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Contemporary Cultural Theory

unavoidable politico-cultural referent. But in fully sovereign
‘postcolonial’ states such as Australia or Canada, the practical
import of cultural nationalism appears both less radical and less
unavoidable. The invariable consequence of ‘going through’
nationality tends to be not its supersession, but its installation into
a position of monopolistic cultural privilege, typically the
central site and source of a more or less conservative cultural
hegemony. It is against such cultural hegemony that multicul-
turalism has tended to assert the rights of minorities.

Multiculturalism
The term ‘multiculturalism’ is often understood in the most banal
of senses, as the availability of different ‘ethnic’ foods, music, art
and literature in the one society. The effects are much less banal,
however, if cultural diversity is extended into the legal system,
labour laws, educational institutions and government policy
towards health and housing. John Rex, Professor of Sociology at
the University of Warwick, defined the ‘multicultural alternative’
in terms of a belief that it should be possible, without undue
threat to the overall unity of a society, to recognise that resident
minorities have rights: ‘to their own language in family and
community contexts,...to practise their own religion,...to
organise domestic and family relations in their own way,
and...to maintain communal customs’ (Rex, 1996, p. 91). Torres
distinguishes between multiculturalism ‘as a social movement’
and ‘multicultural education’ as a ‘reform movement’. The former
is the more far-reaching: ‘a philosophical, theoretical, and political
orientation that goes beyond school reform and tackles issues of
race, gender, and class relations in society at large’ (Torres, 1998,
pp. 175–6).
Multiculturalism was one of the central matters at issue in the
American ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s. In its earliest formulations,
both as theory and as policy, it had been conceived as almost the
archetypal instance of a ‘left-culturalist’ squared circle, that is, as
a plurality of unitary cultures. The obvious objection is that this
is a contradiction in terms. Certainly, its conservative opponents
understood it thus and also, therefore, as necessarily divisive,

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