or making associations and leaps of my own. When I’m forced to use it to grapple with the basic meaning of a sentence, I feel that the writers haven’t really done their job properly. Give me Gary Younge’s style any day.
Nevertheless, for its nuanced, fresh take on a variety of contemporary issues, I’d still recommend reading this book. People who are used to reading academic language will have no problem with it at all. General readers may find their attention wandering in places, as I did, but will still get plenty of interesting ideas from it.
In this book, Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley do a good job of charting the process, and also exposing the true reasons for it. Multiculturalism is a straw man, the authors argue. Despite what you read all the time in outraged newspaper columns, there was never a concerted government policy to promote other cultures or encourage difference.
The current threats, too, are overblown. When the French Parliament voted to ban the burka, only 0.1% of Muslim women wore it. When Switzerland banned the construction of minarets, there were only four in the whole country, and they were already prohibited from issuing a call to prayer. Yet a Swiss MP still warned that minarets could lead to sharia law in Switzerland, with “honour killings, forced marriages, circumcision, wearing the burka, ignoring school rules, and even stoning.”
Attacking multiculturalism is also used as a covert way of expressing racist opinions in societies where overt racism is no longer acceptable in the mainstream. So when Sarkozy attacks the Roma and links rising crime with immigrant “scum”, it’s apparently not racist, but merely a reaction against the politically correct excesses of liberal multiculturalism. Lentin and Titley do a good job of tracing in detail how thin the division is between race and culture, and how racism can often be smuggled in under the guise of legitimate cultural criticism.
This is not to say that they propose complete cultural relativism – it’s not racist to have a problem with stoning or forced marriage – but merely to point out how often cultural issues are used as a cover for underlying racist actions. Progressive causes are often co-opted, too, as the English Defence League presents itself as a champion of gay rights, or Donald Rumsfeld claims to care about the oppression of Afghan women.
Meanwhile, impossible demands are placed on minority cultures within Europe and the US. There’s a chapter on “good and bad diversity”, illustrated with a reference to Ibsen’s play The Doll House, in which a man sees his wife as a doll to be manipulated and treated in a patronising way.
This is supported by a great quote from Gary Younge:
"Somewhere out there is the Muslim that the British government seeks. Like all religious people he (the government is more likely to talk about Muslim women than to them) supports gay rights, racial equality, women’s rights, tolerance and parliamentary democracy. He abhors the murder of innocent civilians without exception – unless they are in Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq. He wants to be treated as a regular British citizen – but not by the police, immigration or airport security. He raises his daughters to be assertive: they can wear whatever they want so long as it’s not a headscarf. He believes in free speech and the right to cause offence but understands that he has neither the right to be offended nor to speak out. Whatever an extremist is, on any given day, he is not it."
Lots of good points, then, but the one downside of this book was the occasionally stultifying language. Take this sentence, for example:
"In a prescient passage in Even in Sweden, Allan Pred (2000) poses a series of questions probing the ways in which the uncritical ontological and discursive overlaps between mainstream multiculturalism and its strategic racist appropriation may serve to further produce racialized populations as subjects of problematization and regulation."
The problem for me is not that I don’t understand the words, but that the order in which they are presented makes my eyes glaze over. If I read the sentence a second time I can work out its meaning, but I’m left with a sense of frustration at being forced to do this unnecessary work. I’m happy to use my brain while reading, but prefer to reserve it for understanding complex arguments or making associations and leaps of my own. When I’m forced to use it to grapple with the basic meaning of a sentence, I feel that the writers haven’t really done their job properly. Give me Gary Younge’s style any day.
Nevertheless, for its nuanced, fresh take on a variety of contemporary issues, I’d still recommend reading this book. People who are used to reading academic language will have no problem with it at all. General readers may find their attention wandering in places, as I did, but will still get plenty of interesting ideas from it.
December 9, 2012
Densely argued account of multiculturalism's crisis within the frame of neo-liberal global politics.
The authors regard multiculturalism itself as being something of a damp squib, have "rarely amounted to more than a patchwork of initiatives, rhetoric and aspirations in any given context." Its importance is less than what it is, than what it has come to mean to the global ruling elites. Yet resistance to the current mood of rejection of multiculturalism is important, because this is really a rejection of "lived multiculture."
What is seen as the failure of multiculturalism becomes a justification for ordering reality into a "good and bad diversity". The bad version is litanised into the repetition of notorious events, extending across the riots in northern English towns in 2001, the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the reaction to the Danish Mohammed cartoons, etc, etc. The incidents are available to be integrated into 'Clash of Civilisation' theories and presented as being essential to the character of the communities identified as being at the heart of 'the problem'.
The effect of generating a sense of 'bad diversity' of this order is that immigrants of both old and new generations become available as a scapegoat for the dislocations of the transition to post-industrialisation across the developed world. In this world, "lived diversity has evaded and transgressed the shapes designed for its management." The multiculturalism once deemed adequate to containing the anxieties of diversity now has to be replaced by a new 'transcendent homogeneity'of society.
The authors go on to consider the form which the crisis of multiculturalism has taken in Britain, the Netherlands and France. The work of Christopher Caldwell is also examined as a leading ideologue of cultural essentialism, seeing nothing more than a working out of all the negative responses to the West in the varied lives of muslims.
The book provides a compelling account of the political forms of the crisis of multiculturalism but is less clear about the part this plays in being a part of 'a neoliberal age'. Assuming they mean by this the form the mode of capitalist reproduction takes in the current period, its seems important to have the authors' views on whether the conflicts and tensions of diversity have an absolute or relative character. To what extent will the renewal of the struggle for multiculturalism be taken up by the new leaders of global capitalism as the balance of the system shifts to the east and the south, or will it carry us beyond the confines of capitalism altogether.
The authors regard multiculturalism itself as being something of a damp squib, have "rarely amounted to more than a patchwork of initiatives, rhetoric and aspirations in any given context." Its importance is less than what it is, than what it has come to mean to the global ruling elites. Yet resistance to the current mood of rejection of multiculturalism is important, because this is really a rejection of "lived multiculture."
What is seen as the failure of multiculturalism becomes a justification for ordering reality into a "good and bad diversity". The bad version is litanised into the repetition of notorious events, extending across the riots in northern English towns in 2001, the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the reaction to the Danish Mohammed cartoons, etc, etc. The incidents are available to be integrated into 'Clash of Civilisation' theories and presented as being essential to the character of the communities identified as being at the heart of 'the problem'.
The effect of generating a sense of 'bad diversity' of this order is that immigrants of both old and new generations become available as a scapegoat for the dislocations of the transition to post-industrialisation across the developed world. In this world, "lived diversity has evaded and transgressed the shapes designed for its management." The multiculturalism once deemed adequate to containing the anxieties of diversity now has to be replaced by a new 'transcendent homogeneity'of society.
The authors go on to consider the form which the crisis of multiculturalism has taken in Britain, the Netherlands and France. The work of Christopher Caldwell is also examined as a leading ideologue of cultural essentialism, seeing nothing more than a working out of all the negative responses to the West in the varied lives of muslims.
The book provides a compelling account of the political forms of the crisis of multiculturalism but is less clear about the part this plays in being a part of 'a neoliberal age'. Assuming they mean by this the form the mode of capitalist reproduction takes in the current period, its seems important to have the authors' views on whether the conflicts and tensions of diversity have an absolute or relative character. To what extent will the renewal of the struggle for multiculturalism be taken up by the new leaders of global capitalism as the balance of the system shifts to the east and the south, or will it carry us beyond the confines of capitalism altogether.
April 14, 2016
Very info-heavy, which is useful - but doesn't seem to offer much theorisation or useful synthesis... Maybe it's because it's a history monograph rather than an English one, which might explain the style. A lot of the examples went over my head.
I have to say though, that the writing style hangs too loosely on the framework. Every paragraph feels as if its slipping and sliding everywhere, not much cohesiveness and the style itself is rather too technical - mechanical would be the word, with not much grace to it.
I have to say though, that the writing style hangs too loosely on the framework. Every paragraph feels as if its slipping and sliding everywhere, not much cohesiveness and the style itself is rather too technical - mechanical would be the word, with not much grace to it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews