Multicultural Society must be Defended?

Nahaboo, Zaki (2015) Multicultural Society must be Defended? In: Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory. Palgrave Studies in Citizenship Transitions . Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 144-165. ISBN 9781137479495

Preview

Text Nahaboo, Z (2015) Multicultural Society must be defended.pdf - Accepted Version Download (506kB)

Abstract

This chapter investigates how orientalist citizenship is reinvented through
attempts to define and defend multicultural society in Britain. I begin by
describing how the normalizing function of ‘state racism’ charted in Michel
Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended has been partially recast through the ‘postracial’, ‘multiculturalist’, and ‘multiculture’ conceptions of multicultural society. In doing so, this chapter helps us to identify the parameters through which new expressions of orientalist citizenship emerge to sustain contemporary state racism. This is exemplified in the figures of citizenship that manifest through an ethnic minority wing of the United Kingdom Independence Party, calls in the British media for intercultural dialogue, and the Stop the War Coalition’s response to the War on Terror in the 2000s. Each captures how attempts at subverting identitarian life scripts, dichotomous subject positions, and essentialist identities become a means of reinventing orientalist citizenship. I conclude that the co-option of anti-essentialist challenges to orientalist citizenship facilitates a new imperative to state racism: ‘multicultural society must be defended’.

Item Type:	Book Section
Dates:	Date Event 2015 Published
Subjects:	CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-03 - politics > CAH15-03-01 - politics CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-02 - sociology
Depositing User:	Zaki Nahaboo
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2019 10:27
Last Modified:	03 Mar 2022 15:56
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/8617

Actions (login required)

View Item