SpringerBriefs in Sociology More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10410 Roland Benedikter • Judith Hilber The Art of Multiculturalism Bharati Mukherjee’s Imaginal Politics for the Age of Global Migration With a Foreword by Chiara Bottici, The New School for Social Research New York, and a Preface by Bo Stråth, University of Helsinki 123 Roland Benedikter Judith Hilber Center for Advanced Studies Technical College Eurac Research Max Valier Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan Italy Italy ISSN 2212-6368 ISSN 2212-6376 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Sociology ISBN 978-3-319-89667-0 ISBN 978-3-319-89668-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89668-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940657 © The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland I am aware of multiple contingencies. It is the universe we inhabit. The trajectory of hate and love would intersect on this field… He had instructed… to merge the metaphoric with the literal… Bharati Mukherjee: The Holder of the World (1993) Critical Acclaim for This Book “We are witnesses to an ongoing global refugee and migration crisis. This crisis seems a nightmare with no immediate wake-up exit—if we listen to media reports and the rhetoric of politicians. Refugees and migrants embody a multi-cultural world for which despite all attempts we are still mostly unprepared. Hence, the crisis of displacement and place-claiming. Such multi-cultural world is as much empirical as it is imaginal, as Roland Benedikter and Judith Hilber show us through their masterly examination of Bharati Mukherjee’s (1940–2017) early literary works from the 1970s to the 1990s. Benedikter and Hilber exemplify how an ‘immigrant’ from India to the U.S. like Bharati Mukherjee can become a world-famous literary phenomenon and lay a claim to place-making. Mukherjee’s work as a literary and biographical phe- nomenon shows how one could live in a house where everybody is welcomed to make themselves at home in a cosmopolitan way. Coming myself from a country where millions are working as migrant workers— and most of them are subjected to exploitation as a way of ‘unwelcoming’ them— and where at the same time refugees have been welcomed, in my view this book makes an original and timely contribution to a topic whose importance will be continuously increasing throughout the world. It focalizes one’sgeographicalori- entation and widens it to encompass the comprehension of the particularity of the problems and potentials of an intercultural world that is the signature of our time. Concise yet comprehensive, inspired and inspiring, this book engages us to understand both the simplicity and complexity of art and multiculturalism, which runs the risk of being rendered clichéd and facile if not handled with depth, clarity, and heartfelt understanding. Educators, politicians, cultural professionals and the schools should ‘use’ this book—in the strict sense of the term. In a world that purports to be global yet undermines this claim constantly by constructing restrictions, I recommend this book precisely to dismantle these restrictions. I strongly recommend it to students, universities, and socio-political networks in hopes that they will use art and multiculturalism as a tool to produce a pluralistic and intercultural world.” —Lorna Q. Israel, The Asian Center, University of the Philippines-Diliman vii viii Critical Acclaim for This Book “Benedikter’s and Hilber’s book, while highly concentrated in length and size, is an outstanding contribution to an increasingly crucial topic of our time. In times of an ongoing global migration crisis, the problem of multiculturalism reflected and conceived as a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted socio-political ‘art’ is exem- plified in this book in exemplary ways. This topic will necessarily grow in interest over the coming years. Most probably, always more geopolitical areas will have to deal with issues like multiculturalism and the politics of the imaginaries behind it to gain access to the deeper, human dimensions involved. Benedikter’s and Hilber’s book is a concise jewel in experimentally addressing these issues. It comes exactly at the right time. It is a clear condensation of an often over-complex issue. At the same time, this book is entertaining, while it is analytic and intellectually sharp. In my view, this book can serve best as an introductory text for a set of questions without which the issue of multiculturalism is hardly debatable on a sound basis: the relation between multiculturalism, global cultural alignment and the role of power; the basics of ‘postmodernity’ and their (often contradictory) relations to politics; and to what has been called, by leading female theorists in the U.S. and beyond, ‘Imaginal Politics’ (Chiara Bottici) which will probably become one of the most important ‘contextual political’ dimensions of the coming years. We urgently have to prepare ourselves for a new phase of integration by preparing our imaginaries. By exemplarily addressing the work of Bharati Mukherjee’s work of the 1970s to the 1990s, Benedikter and Hilber show the full weight of her work for the present. I recommend this book with the utmost conviction.” —Beatrix Aigner, Dott., C. Professor of Transcultural Educational Sciences, Trilingual Free University of Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan, Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, Northern Italy Foreword by Chiara Bottici, The New School for Social Research, New York City This book is about Bharati Mukherjee, born 1940 in Calcutta, India, passed away 2017 in Manhattan, United States, an acclaimed American writer of novels on multiculturalism, globalization, and the postmodern condition. It focuses on her imaginal world, as it is disclosed through literature and an interdisciplinary concept of art. This book achieves multiple goals at the same time: It provides an introduction into one of the most important literary works of the past decades with regards to comparing identities and the textures in which they are expressed; it is an intro- duction to multiculturalism and “postmodernity” as mindsets; it gives insight into the mutual teachings and enrichments between painting and writing; and it is an exploration of both artistic and political multiculturalism, its limits and potentials. In particular, it explains the intersection between different strands of formal pro- cedures, such as painting and writing are, to achieve one and the same goal which is at the center of Mukherjee’s texts: raise awareness about the necessity of “difference in unity”, and about the beauty of “the Other”. Benedikter’s and Hilber’s book highlights the important contribution of Bharati Mukherjee’s work for rethinking what contemporary “Imaginal Politics” currently is, and what it could become. I recommend this text to all interested in contem- porary writing, in multiculturalism, in contemporary politics, and in the achieve- ments of a great female artist. This book will enrich the reader with its sometimes playful, always original and very accessible style, its great accuracy and philo- sophical depth, and not least with its dry wit. It is a great introductory text for high school, college, and university teaching, for which I recommend it warmly. New York City, New York Prof. Chiara Bottici, Ph.D. August 2018 The New School for Social Research Author of Imaginal Politics. Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Columbia University Press, 2014. ix Preface by Bo Stråth, University of Helsinki When reading Roland Benedikter’s and Judith Hilber’s book on Bharati Mukherjee and her rethinking of “Imaginal Politics” and the idea of multiculturalism from the viewpoint of fiction and art, and when writing these lines, more than 60 million humans were on enforced move around the world, in Africa and Asia, in the Americas and in Europe, escaping wars, political violence and persecution, poverty and misery in the search for a better and securer future. While richness has become global and is not restricted to a certain area of the world, poverty and exclusion are growing in what used to be the rich world of universal welfare. Populations in what still might be called the rich world are waking up from indolence as to the distress of the world. They, too, look for a better and securer future through protection from what they define as a new threat. Overwhelmed politicians are electrified and try to find an answer to the question of how to react to a rising wave of ethnic nationalism requiring exclusion of those who knock on the door. This book is about rethinking multiculturalism in new ways through its focus on the literary work of Bharati Mukherjee and about her search for ways to translate the principles of literature and art to the sociopolitical sphere.