| Multiculturalism has a short history and is vulnerable as a concept
and policy in the neoconservative state, after 9/11. It originated in the late
1960s, emerging with the encouragement of the New Left and after a decade of the
civil rights movement that forced the recognition of cultural differences on the
statute books. The word was first used, curiously, to describe Switzerland, and
then was adopted by Canada in 1971 as the first country to develop multiculturalism
as an official policy following the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism
that responded to the grievances of the French-speaking minority. This policy
affirmed the status of all Canadian citizens regardless of their ‘racial’ or ethnic
origins and it confirmed the rights of aboriginal peoples and the status of Canada’s
two official languages. The policy was soon adopted elsewhere, especially within
the Commonwealth and by countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom. New
Zealand developed its own bicultural policy in the last two decades of the twentieth
century after the Maori renaissance of the 1970s revived the significance of the
Treaty of Waitangi and began challenging the dominant monoculturalism of New Zealand
society and its founding institutions. Multiculturalism, then, had its political
home in civil rights, indigenous peoples’ movements, in the critique of colonialism
and neo-colonialism, in citizenship rights, and in a robust notion of equality,
all of which intersected and coalesced during the 1970s. This volatile political
mix soon made its presence felt strongly in education and the education system
was seen as the basis of establishing a kind of monocultural socialisation in
the past and also as the means for addressing new citizenship questions of identity,
cross-cultural understanding, ethnic harmony, social and ‘racial’ coherence, and
the discouragement of ‘racial’ hatred, discrimination and violence. Increasingly,
education was employed as the means for initiating the ‘naturalisation’ of new
citizens and immigrants, as well as one of the vehicles for redressing past grievances
among indigenous peoples. These immense demands often were translated into attempts
to build a multicultural curriculum. Up until the later 1960s, the liberal
state followed a policy of ‘one language, one culture, one people’ and assumed
that cultural homogeneity was a necessary condition for modernisation and development.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the relation between two cultures
– a traditional one and a culture of modernity – came to be officially perceived
as largely a problem of modernisation, of making the former more like the
latter. This modernisation was not just a form of ‘assimilation’ or ‘integration’:
the logic of modernisation was taken to supersede all forms of traditionalism.
Tribalism, in particular, was perceived to be inimical to the interests of the
liberal state because it promoted historic ‘we–they’ attitudes and thereby militated
against the unity of an integrated state. Only recently in Western development
and political theory has it even seemed a remote possibility that the enhancement
of traditional ways of life might actually contribute to, rather than hinder,
the ‘development’ or ‘progress’ of a people. There is probably no more pressing
a set of philosophical problems in educational theory than those that fall under
the broad issue of cultural difference. The question of cultural difference in
the era of modernity can be considered in abstract terms, in terms of the logic
of alterity, of Otherness, but it cannot be thought of without examining the historical
context of colonisation, its consequences for imperial, white-settler and indigenous
cultures, and the historic struggles against the exercise of imperial power: the
myriad forms of decolonisation, cultural reassertion and self-determination. With
the ascent of neo-liberalism in the 1980s multiculturalism suffered a series of
setbacks. First, there was a revival of attacks from neo-liberals who criticised
multiculturalism for allegedly impeding a ‘shared national identity’. Old liberal
arguments concerning the ‘balkanisation’ of the liberal state were advanced alongside
arguments by the likes of Diane Ravitch, Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Sousa, Roger Kimball,
Thomas Sowell and Charles Sykes in the USA that warned about the ways in which
multiculturalism undermined universal values and led to cultural relativism. Second,
in the domain of public policy, the market became the favoured means of the allocation
of public goods and the basis for redistribution rather than direct state intervention.
This ideological perspective eroded many of the political gains made during the
1970s and multiculturalism became a target for the Right that was seen as ripe
for reversal. Yet the institutionalisation of multiculturalism in education and
in law, as official policy, in so many aspects of the state practices, including
hiring practices, official language, anti-discrimination, etc., meant that reversal
was not easily accomplished even though the political climate was right. If
anything, the move to the neoconservative state has heralded a new era of multiculturalism
where it is even more threatened and vulnerable despite this institutionalisation.
Neoconservatives understand that crisis of the neo-liberal state to be one of
governance and disorder after excesses of market individualism that in part requires
the embrace of traditional conservative morality to address the cultural crisis
of individual anarchy, sexual permissiveness, hedonism and cultural relativism.
The integration of the Christian Right into American politics, which took place
under Reagan and then accelerated under George Bush, has focused a new assault
on diversity in the name of (monocultural WASP) values. Multiculturalism is seen
as being responsible for tearing down the values of ‘civilisation’. After 9/11,
multiculturalism is also seen as a mistaken policy, as a policy that has promoted
the demolition of the state and created now insurmountable internal security risks.
In Britain, the USA and France the emphasis has turned away from rights discourse
in relation to immigrants in favour of greater security, more surveillance through
the introduction of ‘community cards’, control and policing of borders, separate
education of illegal immigrants – often involving a denial of cultural rights
– and an erosion of those liberties that we take for granted. For instance, it
has been revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency has secret jails around
the globe and a recent amendment to a finance bill introduced by Lindsay Graham,
a South Carolina Republican, has just been introduced that will reverse the Supreme
Court decision and take away any legal rights of inmates at Guantanamo, thus destablising
the rule of law and questioning the status of habeas corpus. Most often, local
resident, immigrant and especially Muslim populations suffer these new indignities.
The new policies have begun to impact on the independence and existence of ‘faith
schools’ in the United Kingdom and religious practices in French schools (the
government’s ban on Muslim girls’ veils in schools). Riots in France, perhaps
the most extensive since the 1968 student protests, which have spread from Paris
to Lyons, typically involve young French Muslims and Blacks living in suburban
housing estates on the outskirts of Paris who suffer high unemployment and who
have been excluded from the benefits of French society. These young people complain
bitterly of racism and the way the French state requires immigrants to adopt French
values and customs. This has given rise to comparisons with American multiculturalism
that follows anti-discrimination laws based on statistical data (the French state
does not keep such data), yet the treatment of poor Black people in New Orleans
after the hurricane Katrina struck has indicated how the neoconservative state
failed to protect and look after its people. Multiculturalism since 9/11 and under
neoconservatism now faces fresh legal, ethical, political and economic setbacks.
These risks are acerbated under globalisation. In a globalised era, tensions
have been pinpointed between movements towards homogeneity of policies and practices
in education – particularly represented by models grounded in market-oriented
approaches towards efficiency and accountability – and those that take cultural
diversity, democracy and citizenship-building as the core of their approaches.
The former implicitly adopts a position that individualises policy in terms of
‘consumers’, which, at least at the level of provision of public policy, increasingly
obviates cultural difference even if the market itself is sensitive to the exploitation
of difference in terms of consumer marketing strategy. The rationale for the latter
is mainly based on two arguments: on the one hand, the need for identity representation
of culturally diverse groups in different arenas of social, political and cultural
life, including education; on the other hand, the need for all to provide an education
firmly grounded on anti-discriminatory perspectives that highlight the multicultural
nature of citizenship-building and the cultural meanings underpinning democracy. While
these arguments have gained support from all who put into question a culturally
blind market-oriented approach to education, this dichotomous approach towards
the question of multiculturalism is not enough. There is a strong need to gauge
the theoretical grounding and adequacy of policies and practices that take into
account a wider multicultural education project. While often well intentioned,
educational policies committed to multiculturalism often backfire when they fail
to take into account the tensions inherent within the theoretical perspectives
and discourses informing multicultural issues. Such tensions touch on issues related
to identity and difference, and the extent to which these are thought of as essentialised
entities or as dynamic, contingent and always-provisory constructions within discursive
space. Likewise, these policies touch on issues related to the hybridisation of
identities, bringing in the interplay of markers of identity along the lines of
race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, language, culture, and so on. They
also confront issues related to the spectrum between what is called universalism
and relativism, inasmuch as respect for cultural diversity invariably tends to
challenge modern assumptions of universal values and the construction of national
identities. These policies struggle to find appropriate answers concerning possible
ways of taking on board the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ interfaces, as well as the
plural discourses and voices that shape distinct cultural meanings within educational
policies and practices. These tensions do not exist in a unified field,
but rather they interact and impinge on the ways multicultural education is theorised.
Thus, clarifying the epistemological and ethical debates surrounding these tensions,
as well as looking into the extent to which education and teacher education have
been dealing with them, can help not only to map the field – in itself a worthy
enterprise – but also to provide groundbreaking thinking of policies and practices
attuned to citizenship-building within the multicultural project. In a time when
disparate cultural values and outlooks have been at the centre of many misunderstandings
and, indeed, signal value differences at the heart of world conflicts, it is worthwhile
to examine the tensions in discourses geared towards educational thinking that
purport to value cultural diversity and anti-discriminatory perspectives. Even
though we are wary of grand narratives or attempts to project a universal dimension,
we believe that a critical examination of the field of multiculturalism in terms
of its theoretical approaches, as well as its political implications in education
and teacher education, will contribute to the enhancement of the multicultural
project in education. To this end we invited a team of international contributors
from among those at the cutting edge in the debates surrounding the topic. These
contributors adopt different perspectives and their work highlights different
aspects of the subject. The contributors come from different cultural and national
backgrounds and follow different theoretical, political or practical approaches.
The contributors, in particular, were asked to elucidate the implications of their
arguments for educational policies and practices. Susan Searls Giroux in
her article ‘From the ‘Culture Wars’ to the Conservative Campaign for Campus Diversity:
or, how inclusion became the new exclusion’ provides a critical historical account
of the rise of multiculturalism in American universities, analysing its impacts
and tensions, and pointing out the extent to which the present context of post-9/11
terror attacks has reconfigured old backlashes. She contends that neoconservative
forces have been penetrating academic life and promoting the silence of multiculturalism,
paradoxically under the very appropriation of the vision and language of multiculturalism
itself. In ‘Multicultural Challenges in Educational Policies within a Non-Conservative
Scenario: the case of the emerging reforms in higher education in Brazil’, Ana
Canen discusses the extent to which multiculturalism has had an impact in the
emerging reforms in higher education in Brazil. Building on a post-colonial critical
multicultural approach, she analyses the main axes around which the higher education
reform is built. Canen examines the plural and contradictory discourses of the
written media, including university media and the government voice, in relation
to the meanings ascribed to inclusive and multicultural reform. She concludes
by pointing to possible roads ahead towards a transformative higher education
within a multicultural perspective that not only goes beyond dichotomies and incorporates
hybridity as a part of its political outlook, but also attempts to take both cultural
plurality and academic excellence on board. In ‘‘White’, ‘Ethnic’ and ‘Indigenous’:
pre-service teachers reflect on discourses of ethnicity in Australian culture’,
Anne Hickling-Hudson analyses students’ writing in autobiographical or biographical
mode, pinpointing contesting discourses of ethnicity in Australia. The author
argues that in grappling with the negative legacies of neocolonialism and its
‘race’ ideologies, reflection on how students have been socialised to regard their
place of indigenous culture in their society could be the first step in order
for them to become teachers who can overcome prejudice and discrimination in the
classroom, deemed crucial in an intercultural pedagogy. Ho-chia Chueh, in
an article entitled ‘The Multiculturalism Caveat’, explores the notion of a politics
of difference and the essentialist assumptions of political subjectivities. She
provides a close reading of major scholars in the field and specifically examines
the post-structuralist critique of subject-based reason and its appraisal of the
Hegelian metaphysics of negation as means of identity claims. From this discussion
Chueh proceeds to work through ‘a pedagogy of the politics of difference’. In
his article ‘Audit Cultures, Commodification, and Class and Race Strategies in
Education’, Michael Apple turns his attention to educational policies in the USA,
focusing particularly on the federal reauthorisation of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, commonly known as No Child Left Behind. Pointing to its turn towards
testing and accountability, Apple takes that policy as a starting point to discuss
issues related to current neo-liberal trends that have been informing an agenda
of privatisation and marketisation in education. He highlights the ways that a
punitive culture of external auditing, inspection and league tables underlies
No Child Left Behind, even though it is disguised in a transformative and seemingly
multicultural language. Apple points out the implications of race, class and cultural
diversity of such a ‘reform’ agenda, and urges educational researchers to pay
close attention to the complicated class and race dynamics. The article concludes
with the hope that we provoke alternative ways to promote educational policies
that go beyond the controlling, homogenising culture that has prevailed in neo-liberal
educational agendas worldwide. Zeus Leonardo in his article ‘Through the
Multicultural Glass: Althusser, ideology and race relations in post-civil rights
America’ develops his insights on race and multiculturalism by delving into Althusser’s
analysis of the concept of ideology. Arguing that a thoroughgoing and critical
theory of ideology is currently missing from multiculturalism, the author argues
that Althusser’s theory of ideology is useful for the study of race (absent from
Athusser’s original work). He contends that radical work on race within multiculturalism
cannot forsake ideology. We must study not only its real manifestations, but also
its imaginative, ideological dimensions. In that sense, by analysing the three
main moments of Althusser’s notion of ideology, Leonardo claims the third synthesises
the other two and, indeed, most directly provides a clear picture of how racial
ideology functions on a daily basis. In ‘English Rustic in Black Skin: post-colonial
education, cultural hybridity and racial identity in the new century’, Cameron
McCarthy rethinks the constructs of race, identity and cultural heritage, central
to multiculturalism. He takes hybridity and the dynamism and heterogeneity of
plural everyday human encounters. Through what McCarthy calls three ‘vignettes’,
one of which is autobiographical, he develops his argument against understandings
of multiculturalism that tend to mark out ‘indelible lines of separation between
the culture, literature and traditions of the West and the culture and traditions
of the Third World’. He shows the complexity of identity formation and stresses
that curriculum reform must find links that connect plural groups across the particularities
of their ethnic, geographical and cultural identities. Jamie Kowalczyk &
Thomas Popkewitz examine discourses of multiculturalism by historicising the notion
of multiculturalism, examining Italy’s conversations about schooling. In their
contribution entitled ‘Multiculturalism, Recognition and Abjection: (re)mapping
Italian identity’, they argue that ‘Italian schools, along with other European
Union member schools, are engaged in conversations around citizenship(s) (supranational,
national and local variants), the question of national identity as a natural,
uninterrupted homogeneity or an evolving heterogeneity, and the way in which immigration
is evoked as the catalyst for these conversations’. Kowalczyk & Popkewitz
first historicise and second consider the relationship of multiculturalism to
the ‘memory work’ involved in narrating the nation. Third, they explore the local
and the global in the Other. In this they provide a much-needed analysis of the
European and specifically Italian dimension of multiculturalism. In the
final article, ‘Education, Post-structuralism and the Politics of Difference’,
Michael Peters elaborates on the phrase ‘the politics of difference’ by reference
to four main elements: a deepening of democracy through a political critique of
Enlightenment values; an understanding of ‘governmentality’ as a form of political
reason linking forms of governance and the self-regulating individual; an understanding
of emergent forms of post-coloniality, an emphasis on philosophies of difference
and the encounter with the Other; and an examination of ‘the multitude – the coming
of world democracy’. Finally, Peter Roberts contributes a review essay that
explores recent publications and what he calls ‘Friere in the age of the market’. Ana
Canen
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Michael A. Peters
University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA |
