Abstract
Attacks on multiculturalism are becoming increasingly popular. In Europe, there is hardly a politician that has not attacked racism: David Cameron’s first speech as Prime Minister condemned it and Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were not far behind. Perhaps, more worryingly, when Anders Breivik attacked young people in Oslo, his crimes were seen by some as evidence of multiculturalism in crisis. Has multiculturalism indeed failed?
Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley’s The Crises of Multiculturalism addresses these questions head on, arguing that the mobilization of crises discourses is an important political tool for the silencing and effective disarmament of anti-racism. Their arguments unfold in six chapters, which persuasively and passionately unpack the recited truths, the neoliberal fallacies, the mediated aspects of the crises of multiculturalism, and the ever increasing conditions for ‘integration’. Throughout the book, there is a consistent call for political responses to the so-called crises of multiculturalism, which can only be made possible by reinstating the centrality of race as a means by which people are becoming subjects, categorized and ordered in ways that perpetuate inequality and discrimination.
The task of the book is not easy: confronted with the ‘problems of multiculturalism’, riots, veils, ‘home-grown terrorists’, ghettos, honour killings and the like, some might think that multiculturalism has indeed failed and calls for more integration might well sound timely and appropriate. It is this ‘reasonableness’ that Lentin and Titley contest through a series of arguments, which begin with a discussion of the polysemy of multiculturalism. Lentin and Titley begin to analyse some of these discourses on multiculturalism through the idea of recited truths. This notion, based on de Certeau’s idea of ‘récit’, refers to the ways in which stories, told and retold many times, result in the production of social facts: widely circulated concepts and notions go uncontested as they appear self-evident and beyond question.
The central idea discussed in Chapter 1 is that it is no longer ‘race’ that precludes integration, but culture. This culturalist turn, Lentin and Titley argue, is crucial in hiding racism. The recited truth that race does not exist any longer allows culture to emerge as a new way of dividing and ordering people. And while this may appear to be an improvement, culture is understood in a very formulaic, essentialist manner, unchanged and unchangeable through time, wholly endorsed by all community members.
Chapter 2 seeks to identify ‘post-racism’ as the ideology whereby race is rendered irrelevant and banal, even though the world is still clearly and brutally racist. By replacing race with culture, we can attribute everything to culture without any fear of racism: to speak of backward and primitive cultures is acceptable, while to say this about races was once racist. Commentators such as Christopher Caldwell can go on speaking of Muslims and Islam as having infiltrated Europe and Muslim culture as having overwhelmed European culture. Hence, responses such as banning minarets and burkas are considered reasonable and non-racist, as they only refer to Muslim culture. Lentin and Titley move on to relentlessly demolish this kind of argumentation and its warped, biased and unfounded logic. This kind of thinking discounts the relevance of race, just as it allows it to keep on ordering the world: post-racism emerges as the contemporary form of racism.
Chapter 3 moves towards a systematic critique of the type of liberalism that is found at the heart of culturalist arguments and post-racial thinking. This critique unfolds through a discussion of Christian Joppke’s Veil: Mirror of Identity (2009) and through a close examination of multiculturalism in the Netherlands. The main idea is that liberalism posits a core set of values that must be respected by all. Other value systems, which may reject or question these, are bound to be inimical to liberalism. You can either be liberal or an enemy of liberalism – a kind of Schmittian liberalism, which then leads to a series of measures, often coercive, such as the banning of headscarves or minarets. This liberalism, which underlies recent developments in France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, ends up essentializing other cultures, and most notably Islam, which is seen as essentially illiberal, all the while denying that such practices are racist.
In Chapter 4, the authors turn their critique to the media, focusing on the mediation of multiculturalism and its crises through three main mechanisms: media debates, media events and mediated circuits of belief. The authors show how media debates on immigration and integration form an ongoing ritual serving as a technology of neoliberal governance. If media debates hide and justify neoliberal governance, media events offer spectacular evidence for justifying neoliberal practices. Thus, media events such as Geert Wilder’s Fitna and the Jyllands Posten cartoons are used to justify racist anti-Muslim practices. Finally, the media environment, with its emphasis on speed and the remediation of news, provides the conditions for the increased circulation of lies, half-truths and confused ideas associated with the crises of multiculturalism. The media participate in what are called ‘circuits of belief’ regarding multiculturalism: ideas and opinions that operate on several registers, the popular, the expert, the academic, the political, and so on. Because of the conditions of media production, the authors argue, the ideas that are offered priority are those associated with culturalist explanations.
Chapter 5 constitutes a refinement and reiteration of the critique against neoliberalism, this time told from the perspective of lived experience, especially of those who find themselves unable or unwilling to integrate. It is towards those subjects that neoliberalism shows its brutality: these undisciplined individuals, often black youth understood as criminal, and ‘illegal’ immigrants, require special, ‘exceptional’ measures. But the work of neoliberalism is more complex than outright repression: it is located in the privatization of race and the experience of racism. While race is no longer a relevant category, the discourse of common values constitutes the predominant contemporary politics of diversity. If people choose not to endorse these common values, they only have themselves to blame, as Marwa el-Sherbini and other victims of racist violence found out.
The final chapter discusses the very important issue of the articulation of post-race and culturalism with feminism and sexual democracy. One of the most potent claims of culturalist repertoires is that of professing support for women and gay rights and holding Islam as both sexist and homophobic. Engaging with such arguments, the authors show the complex relationships and uneasy alliances between strains of feminism, queer rights movements and neoliberalism. The authors, along with Judith Butler, show how recent feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) hard-won freedoms are used instrumentally as a means by which to discriminate against certain others. The chapter places these debates in the context of the rise of ‘domopolitics’, which refers to the politics of keeping nations secure from perceived threats, of protecting ‘our’ home from others who do not belong there. This kind of politics revolves around issues of compatibility and integration: social movements such as feminism and gay rights are, within this context, used as another means by which to exclude those undeserving others.
There is no denying that The Crises of Multiculturalism is an important book, which combines incisive analysis with knowledgeable reviews of a wide body of literature to persuasively argue for the continuing importance and centrality of race in contemporary ‘post-racial’ cultures. My only issue concerns the role of existing anti-racist action: although the authors do refer to parts of the movement (e.g. SOS Racisme) in a manner that shows they may in fact be part of the problem, I would have liked to see more from the perspective of those who fight and resist the crisis rhetoric and racism. On the other hand, perhaps, one of the outcomes of this book is to trigger such action. And viewed from crisis-torn Athens, Lentin and Titley’s calls for the articulation of anti-racist analysis and action along with feminism, queer, class and anti-neoliberal politics will surely find resonance.