The
issues of diversity, difference, and discrimination, the focus of attention
among intellectuals for two decades, are now passionately felt and debated by
citizens in every country in the world. As we all ask how we can live together,
we face a block that is at once practical and theoretical: the way that nations
continue to enforce discrimination and separation spatially.
This
systematic, sectoral division of the world into discrete spheres of control and
management of human populations creates a severe challenge to those committed to
creating a truly democratic, equal, diverse but coherent world.
How
does the “nation”, its narratives and its ideologies, work to block progress
in this direction? And what part, if any, can “multiculturalism” play today
in unblocking it?
Two
kinds of multiculturalism
At
the heart of the mythology of the nation remains a deep–seated if largely
silent presumption that nations consist of homogenous, self–contained, and
largely self–reproducing population groups. After all, what is a nation
if it is not born of the like–spirited and like–bodied?
In
this conception, familiarity and familiality run together; replication, cultural
as much as biological, is the ground of nation–making. If we make ourselves
through others, those others must be largely just like us for us to be who we
really are collectively, “nationally”. This might be called the cloning
theory of nation–states.
Nationalism
of all kinds is predicated on a monocultural understanding of the nation. The
logic of replication it depends on makes its response to cultural clash or
national crisis one of exhortation to “patriotic” character and conduct.
Anatol Lieven traces this process in the context of the post–9/11 United
States, and how racial anxieties among descendants of the ““original”
white Anglo–Saxon and Scots–Irish populations” in the greater south impact
on political trends.
In
this context, what might “the multicultural” mean? Two versions are
currently on offer. The first is a “descriptive multiculturalism” that at
best grudgingly describes the increasing heterogeneity in most post–1945
societies as a result of global political economic changes and (in societies
like Britain, France, the Netherlands, even Canada) the rapid migrations
following the demise of formal colonial regimes in Africa, the Caribbean and
Asia.
The
second is a “normative multiculturalism” that insists on cultural diversity
and a proliferation (even relativism) of values at the expense of ideas of
national cohesion and unified norms. This entails an acknowledgment,
occasionally even celebration, of descriptive diversity on the ethno–racial
register. It places “ethnic and identity politics”, claims for right and
restitution, and cultural sensitivity at the centre of the political agenda.
“The
multicultural” has been caught in an oscillation between these two
understandings: description and prescription. It has come to represent the
contest with the values, long considered settled, of presumed homogeneity. The
scope of multiculturalism has thus remained confined by the historical period
after the “birth of the nation”, and of the homogeneous kinship and
familiality presumed to have arisen from it.
Multiculturalism,
in short, is assumed to be what happened to nations once their essential purity
was challenged by the influx of racial others. This is the stuff of histories racially
conceived. Consider the longstanding requirement, only now eroding, that
eligibility for German citizenship be restricted to those with “German
blood”; or the purging of those deemed non–white from apartheid South Africa
by restricting them to “homelands” or relocating them from urban to
segregated residential spaces to maintain the fantasy of “original white”
space.
The
difference within
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Since the
1980s, the result of rapid white suburbanisation is that blacks and
Latinos have tended literally to live in different cities from whites.
American segregation has become predominantly urban.
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The
actual historical experiences of two societies, the United States and South
Africa, raise especially interesting questions about the founding assumptions of
the purity myth and the continuing articulation of the monocultural nation.
Their respective historical landscapes, even preceding European settlement, have
always been far more heterogeneous than monocultural racial mythology would
acknowledge.
The
descriptive multicultural of South Africa’s history and heritage is well
known, if only recently celebrated: around a dozen linguistic groups, tied to
varying kinship legacies, migrations from elsewhere and within, multivalent
social and sexual intercourse; indigeneities entangling with migrating African
populations stretching back nearly two millennia, and with more recent – more
“modern” – migrations from multiple Euro–originating sources, but also
from Malaysia, India, and China.
The
condensed summary of South African heterogeneity comes close to an accurate
characterisation of the United States’s historical experience too.
Multicultural diversity marks this history as much within as across groups,
including among American Indians before and after European colonisation.
Boundaries
between the United States and Canada or Mexico were planted only with
“modern” state formation. European arrival, itself involving “people
flow” from multiple sources and many destinations, involved also massive slave
importation from Africa and the Caribbean and – in the wake of abolition –
to a significant East Asian presence, especially in the west coast United
States.
These
regional distinctions suggest, not a patchwork of racially discrete nations, but
rather local landscapes of homogeneity and heterogeneity, of mixture and
(perceived) purity. Amidst all this flux, purity – kinship or lineage,
subspecies or stereotypical, cultural or ethnonational – can’t even get off
the ground. A monocultural history of South Africa or the United States would be
a fabrication.
The
creation of white space
In
these circumstances, how could the idea of the nation be made to work for those
whose interests lay in defining it? A crucial component here is the use of
space.
In
South Africa, apartheid inherited from the colonial period the spatial
imposition of homogeneity; its rule self–consciously utilised prevailing
demographic patterns to exacerbate this, indeed formalising it into a
devastating logic of biopolitical and biospatial governmentality.
80%
of the landmass of apartheid South Africa was reserved for 20% of the
population. Whites insisted on the most arable land, the most beautiful and
environmentally safest residential space, forcing all those deemed not white
into contained, poorer, distant areas. The creation of the passbook system, and
the severe consequences for non–whites caught without them in “white”
areas, suggest how important spatial segregation was in upholding the whole
superstructure of racial purity and superiority.
A
similar spatial logic marks American racial rule. In the 1880s, 90% of whites
lived in the urban north, and a similar proportion of blacks lived in the rural
south. But by the 1940s most black Americans had moved off the land largely into
segregated urban ghettoes. Segregation, which had been regional, became
neighborhood–based. Since the 1980s, the result of rapid white suburbanisation
is that blacks and Latinos have tended literally to live in different cities
from whites. American segregation has become predominantly urban.
Meanwhile,
the prison population has spiraled, rising from 200,000 in 1970 to over 2
million in 2003 (a rise of 900%). Blacks, 12% of the national population, make
up roughly 50% of America’s prison population, whites less than 25%. A third
of black men between the ages of 19 and 39 have a criminal record; a third are
HIV–positive. The prison population is overwhelmingly illiterate; the majority
of inmates were unemployed and earning less than $10,000 per year at the time of
arrest.
There
is at present not a single African–American senator in the United States
(there have been only four since 1790). The “two nations” analysed by WEB Du
Bois remain as much a reality today as a century ago – and this is a spatial
reality as much as a political, social or economic one.
At
a macro level American urban space is shared; New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los
Angeles are racially mixed. But at a micro level, segregation – enforced
through unequal access to capital – is profound, and far more marked than in
equivalent European cities.
The
formalism of spatial shaping has given way recently in both South Africa and the
US to a less formal replication of monoracial landscapes. These interlace race
with class, and operate via the “neutral” modalities of individual
preference schemes and privatised choices rather than official policy. In the
post–apartheid and post–segregation eras, whites and blacks still tend to
inhabit separate spatial worlds. In both societies, the formalism of racial
apartheid and segregation has been replaced by the comparable devastations of
class apartheids.
In
the process, yesterday’s insistence on the assimilation of the subordinate
group into the monocultural nation has become today’s assertion of a
colour–blind racelessness and of “universal” models of culture. The shift
conceals racist continuities, changing modes of exclusion, and moral panics
concerning the uncontainability of multiculture. As descriptive multiculturalism
proceeds, so does a repressing insistence upon normative national sameness,
value homogeneity and exclusive cultural identity.
The
potential of cities
In
this perspective, the fashionable question about what the limits of
multiculturalism might be (often posed today in the context of immigration) both
collapses the distinction between descriptive and normative and can be seen to
embody a key assumption that the experience of South Africa and the United
States belies: the existence of a racially pure past that is now under threat
from difference and heterogeneity.
If
the distinction is applied, and the assumption refused, a deeper question about
multiculturalism comes into view: in a world of difference, to what extent are
we open and prepared – really open, really prepared – to live in a world of
shared possibilities, transforming modes of meaning–making, challenged ways of
expression, contested ways of world–fashioning?
This
question is not about a choice between homogeneity and heterogeneity, or between
a liberal society tolerant of others and one repressive of difference and
distinction. Rather, it is about determining the broad, generalised shared
values by which collective life extends itself.
The
city is the place, and space the idea, where this question is today posed most
acutely. From the end of the 19th century, post–slavery racial arrangements
were increasingly embodied in shifting urban demographies. But large,
diversifying cities with vibrant cultural and commercial intercourse came also
to represent the potential for undermining racial repression and restriction.
Cities
where residents intimately live, work and intermingle within relatively
restricted spatial areas tend to develop far more progressive political ideas
than those where people live in a dispersed fashion, commuting to work in
different urban locations, often on suburban trains or in isolated and cocooning
automobiles. The experience of rubbing shoulders, the pressing of bodies, being
thrown together in unexpected ways with the different, creates its own effect.
The politics of such cities may get loud, even disturbing, occasionally violent;
but they demand taking notice of others, attending to their condition, refusing
to turn away too easily. The space of the multicultural is at once the politics
of space.
A
bridge to the future
The
argument needs a concluding counter–line. The multiculturalism predicated here
would forego the need for multicultural insistence, let alone resistance. The
multicultural, I am suggesting – normative as much as descriptive – is no
more than provisional.
If
we take seriously the descriptive realities of heterogeneity, historically and
spatially, we would have no need for multicultural insistence. Until then,
however, multiculturalism can serve usefully as a bridge to an awareness of the
exclusivities propagated in the name of purity (biological, social, political,
cultural), and to point us towards more productive possibilities. So:
multiculturalism provisionally, until we come to terms with heterogeneities,
with impurity, with the nation – then and now, here and there, and all that
they entail.
