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Introduction: the Politics of Multiculturalism Chapter 1 Notes Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism 1 The ambiguity of the term ‘cultural difference’ here is an intentional one, for I use it to refer to both ‘real’ formations of history and culture (i.e., as equiv- alent to what gets called ‘ethnicity’) and the ‘unreal’ categories of race. I use ‘cultural difference’ in the recognition that it is ultimately impossible to make a clear and clean distinction between the two. Chapter 1 Understanding the Politics of Multiculturalism 1 My characterization of anti-racism’s ‘binary logic’ here is of course necessarily simplified. For a sustained treatment of anti-racism’s complex and conflicted histories, see Bonnett (2000a). 2 As I will frequently return to the concept of disavowal, a brief note is necessary here. While it is a term that has been most typically employed in relation to theories of race developed in dialogue with a psychoanalytic tradition (see, for example Bhabha, 1994: 66–84), my emphasis here is a resolutely social one. While it is impossible to deny a psychic and uncon- scious dimension to discourses of race, my analysis concentrates on how racism’s disavowal has worked in the service of more explicitly political – that is to say, institutional – interests. Here, I follow Judith Butler in her recognition that it is ultimately impossible to maintain a distinction between the laws of the symbolic and the social, on account of the former comprising ‘the sedimentation of social practices’ (Butler, 2000: 19). 3 In the same way that, according to Karl Marx, we should ‘not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty-bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egotistic class interest’, but rather acknowledge it is prey to a conceptual error that considers the special conditions of its emancipation to be the general conditions for the emancipation of all (Marx, 1998: 50), it should be recognized that the adherents of nominally anti-racist practices that serve to reinforce racism are not necessarily motivated by racist intent, and in fact may in their own understanding be acting with the best of intentions. 4 Blair (2005e). 5 I am, accordingly, not interested in making a prima facie distinction between the kinds of multicultural practices I approve of, and those I do not. To do so would only serve to maintain a normative distinction between good and bad that tends, I am suggesting, to prevent a fuller understanding of what is at stake in multicultural practice. 6 Contrary to those who would link the genesis of nationalism to an earlier – even primordial – historical moment, and by doing so locate its origins in a 178 Notes to pages 26–35 179 common national identity antedating the state (see, for example, A. D. Smith, 1998), here I follow the lead of modernist historians who argue with vary- ing degrees of emphasis that the phenomenon of nationalism – as a descrip- tion of the convergence between the political state and the population over whom it has jurisdiction – can be traced back no further than the social and industrial revolutions of the modern period (see, for example, Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990; Anderson, 1991; Breuilly, 1993). 7 For an excellent study that focuses on the importance of nationalism (as ‘the dominant operative ideology of modernity’) to our ideas about identity ∨ and belonging, see Malesevi´c (2006). 8 For a short, clear explanation of the status of race as neither an entirely ‘objective’ or ‘ideological’ phenomenon, see Omi and Winant (1993). 9 I am thinking here not only of the vulgate that posits that the state has become redundant under the conditions of neoliberal globalization, but also those philosophical currents that adopt dispersed and decentralized models of political power in which the role of the state as a political actor tends to vanish (see Aranowitz and Bratis, 2002). 10 This is in part out of a need to develop a kind of methodological short- hand: the emphasis I will give to the importance of race as a nationalist politics would not be possible without some finite grasp of the social agents whose actions codify a ‘state’ position. The conceptual advantages I derive from this approach – not least in being able to trace a certain political logic in what might otherwise seem entirely contradictory prac- tices – will outweigh, I believe, an inevitable and accompanying tendency to overemphasize the state’s autonomy and coherence as a social actor. I am willing to engage in a degree of simplification here in the conviction that it is important to hold onto a conception of the state as an object of analysis. 11 My choice of subject matter here has largely been dictated by a desire to cover a broad range of state practices, from the local politics of community to the international politics of war. There are some very important events this book has not dealt with – perhaps most notably the murder of Stephen Lawrence and its aftermath – because they have been given sustained acad- emic treatment elsewhere. 12 The term ‘multicultural nationalism’ or a close variation of it, has been vari- ously used to signify ambiguous new configurations of ‘civic’ and ‘ethno- cultural’ nationalism (Brown, 2000: 48), to describe Canada’s federal unionism (Kernerman, 2005), or the relationship between cultural pluralism and sub- state nationalism in Scotland (Hussain and Miller, 2006). My usage places its emphasis on the pluralization of official discourses of identity and belonging, and is closest to Anne-Marie Fortier’s definition of ‘multiculturalist national- ism’, as a ‘narrative that posits multiculture and diversity at the heart of the nationalist project’ (Fortier, 2008: 22). 13 Stuart Hall et al. (1978: 333). 14 Social contradictions are of course intractable only in the sense that they cannot find resolution within the existing parameters of any designated social order. It is, in other words, in defence of a certain social order (and a refusal to entertain the possibility of an alternative one) that the state acts in a regulatory role. 180 Notes to pages 39–51 Chapter 2 Black in the Union Jack: The Britishness Project 1 Note too how the changing status of Britain is signalled as a popular liber- ation as ‘nation’ supersedes ‘state’ as the container of Britishness. 2 For detailed commentary on the media’s reception of the Parekh Report, see Fortier (2005), McGalughlin and Neal (2004) and Runnymede Trust (2000b). 3 ‘Englishness’ is of course not the same as ‘Britishness’, though in the con- text of these debates there is in fact very little to distinguish the two. I will briefly consider these nationalist terminologies in a discussion below. 4 Blair in Tempest (2007b). 5 As national statistics demonstrate (see National Statistics Online, 2006), a British identity has the added advantage of being a category of iden- tification taken up with somewhat more enthusiasm by a non-white popu- lation (predominantly resident in England) who are typically more sensitive to the abiding racial connotations of Englishness. While a civil sense of Britishness might thus be thought to provide an opportunity to develop a genuinely plural national identity, the state’s recent practices – as the fol- lowing pages will argue – have moved Britishness towards, rather than away from, a racialized idea of national belonging. 6 This turn to discourses of nationalism as one of the few means of arti- culating a sense of governmental distinctiveness and agency under the con- ditions of what Colin Crouch calls ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch, 2004) is becoming a familiar phenomenon across a number of Western states, and has of course also underwritten the popular appeal of the parties of the European far right. 7 This is not to engage in a tug of war over Orwell, whose thinking on nationalism and race make him in many ways a product of his time. The recognition that British radical traditions have historically often been com- promised by nationalist forms is still not adequately acknowledged (see, for example, the admission of nationalist ambivalence in the editor’s preface to Samuel (1989), or the critique of New Left historiography in Gilroy (1993: 1–40)). 8 As the nation was treated to the spectacle of performers from the Notting Hill Carnival dancing in the Mall beneath an ageing rock guitarist noodling the national anthem from the roof of Buckingham Palace, it was hard not to recall the words of Prince Philip to an Aboriginal elder in Northern Queensland some three months previously: ‘do you still throw spears at each other?’ (quoted in Marks, 2002). 9 Consider, with reference to my earlier remarks on the reception of the Parekh and Macpherson reports, former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont’s description of the Queen Mother’s funeral: ‘What was moving about the lying in state in Westminster Hall was the large number of West Indians, Africans and Indians who filed past the coffin. One was reminded that the monarchy does far more to reconcile differences among ourselves than any amount of reports from the Runnymede Trust or Sir William Macpherson’ (Lamont, 2002). 10 For a useful critique of a certain formalism in Laclau’s theory, particularly in relation to the politics of cultural difference, see A. M. Smith (1998: 177–202). Notes to pages 52–59 181 11 Blair (1997). 12 Balibar (1999: 166). 13 Despite the US walkout infamously ordered by Colin Powell at the Durban World Conference Against Racism in 2001, North America’s pressing need to deal with the history of slave labour in its southern states has meant that in debate (if not action) these questions have generally been approached with a greater degree of sophistication than in Britain. 14 According to Paul Routledge (2006: 16), Brown’s position on this subject has derived from his speechwriter Michael Wills.
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