Page 152 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 143

The cultural politics of difference

insofar as it focused on the needs and complaints of specific social
groups defined by ethnicity or race. A threat to national stability
and traditional values, according to Arthur Schlesinger, multi-
culturalism could even lead to the ‘disuniting of America’
(Schlesinger, 1991). At the other extreme, radical critics tended to
see multiculturalism as a strategy of containment, accepting the
need to recognise and foster the cultural diversity of a society,
but within the pre-established and overarching institutions and
values that traditionally harboured discriminatory and ex-
ploitative policies. According to this argument, society and
culture are irreparably marked by divisions of class, gender and
race that are repressed by unitary conceptions of culture, even if
these are ethnically multicultural. To cite an American example
again: ‘Such pluralism tolerates the existence of salsa, it enjoys
Mexican restaurants, but it bans Spanish as a medium of instruc-
tion in American schools. Above all it refuses to acknowledge the
class basis of discrimination and the systematic economic
exploitation of minorities that underlie postmodern culture’
(JanMohamad & Lloyd, 1990, p. 8).
Multicultural theory has increasingly tended to invoke ethnic
‘difference’ as in itself a discursively and politically subversive
category. Writing from a country where multiculturalism con-
ventionally denoted ‘ethnicity’ rather than ‘race’, Australian
feminist Sneja Gunew, now Professor of English at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia, argued that it would ‘deconstruct’ the
dominant unitary national narratives, become ‘a strategy which
interrogates hegemonic unities’ and thereby establish the ‘basis
for constructing “signifying breakthroughs”, the preconditions for
a revolutionary, non-repetitive, history’ (Gunew, 1985, p. 188).
Later, she would borrow from Michael Fischer the notion of a
poetics of ethnicity, which could seek ‘mutual illuminations in
reading those juxtaposed dialogic texts or utterances that swerve
away from... binary structures’, and thereby substitute ‘irony
. . . for authenticity’ (Gunew, 1994, p. 49; cf. Fischer, 1986). Writing
from a country where multiculturalism often denoted ‘race’,
Stuart Hall’s work of the 1990s increasingly gave pride of theor-
etical place to the relatedly ‘diasporic’ issues of multiculturalism
and ‘hybridity’, postcolonialism and globalisation. Interestingly,

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