The Post 9/11 World and the Crises of Multiculturalism: Sussex University 50th Anniversary Event
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The Post 9/11 World and the Crises of Multiculturalism: Sussex University 50th Anniversary Event
- 1. THE POST 9/11 WEST AND THE CRISES OF MULTICULTURALISM DR ALANA LENTIN, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
- 3. OVERVIEW
- 7. BACKGROUND
- 8. TOO DIVERSE: THE REAL PROBLEM WITH Entropa Installation: The Netherlands is seen as series of minarets submerged by a flood
- 9. TOO DIVERSE: THE REAL PROBLEM WITH “Nas @43 where have I mentioned the word ‘genetics’ or the word ‘race’? My problem is with Somali culture not Somali genes.” CAULDRON — Entropa Installation: The Netherlands is seen as series of minarets submerged by a flood ON 21ST AUGUST, 2009 AT 11:41 AM WWW.PICKLEDPOLITICS.CO
- 10. GOOD & BAD
- 11. GOOD & BAD “In the European shift to the privatization of race, the shifting border between good diversity, requiring celebration and cultivation, and bad diversity, diverse matter recognized as of out place, is central to understanding a particularly influential inflection of antiracialism. How can there be racism when the official commitment to diversity is so manifest, and so mediated?” The Crises of Multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley)
- 13. ‘Europeans know more about Arabic calligraphy and kente cloth because they know less about Montaigne and Goethe. If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half‐century, it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour. Immigration is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it’ Christopher Caldwell 2009: 17
- 14. BATTLEGROUND:
- 15. BATTLEGROUND: “White Men Saving Brown Women from Brown Men” GAYATRI SPIVAK, CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?
- 16. CONCLUSION In memory of Baha Mousa (1977-2003)
- 17. CONCLUSION “Why is a book that makes you ashamed for its author, even occasionally ashamed to be reading it, still worth reading? Because for all its bigotry and paranoia, all of its ill‐ informed dismissal of Islamic history and culture, “The Rage and the Pride” is a bracing response to the moral equivocation, the multi‐culti political correctness, the minimization and denial of the danger of Islamo‐fascism In memory of Baha Mousa (1977-2003) that dogs the response to Sept. 11 and to the ongoing war on terrorism.” CHARLES TAYLOR ON ORIANNA
Editor's Notes
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- - Post-2004 (but building on critique of MC going back to 1980s) the hegemonic discourse - uniting left and right - is that MC is a failed experiment leading societies, as Trevor Phillips put it. ‘sleepwalking to segregation’.\n\n- Pictures represent some of the themes that come under the crisis discourse that emerges.\n\n- The main themes include:\n\n+ MC creates ghettoisation, disintegration, lack of social cohesion, minority white cities, permits illiberal minorities the upper hand...\n\n+ Key moments: recently Anders Behring Breivik Utøya killings, 7/7 bombings, banlieues riots, cartoon controversy, Theo Van Gogh murder, Swiss Minarets, expulsion of the Roma from France/Italy, Merkel’s announcement of a crisis in the wake of Sarrazin, Cronulla riots (Australia), Hijab and burka bans, use of sexuality in creating opposition between liberal and illiberal societies (Fortuyn, Hirsi Ali)...\n\n+ Key responses: focus on national values (citizenship tests, ceremonies), action against ‘radicalisation’ (e.g. Prevent), return of ‘positive’ teaching of colonial past (Ferguson), Cameron and Merkel’s speeches, immediate focus on race post-riots.\n\nParadoxically these are culturalised responses to what is construed as a cultural problem.\n\n+ Key characters: US shock jocks, European equivalents (e.g. Melanie Phillips), Caldwell, nouveaux philosophes, ‘liberal’ journalists (Nick Cohen, Fallaci), and more complexly, Trevor Phillips, Ni putes ni soumises et compagnie, academics such as Joppke.\n\nIn ‘The crises of multiculturalism’ we theorise the assertion that MC is broken in terms of circuits of beliefs and recited truths, as mediated and mediating - in danger of happening here because it is happening elsewhere - so the need for ‘honest debates’ about Islam/Muslims/terrorism/burka even in countries (e.g. Finland) without 2 Muslims to rub together.\n\nThe spectre of ever-present danger is racialised and given human form as what an artist friend, Tobaron Waxman calls, ‘fear of a bearded planet’. \n\nI want to focus here on the discourse around the crisis of multiculturalism as one very real outcome of the post 9/11 consensus (not that critique of MC didn’t exist before) but now 9/11 acts to legitimise the dismantling of any (limited) gains of multiculturalism.\n
- While the well-founded critique of MC policies as essentialising, often compounding communal hegemonies (e.g. patriarchal, heteronormative...) are well taken, the crisis of MC discourse needs to be seen as an attack not on prescriptive MC but on lived multiculture - the fact of ‘too much diversity’ (Goodhart).\n\nIt is a riff on the old story that blames different others for the ills of society at large.\n\nIndeed, the crisis of MC, can be seen as one of the main ways in which racism is articulated.\n\nHowever, because of the focus on culture rather than race, the charge of racism is both implicitly and sometimes explicitly denied.\n\n\n
- One of the main ways in which race is (not) talked about is through the use of the language of ‘diversity’ both as a code for racialised difference and as a purportedly more useful way of conceptualising multiculturalism. \n\nDiversity, as a replacement for MC, is acceptable even in places that have eschewed MC (e.g. France). It is seen as incorporating everyone and crucially as a positive discourse - not oppositional like anti-racism - not pointing out the failures of the past (e.g. colonialism, slavery...) but forward thinking.\n\nIn terms of policy it permits for racial equality to be weighed up against other forms of parity issues often - paradoxically - pitting marginalised groups against each other rather than stressing common points of shared diversity.\n\nHowever, as it is positive, it is also negative. In the book we describe this as good and bad diversity.\n\nGood diversity adds color and uniqueness to neoliberalised society. The mantra of free choice allows everyone to choose from a smorgasbord of cultural offerings (culinary, music, style...).\n\nThis form of diversity speaks to the push for everyone to be unique (what is your USP?) - a type of bennetonization of society in which we are united, in the sense of being uniformed, in our diversity.\n\nBad diversity is where difference becomes excessive and where, crucially, is threatens to transform hegemonic political culture. This is the diversity that spawned the ‘homegrown’ terrorists of 7/7...\n\n\n
- Example of bad diversity:\n\nCaldwell’s chapati flour e.g. \n\nMuslims are seen not just as dangerous terrorists, but also because ‘radical’ Islam questions the dominance of western culture. \n
- I want here to briefly make the connection between Foucault’s biopower and Yudice’s cultural power more concrete and, in doing so, link the three moments of the post-racial, the culturalist and the post-political.\n\nFoucault’s work on racism is unfortunately restricted to a few lectures in Society Must be Defended and a brief mention in the History of Sexuality. Nevertheless, it is instructive precisely because of the connection to biopower.\n\n1. The biopolitical state - as opposed to the sovereign state before it - sees its population as a single organism in a world of similarly constituted and competing organisms that must be kept alive.\n\n2. Racism enters the picture for Foucault in order to explain how a power whose function it is to ensure the survival of its population is nonetheless involved in killing. Whereas under sovereign rule, the death of one’s enemies ensured the population’s survival, under the biopolitical state their death allows one’s population to flourish. This is the difference between a political view of conflict and a biological or racial one.\n\nSo, for Foucault racism divides between those within the population who have the right to live and those who must die for the strength of the organism as a whole. \n\n3. Therefore, while under sovereignty, enemies were conceived of as being external, the biopolitical or racial view of enemies as biological means that they can be internal as well as external. Hence the rise of eugenics, for example.\n\n
- I want here to briefly make the connection between Foucault’s biopower and Yudice’s cultural power more concrete and, in doing so, link the three moments of the post-racial, the culturalist and the post-political.\n\nFoucault’s work on racism is unfortunately restricted to a few lectures in Society Must be Defended and a brief mention in the History of Sexuality. Nevertheless, it is instructive precisely because of the connection to biopower.\n\n1. The biopolitical state - as opposed to the sovereign state before it - sees its population as a single organism in a world of similarly constituted and competing organisms that must be kept alive.\n\n2. Racism enters the picture for Foucault in order to explain how a power whose function it is to ensure the survival of its population is nonetheless involved in killing. Whereas under sovereign rule, the death of one’s enemies ensured the population’s survival, under the biopolitical state their death allows one’s population to flourish. This is the difference between a political view of conflict and a biological or racial one.\n\nSo, for Foucault racism divides between those within the population who have the right to live and those who must die for the strength of the organism as a whole. \n\n3. Therefore, while under sovereignty, enemies were conceived of as being external, the biopolitical or racial view of enemies as biological means that they can be internal as well as external. Hence the rise of eugenics, for example.\n\n
- I want here to briefly make the connection between Foucault’s biopower and Yudice’s cultural power more concrete and, in doing so, link the three moments of the post-racial, the culturalist and the post-political.\n\nFoucault’s work on racism is unfortunately restricted to a few lectures in Society Must be Defended and a brief mention in the History of Sexuality. Nevertheless, it is instructive precisely because of the connection to biopower.\n\n1. The biopolitical state - as opposed to the sovereign state before it - sees its population as a single organism in a world of similarly constituted and competing organisms that must be kept alive.\n\n2. Racism enters the picture for Foucault in order to explain how a power whose function it is to ensure the survival of its population is nonetheless involved in killing. Whereas under sovereign rule, the death of one’s enemies ensured the population’s survival, under the biopolitical state their death allows one’s population to flourish. This is the difference between a political view of conflict and a biological or racial one.\n\nSo, for Foucault racism divides between those within the population who have the right to live and those who must die for the strength of the organism as a whole. \n\n3. Therefore, while under sovereignty, enemies were conceived of as being external, the biopolitical or racial view of enemies as biological means that they can be internal as well as external. Hence the rise of eugenics, for example.\n\n
- Conceiving of the relationship to one’s enemies as biological rather than political transforms politics, as Hannaford makes clear in this quote. \n\nThis new understanding of politics means that the interests of the state became subsumed to that of the race. So the state’s power becomes invested in internally rationalising its population and in justifying the rampant fight for imperialist domination. \n\n
- End with some brief comments about the gendered and sexualised politics of post 9/11\n\nTime cover of Aisha/Nazia demonstrates how brown/Muslim women’s bodies have been used as a battleground in the ideological consensus building post-9/11.\n\nWar in Afghanistan sold as a war to liberate Afghan women from Taliban although we know their plight is same/worse today\n\nWestern focus on honour killings and forced marriages portrays Muslims as diabolic - capable of worse crimes. So calling it honour killing rather than murder sets tis crime apart from other murders giving the impression that domestic violence is more prevalent amongst Muslims while statistically this is not the case. \n\nSexuality has also been used as a means for dividing between ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ societies. We give in an example in the book (from Lisa Duggan) of mainstream gay organisations who “objected during the invasion of Afghanistan to the publication of an AP photograph of a US warhead emblazoned with the words ‘Hijack this Fags’ not because of opposition to the war but because ‘“the message equates gays with the enemy”’ and dishonours gay servicemen objected during the invasion of Afghanistan to the publication of an AP photograph of a US warhead emblazoned with the words ‘Hijack this Fags’ not because of opposition to the war but because ‘“the message equates gays with the enemy”’ and dishonours gay servicemen.”\n\nThis is what some theorists such as Jasbir Puar have referred to as ‘homonationalism’ in which homosexuality is normalised in western societies in opposition to non-western ones despite the fact that equality for gays is far from achieved.\n\nIt is always worth ventilating the hypocrisy of the politics of freedom; that, for example, while the Danish People’s Party champion gay rights in Denmark, it formed an alliance in the European Parliament in 2009 with, among others, the Italian Lega Nord, whose deputies have called for ‘an ethnic cleansing of faggots’.\n\nIn this country it is important to remember that the leading far-right movement, the EDL, has a sizeable gay wing.\n\nThe politics of anti-multiculturalism has pitted groups who would historically have been in solidarity against each other by hijacking the discourse of equality and turning it into something that we only deserve if we give up ‘bad diversity’ we find distasteful. The fact that all Muslims have become associated with a minority that perpetrated terrorist atrocities means that most people perceived as Muslims cannot escape the elements of bad diversity the west objects to even if they want to. It is in this sense that the homogenising ‘with us or with the enemies’ discourse of post-9/11 has become a racist one - for even those who wish to side ‘with us’ are by the very fact of their identification with ‘the enemy’ are excluded from doing so.\n
- This quote from the review of Fallaci’s book illustrates the mainstream consensus, apparent in the reaction to the atrocities permitted in the name of the ‘war on terror’ - extraordinary rendition, Guantanomo bay, detention without trial, racial profiling, etc. - is better than what could happen were we not to allow for this permanent state of exception. \n\nIn this sense, while 9/11 did not change the world it took us back. While racism was still very much a thing of the prsent (rather than the past) on 10 Sept. 2001, some significant gains had been achieved. The events of the last ten years (as I have sketchily attempted to show) have relegitimised forms of institutionalised racism on a global scale that many fought hard to overcome. \n