Comentários / SESI - Serviço Social da Indústria - Distrito Federal - Professor de Língua Inglesa - Licenciatura em Letras - Habilitação Inglês - CETRO - 2013 - Prova Objetiva

Un/settled Multiculturalism

     In contrast to Britain, the figuration of multiculturalism in
the United States has produced much greater social
reverberations and contested theoretical resolutions. This is
hardly surprising, considering that the main institutional sites for
the multicultural debates in Britain were primary and secondary
school education, while in the United States it was the university.
What became known as the "culture wars" in the United States
during the mid-1980's into the 1990's, politicized and expanded
the concept of multiculturalism beyond the parameters of race
and ethnicity, into the discourses of gender and sexuality
conceived as socially repressed cultural differences. The culture
wars engaged and enraged university teaching, book publishing
and public journalism. Stimulating a searing calling into question
as well as the implacable defense of the cultural American
mainstream, the culture wars produced an impassionate politics
of knowledge in which interrogations of the exclusionary racial,
gender, sexual and class formations of the nation were
reactivated as themes relevant not only to the democratic ideals
of citizenship but to the epistemology of many academic
disciplines. Once it was widely perceived that the western canon
was under assault, this sparkled a counter-reformation.
     The discourse of multiculturalism in the United States
touched political nerves which were irreducible to the nervous
system of either Left or Right. It has been variously lampooned
as "political correctness"; the critique of the hegemony of "dead
white males" in knowledge production; or the attempt to overturn
western civilization by substituting for the "classics" lesser
readings based not on scholarly values but on ethnic and gender
proportionality. More considered critics have seen it a feverish
post-modern embrace of relativism in knowledge (whether
scientific or moral) and an irrational, ethnicized opposition to
universalism which eschews a broad-based politics (i.e.
organized against the social inequalities of material interests),
favoring instead an identity politics organized around the virtues
of cultural recognition. The trouble with criticisms of this nature is
that whatever merits they contain are ill-served by their inability
to distinguish exactly the object of their critique. That there are
various multiculturalisms in the politics of multiculturalism is
perhaps the chief contribution of the United States' experience
to the debate, but this is not yet something that the critique of
multiculturalism  has  managed  to  take  on  board.  As  Cynthia
Willet puts it in her anthology of philosophical arguments,
"Multiculturalism has not yet been fully theorized. In part the lack
of a unifying theory stems from the fact that multiculturalism as a
political, social and cultural movement has aimed to respect a
multiplicity of diverging perspectives outside of dominant
traditions".
     Admittedly, this may be the over-idealization of a
provisional and pragmatic set of circumstances but it does point
to the need to understand the politics of multiculturalism(s) as
articulating, in critique of dominant, oppressive traditions,
different specifications of the logic of the multicultural in the
fields of knowledge and representation. Understanding these
dominant traditions within the logic of the multicultural suggests
the need for coalitions and co-production in knowledge formation
which takes seriously the "local memories" and "subjugated
knowledge" (according to Foucault) whose exclusion and
repression shore up the dominant tradition as an unquestionably
valorized (western) universal foundation. In the United States
(as in Britain), it is the colonial institutions of the western
foundation of power and knowledge which, despite concomitant
developments in liberalism and subsequent formulations of
representative democracy, have yet to experience significant
decolonization. At its best, the politics of multiculturalism in the
United  States  has  raised  serious  doubts  and  consternation

(HESSE, B. Un/settled Multiculturalisms, 2000)