It is not without political significance that the discourse of ‘multiculturalism’ has become increasingly interrogated in Britain after 9/11, and in particular after the July 2005 London bombings. The sheer frequency of critical essays, talks, journalistic articles and debates in the print, broadcast and on-line media directly addressing multiculturalism suggests that the term signifies a key locus of public anxiety.1 It seems that everyone has suddenly become an expert on the subject. This intense scrutiny raises a number of questions: Why has the ‘multiculturalism debate’ been so central to the nation and its concerns about ‘terrorism’ and ‘security’? How has the connection between multiculturalism and the ‘war of terror’ been articulated? What sort of ‘political work’ has the term multiculturalism being doing? For whose benefit?
In Britain, multiculturalism has effectively acted as the ‘cultural front’ in the ‘war on terror’, where identity and difference have been identified (again) as the troubling antagonism to national belonging and social harmony. Tellingly, the positions taken on multiculturalism have been multiple and divergent: there has been no clear political alignment of what it means and whether it is a good thing or not. Multiculturalism has simultaneously been presented as the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’ to the contemporary crisis. After the London bombings, the ‘resilient spirit’ of the capital city and the nation was invoked though a recourse to the cultural diversity of the metropolis; Mayor of London Ken Livingstone began a campaign celebrating London’s multiculturalism. Given that the bombings occurred immediately after the announcement that London would host the 2012 Olympics, it was revealing how the juxtaposition of these two events enabled a direct connection to be drawn between London’s cosmopolitanism and the ‘war on terror’. The Olympic bid’s images of joyful, multi-racial East London school children were presented as symbolic of a ‘new Britain’ comfortable with its harmonious diversity and confronting the alien ideologies of ‘Islamic extremism’. Whereas this celebratory multiculturalism, especially in the arts, education and public services, has become hegemonic for New Labour, as well as in liberal global corporate culture, influential figures close to the present political regime such as Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), have been warning that multiculturalism is leading to cultural segregation and the creation of ‘ethnic ghettos’.2 This view has converged, maybe unwittingly, with many commentators on the political right such as David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, who had denounced, in a well publicised article, the increasing cultural diversity of Britain.3 While from a different political and theoretical persuasion noted writer and anti-racist Kenan Malik has made a number of scathing attacks on the ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity, arguing that it is the source of the problem itself.4
This recent proliferation of variable and at times contradictory uses of multiculturalism re-confirm the argument made by the theorist Homi Bhabha:
Multiculturalism – a portmanteau term for anything from minority discourse to postcolonial critique, from gay and lesbian studies to chicano/a fiction – has become the most charged sign for describing the scattered social contingencies that characterise contemporary Kulturkritik. The multicultural has itself become a ‘floating signifier’ whose enigma lies less in itself than in the discursive uses of it to mark social processes where differentiation and condensation seem to happen almost synchronically.5
As a ‘floating signifier’ multiculturalism has been mobilised to support, contest or stand-in for a range of political and ideological arguments. At this conjuncture it is increasingly difficult, even if this was critically desirable or possible, to present the different conceptualisations and uses of multiculturalism now circulating. That would invariably just add another view in the increasingly intellectually and politically fraught debate. It is not my intention here to proliferate the meanings that the concept may have, or to evaluate competing interpretations, but rather to attempt to briefly consider how multiculturalism as a problematic has been ideologically framed. What are the underlying conditions and assumptions that inform the debate?
It is also not to argue that the concept of multiculturalism is a problem per se, as has become more frequent. For myself, the expansion of the debate does signal a heightened state of national anxiety about racial and cultural Otherness. It does indicate that multi-culture is an important contested site of politics in this globalised moment, even if culture is being understood in a problematic or reductive manner. What is important here is to recognise that the notion of multiculturalism has opened up, even if in a delimited way, the possibility of addressing more explicitly questions of race and ethnicity. In Britain, discussions of race and racism continue to be repressed in public discourse, as if they are too traumatic to confront directly. Race continues to manifest itself in coded and/or spectacular forms, usually in moments of crisis.6
Similarly, academic work on multiculturalism and race has proliferated in recent years. In contrast to the more publicly visible critiques of multiculturalism, critical studies, especially in the disciplines of Sociology and Cultural Studies, have tended to consider more sympathetically the theoretical and political conceptualisations of multiculturalism in relation to notions such as diaspora, racialisation and globalisation.7
While, as I have indicated, there seem to be as many multiculturalisms as there are commentators, the key argument here is that dominant discourses have articulated this ‘floating signifier’ with the master (although empty) signifier of contemporary politics – ‘terrorism’ – and exposed the mutating forms of a ‘postcolonial racism’. The processes of decolonialisation and globalisation have made the borders of Western nations increasingly porous to people and cultures from the formerly colonialised worlds, this in spite of the continual and violent attempts to police and militarise entry into the West. Territorial colonialism was sustained by the binary logic of the ‘West and the Rest’, when racist discourse, especially in the form of Orientalism, sustained an imperial governmentality, where the boundary between the white, racialised Occident and its Others was clearly marked and secured. This binarism has been increasingly difficult to sustain over the last century, with the West being increasing populated by a multiplicity of migrant cultures and people. The demands and movements of capital and labour have called into crisis the historical colonial divisions. The (European) modern state has had to deal with questions of inclusion and exclusion. In fact ‘race’ has been constitutive of the state from its beginnings.8 The challenge for nation-states has been not just to exclude, but also to monitor, control and subjugate the increasing presence of racial and cultural Others inside the West. Western nations have had different strategies to meet this challenge. Multiculturalism, in its many variants and modalities, can be understood as a specific political model of managing cultural heterogeneity in times of ‘hyper-globalization’.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire argue,
…Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command.9
For these authors this ‘new Empire’ has shifted from the exclusionist, racial logic of colonialism. It in fact works through cultural difference and inclusion in the reproduction of global power. This is an argument that Sanjay Sharma and myself consider and develop in more theoretical detail in the essay ‘White Paranoia: Orientalism in the age of Empire’:10 Hardt and Negri suggest that the racism of Empire is a cultural neo-racism of segregation, which primarily integrates others (differences are ordered and controlled). It is distinguished from the colonial racism of division and hierarchy, which takes place across the racial boundary of self/other (differences are excluded and negated). They contend that cultural racism needs to be conceived as a ‘strategy of differential inclusion’, as opposed to the absolute exclusion of the Other.
White supremacy functions…through engaging alterity and then subordinating differences according to degrees of deviance from whiteness. This has nothing to do with the hatred and fear of the strange, unknown Other. It is a hatred born in proximity and elaborated through degrees of difference of the neighbour…Subordination is enacted in regimes of everyday practices that are more mobile and flexible but that create racial hierarchies that are nonetheless stable and brutal.11
Cultural racism, as Hardt and Negri have stated, is one of proximity to a normalising Whiteness. While the deterritorialising global capitalism of Empire furiously traverses national, cultural and racial borders, paying little heed to place, its multicultural ideology seemingly appreciates (requires) the difference (distance) of the Other. Slavoj Žižek has asserted that
multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ – it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position.12 (Emphasis added).
It is precisely the ‘empty point of universality’ of multiculturalism which enables it to respect the specificity of the Other by maintaining the proper distance and asserting its own superiority. If we accept that global capitalism articulates a contemporary Orientalism, we need to withstand, as Žižek argues, merely exposing the (false) universality of multiculturalism as harbouring Eurocentricism in the masking of its own particularity. Instead, he argues, the ‘particular cultural background or roots which always support the universal multiculturalist position…conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of universality’.13 Zizek contends that rather than pointing out the particular characteristics of the universal subject (white, male, heterosexual etc.), which represses and subordinates differences, ‘identifying universality with its empty point of exclusion’14, is more likely to challenge extant capitalist hegemony. However, if contemporary Orientalism as cultural racism operates by an inclusive hegemony (which has no outside), we need to interrogate further ‘what’ occupies the void of universality.
In his analysis of multiculturalism, Žižek falls short of marking the empty place of the universal as a positionality of Whiteness itself. The contention is not an attempt to identify the particularities of Whiteness, because its own inscription has no content. Rather, Whiteness as an ‘absent presence’ seeks to stand for, and be a measure of, all of humanity. It operates as a universal point of identification that strives to structure all social identities.15 In this respect, Whiteness functions like an ‘empty signifier’ such that it needs to fill or hegemonize the empty place of the multicultural universal in order to uphold its authority.
It is this ‘empty place’ of Whiteness which the contemporary debate on multiculturalism is structured around. While the vitriol against ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘refugees’ can be explained by notions of racial exclusion, it needs to recognised that it is their racially coded, differentially marked Otherness, that confirms their relative alien status. It is not insignificant that multiculturalism is emerged as an anxious discourse principally in relation to Muslims and Asians – cultures constructed through ‘postcolonial Orientalism’ as ‘culturally distance’ relative to the norms of Whiteness. Trevor Phillips’ problematic calls for greater ‘integration’ and the consolidation of ‘Britishness’ have been addressed implicitly to working class Muslims and South Asians more generally, suggesting that the mere concentration of Muslims and Asians in an area constitutes a threat to the nation.
This version of multiculturalism makes the problematic but commonly held assumption that the formation of ethnic communities separates them from mainstream (i.e. white) British life. In fact there is no evidence to suggest that these ‘imagined ethnic ghettos’ actually exist or that there is a rabid anti-Britishness present which is fuelling the creation of terrorists. As has become evident Islamic militants are as likely to be from the leafy green white suburbs of the southern home counties, as from the racially marked inner cities of Bradford or London. Phillips’ neo-Orientalism is consistent with the integrative logic of Empire. Integration, as well as racial exclusion, have been central tenets of post-war race-relations ideology in the UK. Crucially not assimilation, with its potential erasure of difference and loss of identity, cultural integration now is the ‘stratification of difference’, where ‘degrees of difference’ are positioned in relation to a presumed universal, (white) norm. Citizenship is defined by the adherence to set of cultural values that demarcate the field of integration and a ‘new multicultural Britishness’, as codified for example in the recently established citizen tests.
The strategy of integration to a racialised British norm is a faltering attempt to demarcate and police diversity itself. This is evident in the continual, well established practice of racial stereotyping, by identify and dividing the Other into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. At present the splitting of the Other into the ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Muslim is necessary to differential racism. The problem and hence the source of anxiety is that is impossible to know who is who. It is not only that who is defined as a moderate or extremist is not fixed within neo-Orientalism, but also Islamic discourse essentially does not legitimate or support these categories within theological or political doctrine. So the argument that is constantly been circulated in the West post 9/11, that it is not Islam we are fighting but extremists and terrorists who have nothing to do with Islam, is unsustainable and is a politically futile attempt at racial and cultural differentiation. (What seems impossible and too frightening to countenance for the white, Western world is that what we are seeing are politically different and competing readings within Islamic discourse). This fetishistic and anxious repetition of the moralistic Manichaeism of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims, has informed and delimited the debate on multiculturalism, especially after the 7th July bombings. For example, immediately in the wake of bombings we saw in the media the image of one of the suspected suicide bombers juxtaposed with one of the victims, a young Muslim woman. The intended impact of this comparison was dependent on a set of racial and cultural ideologies already circulating at least post 9/11, if not since the ‘Rushdie affair’ in late 1980s: the alien male Pakistani suicide bomber from the north of England with no job and little prospects was contrasted with the identifiable, sympathetic young British-Bangladeshi woman from East London who was studying with a bright future. The gendering of the racial discourse has remained central in the attempt to differentiate and integrate Muslims. While men have largely been seen as the problem, women have been represented as only victims of Islamic patriarchy. The difficulty is that this construction has been unsustainable even in the dominant media sphere. For example, Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the 7th July bombers, was considered by local whites and Asians as a ‘respectable member of the community’, a learning mentor at a primary school in Dewsbury, who worked with children of all ethnicities. A series of vox-pop interviews with mainly white parents in the news media in the wake of the bombings exclaimed that he was a ‘lovely man’, ‘he was good with our children’, ‘he was normal’.
What has been particularly disconcerting ideologically and culturally has been the realisation that the London bombers were British, who speak English with colloquial regional accents. Attempts to locate them as being connected to or at least indoctrinated by Al Qaeda have largely failed.16 White racialised anxiety is the inability to tell the terrorists from the presumed norm. What is really troubling is that ‘Muslim terrorists’ act and behave just like us.17
The shooting of the Brazilian-born Jean Charles de Menezes - who had no connection to Islamic militancy - by the security forces after the second attempted wave of London bombings on 21st July 2005, is symptomatic of this anxiety and increasing paranoia of being unable to discriminate between Muslims, Asian or Black people. (The situation is even more fraught when faced with ‘white Muslims’ – in these instances the ideological construction of Whiteness has totally imploded, causing great consternation to processes of cultural identification and differentiation). Clearly the task of monitoring all Asians and Africans is impossible. It presumes that one can map, make visible and fix cultural, religious and political identities within the porous borders of European nation states, and in the constantly shifting, culturally hybrid, demography of urban spaces. This has lead to a generalised state of fear, and to the culture of ‘racial’ anxiety and paranoia. Where is the Muslim? Is he one of ‘us’ or one of ‘them’? A sort of cultural hysteria - what does the Muslim want from me? What have we done to them?
This anxiety, which slips easily into paranoia at the individual and social level, is maybe a particular racialised manifestation of a wider culture of anxiety and fear that entraps the Western subject within a globalising, media culture of cultural affluence and individuality, and racial superiority. The political theorist Renata Salecl has developed a very insightful reading of the present culture of anxiety that supports and contextualises well my putative attempt to examine the relationship between racialised anxiety and anxiety in general. It is worth quoting at length her pertinent and relevant argument:
Although it appears that the new age of anxiety is linked primarily to the danger of terrorist attacks and new illnesses, we should not forget that anxiety arises from the changed perception the subject has of him- or her-self as well as from changes to their position in society at large. In the last few years, the media have been constantly reporting new psychological disorders. Some of the new syndromes were quite peculiar: in the 1990s, a number of newly rich Americans supposedly suffered from so-called ‘sudden wealth syndrome’, which is also sometimes referred to as ‘affluenza’; young children whose parents were too protective were in danger of developing ‘adventure deficit disorder’; and women’s magazines were writing about ‘body dysmorphic disorders’ of people who are too concerned about their looks. Moreover, the list of these disorders seems to be growing rapidly. Anything that is perceived as an impediment to the subject, who is supposed to be fully in control of herself, constantly productive and also not disturbing to a society at large, is quickly categorised as disorder. While the subject’s inner turmoil and dilemmas in regard to social expectations quickly get named as anxieties. Even before September 11, anxiety became used in the most expansive way.18
Her argument continues:
In today’s culture, it again seems that economic uncertainty is not the primal cause of anxiety, since the latter is much more connected to the problems people experience with regards to their social roles, to the constant desire to change their identities, and the impossibility of finding any guidance for their action. These uncertainties today also result in people turning to religious fundamentalism and their embracing social restrictions, which introduce new forms of totalitarianism.
Before September 11 Westerners could have easily embraced the perception that they lived in a world of simulacra in which everything was changeable and in which life looked like a computer game. People thus had the hope that with a proper genetic code and the invention of new drugs, matters of life and death would be more predictable and controllable in the future. But September 11 changed this optimism: suddenly both the human body and society itself appeared much more vulnerable again. What especially caused an overwhelming anxiety to emerge was the collapse of the fantasy structure that seemed to organise people’s perception of the world and the emergence of two uncanny agents – terrorism and the virus.19
While Salacl explores a generalised culture of anxiety, her arguments seem to be strongest if situated in relation to a racialised Western context. We can bring together the two anxieties of terrorism and virus in conceptualising the discourse of Islam, multiculture and terror. As has been frequently remarked that the terror networks are virus-like, which like bacteria are largely invisible until they strike and then become invisible again. If we then add the key dimension of networked communications technologies such as the internet and mobile phones, and the related fears of computer viruses, and articulate this with idea of a potential ‘unmappable’ flow and movement of ‘Muslim bodies’ inside the West, we see the formation of a culture of ‘racial paranoia’ which perceives the decentred ‘rhizomatic networks’ of Islamic culture, people and terror as unpredictable and indestructible.
Further, as Salecl cogently argues, anxiety is not caused by the fear of the object itself, but is now about the inability of getting rid of the anxiety. Developing this line of thought, we could say that ‘racialised anxiety’ is created by the inability of the white subject to get rid of the perception of networks of Muslims hell-bent on destroying the Western way of life. This narcissistic construction of ‘racialised Orientalism’ underpins the anxiety induced by threat to the universality of white subjectivity. This discourse of anxiety and paranoia is singularly about the Western subject and its racial disavowals - it has little to with the Other. Just think of the frequent media panics about immigrants and refugees bringing in diseases - the only concern in these reports is the threat they pose to us. There is no consideration for the welfare of the migrants.
In our ‘White paranoia’ essay there is an attempt to further map the precarious contours of the ‘white subject in jeopardy’ by drawing attention to the narcissistic form of cultural identification that attempts to sustain the (invisible) racial centre:
... the precarious maintenance of white universality, in the moment of ‘multicultural Empire’ has to negotiate and control the dissonance produced by the proximity of cultural differentiation, through a mimetic identification with others as an idealised object. The white subject demands that the Other authorise the universality of Whiteness by identifying with it. This ‘idealized Other’...is necessary to sustain the hegemonic positionality of Whiteness, through a narcissistic mode of racial authority and power dependent upon a knowable and controllable Other. The contemporary challenge of alterity and subaltern subjectivity to Whiteness threatens to undo this imaginary structure of identification. The narcissism slips easily into anxiety, fear and paranoia for the white subject, when the Other is not in its proper place (no longer ‘Other’). The dislocated, racially subjugated figure, in the form of a ‘return of the repressed’, creates a haunting, subterranean presence deep within the hegemonic formations of the Occident. The differentialist racial logic of cultural stratification and integration undermines, blurs and destabilises the racial binarism of colonial discourse. This intimate stranger induces anxiety and paranoia through ‘dis-Orienting’ forms of counter mimesis, where the subaltern may be ‘white but not quite’.20
This racialised anxiety and narcissism points to the extremely problematic limitations of the present debate about multiculturalism in these times of global conflict and turmoil. The radicalised Muslim militants - suicide bomber or not, and the multitude of sympathisers globally, are challenging the hegemony of Western subjectivity, and its attendant racial and cultural erasures, exclusions and violence. What this ‘decentring’ of the West brings in its wake are the questioning of presumed ethical norms of how we live, of belonging, of being a subject, of being human. A British Muslim woman who decides to wear a hijab questions the very idea of freedom and individuality that is so cherished by Eurocentric white liberalism: it seems paradoxically to be a choice for ‘unfreedom’. In the post-ideological world of apolitical consumerism and flexible identities the ideas of community, belonging and collectively - cultures of ‘passionate attachments’ - are a challenge to the notion of a ‘rootless’ universal subjectivity. Although we have witnessed quite differing responses to the demand by Muslim girls to wear religious dress in school in France and Britain, what both responses - exclusionist and assimilationist in unversalist France and ‘differentially integrative’ in multicultural Britain - have in common is the norm of white universality at their (invisible) centre.
The differing models of managing diversity share in reproducing the cultural Other as essentialised and fixed. Muslim, Asian and African diasporic cultures are constantly mutating, hybridising and changing, and are marked by divisions, contradictions and lack – exemplifying a form of ‘vernacular multiculturalism’.
This is not the moment to conceptualise the complexity of this anti-racist cultural politics, but only to state that this ‘vernacular multiculturalism’ is being marginalised and made invisible by the discourse of white anxiety and paranoia that is unable to work through its ‘postcolonial melancholia’ - an interminable mourning for an imperial empire and white Britishness. Multiculturalism could be the concept we use ‘under erasure’ to re-imagine the new complex conjuncture of globalisation, nation and decolonialisation. Instead multiculturalism itself is blamed for the end of empire; for the decline of the nation; and the loss of white identity. For example, in a recent study, the authors of The New East End 21 effectively reproduce the idea that the white working class are the victims of multiculturalism and this is the cause of white racism towards the East London Bangladeshis! One needs to urgently ask again what social anxieties and ideological fantasies are being condensed into the ‘floating signifier’.
Ashwani Sharma is Principal lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London (a.sharma@uel.ac.uk)
© 2004·06
British urban sociologists have…been happier focusing on class rather than race in mapping processes of change
Welcome to this issue
Contents of this issue
Editor’s letter
Academic
Debate
Entertainment
Essays
Journalism
Feedback
Britishness, multiculturalism and globalisation
Consumption, the City and social practice
White flight, black attitude
How the ‘War on Terror’ helps terrorism
Religiosity and the politics of identity
Tolerance with conditions
Shooting the Brazilian
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