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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 151
The cultural politics of difference
et al., 1989, p. 2). The implication, that American culture is
somehow subversively peripheral to a European centre, seems
almost wilfully perverse, given that many of the dominant
cultural forms of our time—science fiction, jazz, rock, the
Hollywood movie, some important television subgenres—are
characteristically American in origin. It can be sustained only at
the price of a systematic indifference to such ‘popular’ cultural
forms and a corollary insistence on the special value of ‘Litera-
ture’. For it is only in the very peculiar and increasingly socially
marginal instance of high literary studies that such notions of
American marginality retain an even residual credibility.
Elsewhere, American centrality is surely almost self-evidently
obvious. There is, then, a certain irony in the way postcolonial
theory proclaims its own antipathy to the Anglocentrism of
traditional English studies, while simultaneously rejoicing in
notions of Literature clearly reminiscent of Leavisite culturalism.
We have referred to postcolonialism as performing a similar
function in the former colonies to that of multiculturalism within
the former metropoles. But the former colonies—and especially
the settler colonies—are also themselves imaginable as multi-
cultural. And here the practical politico-cultural dilemma arises:
how exactly does one reconcile a postcolonial identity, the external
difference of which is predicated upon its own internal unity, to
a multicultural diversity that will threaten all national cultural
unities, including even the postcolonial? In During’s opinion,
‘today, in writing in a First World colony... one ought to be
nationalistic’ and ‘nationalism in postcolonial nations has virtues
. . . it lacks elsewhere’ (During, 1990a, pp. 139, 151). This is espe-
cially so, he continued, in those settler societies where
‘nationalism is not used against large minority racial/tribal
groups’ (p. 139). By contrast, Gunew insisted that multicultural-
ism must seek to ‘confound those who believe that the land
speaks... literary nationalism’ (Gunew, 1990, p. 116).
Ironically, Gunew was writing against exactly the kind of
‘virtuous’ postcolonial nationalism During had sought to cele-
brate. No doubt nationalism ‘has different effects and meanings
in a peripheral nation than in a world power’ (During, 1990a,
p. 139). But these differences might matter much less for those
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