Page 148 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 139

The cultural politics of difference

of London, has recently observed: ‘deconstructive feminism
. . . avoids the perils of generalizations about female subjectivity.
But it courts the danger that its own interest in endlessly prolifer-
ating particularities of difference... endorses a relativity and
indeterminacy which works to undermine political projects’
(Segal, 1999, p. 32). Hence Showalter’s earlier insistence that:
‘Feminist criticism can’t afford . . . to give up the idea of female
subjectivity, even if we accept it as a constructed or metaphys-
ical one’ (Showalter, 1989, p. 369). Barrett makes much the same
point, albeit with a less assured sense of her own political certain-
ties: ‘If we replace the given self with a constructed, fragmented
self, this poses... the obvious political question of who is the
I that acts and on what basis,... who is the I that is so certain of
its fragmented and discursively constructed nature’ (Barrett, 1999,
p. 25).

NATIONALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM

Nationalism
As with gender and sexuality, so too with the debates over the
cultural politics of nationalism, multiculturalism and post-
colonialism—an originally culturalist discourse has taken on an
increasingly post-structuralist character. Nations are often under-
stood as political, geographical or even biological phenomena, but
there is an obvious sense in which they are primarily cultural.
Nationalism is clearly not the politico-cultural effect of an already
existing nationality, but its cause. As the social philosopher Ernest
Gellner observed: ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations
to self consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’
(Gellner, 1964, p. 169). Nations are not so much matters of natural
‘fact’, then, as forms of collective imagining. That there is some
deep connection between the developing social role of the
modern intelligentsia and the creation of such imaginings has
become something of a theoretical commonplace. If it is no longer
possible to hold German idealist philosophy entirely responsible
for the subsequent history of nationalism, this is largely because
attention shifted, in Gellner’s own work and in that of Tom Nairn,

139