Page 25 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

coming to terms somehow with racial minority status, and acting upon it. Identity
politics within the nation–state, then, especially in Western liberal states, has taken
on the form predominantly of what Charles Taylor (1992) famously calls a ‘politics
of recognition’. The demand for – and granting of – recognition (of one’s minority
rights, one’s culture, one’s identity) are central to the idea of multiculturalism
– a political response to that demand which has had a particularly strong and
controversial influence in the past few decades. Multiculturalism can be defined,
in very simple terms, as the official and informal recognition that racial and ethnic
minorities in a particular nation–state have their own distinct cultures and commu-
nities, and that these have to recognized and appreciated as such. Thus, the idea
of multiculturalism implies, in its bare bones, an acknowledgement of the
co-existence of multiple cultures and peoples within one space, generally the space
of the nation–state. In contrast with diaspora, multiculturalism emphasizes the fact
that a constellation of racial/ethnic groups have to make do with sharing the space
here. In this sense, multiculturalism takes the challenge of togetherness in difference
seriously. It is multiculturalism’s assumed mode of sharing, however, which is
problematic.
In its most significant usage – and the one I engage with in this book –
multiculturalism is a government policy to manage cultural diversity within a
pluralist nation–state. If the nation–state can no longer maintain its homogeneity,
so goes the pluralist train of thought, then the best solution would be to allow
for the preservation of a diversity of cultures, but within certain, well-demarcated
limits, so as not to disturb or threaten the national unity. This is what Homi
Bhabha (1990), the postcolonial diasporic intellectual par excellence, describes
ironically as the simultaneous encouragement and containment of cultural diversity.
Thus we have the ‘multicultural nation’ or the ‘multicultural state’, in which
differences are carefully classified and organized into a neat, virtual grid of distinct
‘ethnic communities’, each with their own ‘culture’. The problem with this
conception of the multicultural society is that it does not respond to the dynamism
that occurs when different groups come to live and interact together, ‘tumbled
into endless connection’ as Geertz put it. It is an all too ordered and well-organized
image of society as a unity-in-diversity – a convenient image from a bureaucratic-
managerial point of view, but problematic because it does not take account
of forces, rampant in any complex, postmodern society, which are in excess of
or subvert the preferred multicultural order. In other words, multiculturalism is
based on the fantasy that the social challenge of togetherness-in-difference can
be addressed by reducing it to an image of living-apart-together. Acknowledging
this is one way to understand why multiculturalism has not been able to do away
with racism: as a concept, it depends on the fixing of mutually exclusive identities,
and therefore also on the reproduction of potentially antagonistic, dominant and
subordinate others.
The chapters in Part II have been written in my struggle to come to terms with
multiculturalism in Australia, one of the few countries in the world which has
declared itself officially multicultural. In particular, as Australian multiculturalism

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