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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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