Exalted Subjects

:Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Thobani, Sunera. (2007). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter 4. Multiculturalism and the Liberalizing Nation (143-175)

It is notable the mandate of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963: it is "to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of equal participation between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by other ethnic groups" (p. 144). This mandate called for official recognition of various ethnic communities, leading to the adoption of multiculturalism as official state policy in 1971, Thonabi writes.

Thobani contests that official multiculturalism contributed to stabilizing white supremacy under the guise of tolerance to difference. In particular, it is pointed out that the elimination of overt Canadian immigration policy and citizenship in the 1970s was a pragmatic response to changing global economic condition and lack of labour and had less to do with idealistic commitments to c cultural utopia.

Thobani argues that Canadian multiculturalism contribute to recasting national identity by distinguishing Canada from other nation-states such as the United State and Europe in that Canada departed from colonial and imperialist histories and it had more embracing and pluralist, more tolerant, racially innocent, thus more adaptable to changing global conditions, which led to selling diversity in the field of international business interests. Thus, Thobani writes, "[Multiculturalism's] appeal for tolerance enabled a national amnesia regarding inconvenient histories" (p. 154).

Thobani argues that multiculturalism suppressed race and racism discursively, thus disrupting the potential of greater multiracial solidarity. Looking at multiculturalism policy proclaimed by the Trudeau Liberals, Thobani states that the policy, framed within bilingualism and biculturalism, is to allocate resources to cultural groups who committed to a national unity. Thus she writes, "How the desire to contribute to national unity demanded by the policy was to be measured was left unspecified. It was clear, however, that multiculturalism was intended to further the nation's unity, not its transformation" (p. 156).

As Sheren Razack astutely describes culturalization of racism as modern racism, according to Thobani, multiculturalism deflected attention from race and racism to cultural difference. Thobani writes:

The multiculturalism policy identified the national's lack of familiarity with the cultures of racial minorities, and these minorities' lack of English- and French-language skills, as the most salient factors excluding them from 'full participation' in society. It thus placed the onus for racial inequalities experienced by people of colour onto their own (collective) cultural inadequacies (that is, their differences) and (individual) lack of linguistic skills.(p. 156)

(Federal Multicultural Policy
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Robert L. Stanfield, David Lewis, Réal Caouette

House of Commons Debates, October 8, 1971, pp. 8545-8.
http://www.abheritage.ca/albertans/speeches/trudeau.html

)

Thus polemics around racism disappeared in the discourse of culturalization of multiculturalism and reframed the power relations of racial hierarchies as cultural ignorance and intolerance. Thobani states, "whereas in the pre-war period, racial character and culture were treated as synonymous in state practices, these new policies emphasized distinctions of culture while suppressing those of race" (p. 158)

Thobani argues that the discursive regulation of multiculturalism encouraged immigrants to see themselves and their communities through the eyes of the state. Among the techniques used by state multiculturalism, selective state funding was crucial to conditioning community organizations, activities, etc., thus shaping particular multiculturalism. Central to this drive, according to Thobani, is the state's emphasis on traditional values in ethnic cultures. Within this aspects, cultures, static and bound to pre-modern, are to be tolerated. Thobani writes:

Ethnic groups were presented as connected to tradition, not modernity, and they embodies 'human experience in various parts of the world' associated with a different temporal plane (different periods of time) than the one inhabited by the nation...The policy advocated that their strangeness was not only to be tolerated but also was to be preserved and made cannibalistically available for the nation's sustenance and enrichment. (p. 163-164)

Opposing to the view of the multiculturalist policy that "fossilize immigrants as living remnants of the past"(p. 164), Thobani shares a perspective with post-colonialists and emphasizes new hybrid forms of subjectivities of immigrants.

The forms of identity, consciousness, and social practices developed by immigrants within Canada were likewise shaped as much by the exigencies of their insertion into the new society, by their experiences of migratory dislocation and by their interactions with nationals as they were by the 'cultural baggage' they were assumed to bring with them from their traditional homelands. (p. 164)

Here is part of the speech of Prime Minister Trudeau to the House of Commons:

The government will support and encourage the various cultures and ethnic groups that give structure and vitality to our society. They will be encouraged to share their cultural expression and values with other Canadians and so contribute to a richer life for us all. (as cited on the page 164)

[This state's emphasis on the traditional aspects of immigrant communities or minority culture seems to ground a root cause of controversies over commensurability of feminism and multiculturalism.] Observe that minority group feminists' struggle over gender oppression that is confronted not only within the same community but also the pervasive discourse of (traditional) culture, Thobani argues that the hegemony of multiculturalism, which interlocks culture with tradition, support the maintenance of internal patriarchal order within cultural practices. [This also help the academic dispute that confronts feminism and multiculturalism, as seen Okin's argument. Culture, seen as tranditional aspects and pre-modern practices, could not be commensurable with a multiculturalism discourse.]

Thobani describes how the master narrative created by multicultural discourse control individual men and women's behaviors and identities:

Multicultural discourse marks non-western cultures as more patriarchal and backward than the west, while it simultaneously pressures immigrant men to conform to significantly strenghened masculist codes of behaviour in the name of cultural authenticity. As a consequence, immigrant women, whose consciousness is also shaped in interaction with the master narrative, approach the men of their communities with complex expectations and anxieties...Both women and men come to 'see' and experience their own culture through this frame, with its particular versions of femininities and masculinities. They learn to see themselves through the nation's eyes, even when they see to contest such damaging images of themselves. (p. 166)

Thus, Thobani states, "the gendered effects of multiculturalism undermine the possibilities for solidarity between 'cultured' women and men" (p. 167). Within this frame, Thobani asserts that immigrant women's modernization is signally by the level of their assimilation into Canadian society and its values, which exalts nationhood.

Thobani argues that, as Fanon saw racialization of colored people as critical to shaping their subjectiviy, "(multi)culturalizing process in Canada profoundly influence the subjectivity of immigrants, especially their racial and cultured sensibilities" (p. 171).

While immigrants have been 'overdetermined' culturally through multicultural state policy, Thobani argues, Aboriginal peoples were contemporaneously refused by the state. She asserts that responding to Aboriginal peoples' claim for self-determination, the state discredited their claims to special status as the original inhabitants of the land, thus devaluing Aboriginality as only one of several cultures to be harnessed for the cultural enrichment and to exalt the benevolent and inclusive qualities of nationals.

Chapter 5. Consultations and Nationalizations (179-213)

In examining Canada and Immigration: Facts and Issues (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 1994), Thobani calls attention to the phrase, "In 1991, the Economic Council of Canada found that immigration had a small but positive impact on our economy" (p. 3), as the beginning point for a discussion on the immigration program. Thobani criticizes the assumptions that base this statement: (1) it erases the history of European colonial migrations, thus neutralizing the nation's existence, (2) Referring to "our" economy, it identifies immigrants as strangers who contribute to our economy not their economy, and (3) it excludes Aboriginal Peoples from the discussion of immigration program by treating them as having no stake in the subject.

Thobani also sharply points out that the Canadian state, by defining immigrants as stranger, "legitimize and normalize unequal rights and entitlements for all immigrant, so that it appeared completely normal and natural that 'they' should not have the same rights as 'us'" (p. 212). What's more, this process of legitimization is performed through numerous public consultations, which not only condition a reality to perceive but also provide an illusion of public consensus collected and approved through participatory democracy.

Such discussion of immigration is often tied with economy. Family sponsored immigration, thus, became a target to criticism because of its lack of economic contribution to the state and its facilitation of virtually limitless immigration. In this circumstance, immigrant women and their families are more vulnerable to public angst.

Selling Diversity

Abu-Laban, Yasmeen., & Gabriel, Christina. (2002). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

Chapter 1. Diversity, Globalization and Public Policy in Canada. (11-35)
The authors finds the notion of selling diversity in three public policies--immigration, multiculturalism and employment. They note that multicultural policy, first articulated by the federal government of Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971, has been a major means of official recognition of ethnic minorities in the Canadian nation. Recently, however, as they observe, policy-makers akin to neoliberal globalization, which emphasizes global markets and Canadian economic competitiveness, tend to turn certain notions of diversity pertaining to economic competitiveness into a selling point while muting diversity as a commitment to social justice and respect.

The authors affirm that the movement of peoples across national borders is one of the most evident forms of globalization today and a major source of greater diversity. Pointing out the lag of public policies that deal with the diversity, authors argue that some of the richest contributions to policy studies come from feminist scholarship in that while looking into thegendered/differential impact of policies on men and women, they open up space for a critical treatment of other forms of exclusion and marginalization. Yet, they rightly point out that gender analysis of Canadian public policy has not sufficiently interrogated the consequences of policy for ethnic minority and racialized women.

Chapter 4. Multiculturalism and Nation-Building (105-128)
In this chapter, the authors examine the Canadian state's multiculturalism historically. The Prime Minister Trudeau's announcement of a policy of multiculturalism is generally perceived as a state's response to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, Aboriginal claim and third force from other ethnic groups. As the authors point out, it is interesting to note that Trudeau stood for a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. The authors argue that this framework early on bears witness to the continued domination of British and to a lesser extent French-origin groups in Canada.

Between 1971 and 1993, the authors state that multiculturalism focused on the cultural maintenance of diverse ethnic heritage such that "song and dance" were much highlighted. They observe a burgeoning linkage between multiculturalism and business interests in the 1980s, as seen in the slogan, "Multiculturalism Means Business", in a conference organized by the Progessive Conservatives in Toronto in 1986. From then on, the Canadian state has made a strong tie between multiculturalism and its international business. The authors argue that now the policy of multiculturalism, which began as a domestic policy, is becoming a selling product with a strong affinity to neo-liberal ideals.

The authors note another type of criticism along with this neo-liberal impetus. Reform Party, in particular, hinged on their advocacy of individual rights and the formal equality of people and provinces--this party also refused a special recognition of Quebec in Canada on the basis of the equality of each province. They argue, according to the authors, that the preservation of cultural background is a matter of personal choice and the state should promote minorities to integrate into the national culture, thus calling for an end to funding of multicultural support.

This conservative and neo-liberal criticism continued after 1993 and the authors note that business value was much stressed while funding for multiculturalism were severely being cut. In particular the authors note popular criticism, particularly in English-Speaking Canada in this period. They draw on the division of private and public spheres in the criticism. They state:

Along with the argument that Canadian multiculturalism weakens national unity, criticisms have centered around the idea that, while the expression of minority languages and culture are acceptable in the private sphere, the state should have no part in upholding them in the public sphere. (p. 106)

The authors argue that the notion of private means the household on the one hand and market and business on the other hand. Thus, multiculturalism as a policy means business to the Canadian state. They write:

While multiculturalism has faced significant cutbacks at the federal government level, at the same time policy-makers have marshalled a globalization discourse to defend multiculturalism policy. Here, policy-makers maintain that "diversity" benefits Canada's international trade and global competitiveness. (p. 106)

Interestingly the authors connect the division of private and public spheres in the dispute on multiculturalism with an implication of gender in multiculturalism. The authors observe the tendency that in the policy discussion, minority/immigrant women are often portrayed within their ethnocultural community, rather than within the structures of racism, sexism and exclusion in Canada. This tendency is tied to the argument for multiculturalism confined to the private sphere. The authors argue: specially for those in favor of multiculturalism only in the private sector, the realm of culture, such as food, language, and customs, is typically associated with women. Positioned in this way, women are more excluded from the realm of the public spheres of politics and work.

The authors observe a similar tension among feminist scholarship, as Okin view that minority women are harmed by multiculturalism, which sustains group rights. In a response to such argument, the authors call for careful dialogue and exchange between men and women within ethnocultural communities as well as the broader Canadian society. The authors quote Sherene Razack's argument on this subject. Razack criticizes that few of feminist scholars have engaged in respectful First/Third dialogue and instead seen Third Women only as subjects, "exotic other females in need of their benevolent protection".

The Dark Side of Nation

Bannerji, Himai. (2000). Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press.

Introduction (1-13)

Describing globalization as an economic and cultural imperialism, Bannerji is keen to cultural politics and calls attention to culture of resistance, which she calls popular multiculturalism, in opposition to official or elite multiculturalism--each is represented by Kymlicka and Taylor. She asserts that it is antiracist and feminist class politics that would prevent the popular multiculturalism from falling prey to colonial, racist discourse and ethnic nationalism.

Bannerji examines Canadian state's adoption of multiculturalism historically: multiculturalism was a response of the Canadian federal government to rapid influx of third world immigrants to Canada as well as a growing intensity of the English-French rivalry and claims of Canada's aboriginal population. Within this situation, the proclamation of multiculturalism diffused the tensions and reduced the groups' demands to cultural ones, thereby helping the nationhood of Canada centered on the hegemonic Anglo-Canadian national culture, Bannerji notes.

Observing issues around multicultualism, Bannerji argues that no critique of hegemonic relations takes place and such debate ignores an understanding of socio-economic relations that constitutes a larger national and international political economy and their manifestations in our lives. Taking a critical stance, Bannerji calls attention to class, patriarchy and gender that construct relations and ideologies for exploitation under the name of community or nation. Bannerji states:

Thus a nexus is visible between the racialized class patriarchy of the Canadian state and its creations, the multicultural ethnic communities who come from equally sexist and class societies. There is a convergence of forms of ruling and exploitation when "the community" meets the multicultural state. (p. 11)

Bannerji maintains a stance of marxist feminism in looking at multiculturalism in Canada. Refusing official or elite multiculturalism, she calls for popular multiculturalism that is safeguarded by an antiracist and feminist marxist perspective.

Chap. 1. The Paradox of Diversity: The Construction of a Multicultural Canada and "Women of Colour" (15-61)

Bannerji notes that multiculturalism is a state sanctioned, state organized ideological affair in Canada. For Bannerji, a fundamental problem in the discourse of multiculturalism lies in the notion of difference is socially abstract and wipes away its historical implication. Bannerji argues that Deflecting from historical power relations, the deployment of diversity reduces to a managerial task outside of hegemony. Through depoliticizing culture and removing hegemony from it, Bannerji contests, the discourse of multiculturalism, after all, reduces political issues into a cultural artifice and converts culture into a private matter. Bannerji defines as a dispersion effect that the discourse of diversity occludes a process of homegenization that underpins the project of liberal pluralism. Thus, for Bannerji, the discourse of diversity is an ideology.

Claiming an antiracist and marxit feminist, Bannerji ultimately calls for collective political conscientization with others inhabiting similar social conditions produced through oppressive relations such as class, race, gender and sexuality.

Chap. 3. On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of "Canada" (87-124)
Bannerji examines the discourse of multiculturalism in the nation-making process: Canada, a capital state with the legacy of a white settler colonial economy along with aspirations of liberal democracy, needs an ideology to mediate tensions and ruptures around the historical Anglo-French rivalry. Within this context, Bennerji argues, "undesirable others" consisting non-white peoples with other kinds of cultures, are to be discursively inserted in the binary hegemonic conflict. Bennerji argues, therefore, that the discourse of multiculturalism serves as a culmination for the ideological construction of Canada. In this ideological process, difference becomes neutralized and perceived as diversity rather than racism and colonial ethnocentrism. (p. 96)

Chap. 4. Charles Taylor's Politics of Recognition: A Critique (125-150)

From the perspective of antiracist and marxist feminism, Bannerji criticizes that Taylor, who differentiates his approach from the Canadian state's official multicultural policy, demonstrates an elite multiculturalism by calling for the recognition of the incoming "their" cultures within "our" culture, the existing Anglo-European hegemony in Canada. According to Bannerji, it is condescension toward "other" people who bear witness to their complex history, culture, and value.

Bannerji notes that despite his sensitivity to alienation and individualism produced by an industrial society, Taylor does not take in account the history, social relations and politics that drive to such technological deployment; instead he slips into a metaphysics of the human conditions, thus obscuring history. (Thus, he dissociates culture from power/knowledge and politics. )

Bannerji explains Taylor's perspective on the liberal state's multiculturalism: for Taylor, the liberalism, which is based on the abstract universalism and individual rights and equality, now enters the cultural realm in the state's multiculturalism. By seeking to incorporating cultural difference into the procedural democracy of the state, the official multiculturalism inevitably encounters a dilemma because of the simultaneous demand for equality and difference and because of its reliance on a universal argument to validate the particular.

As the fundamental problem in Taylor's argument, Bannerji writes that Taylor sees difference only in culture, uninscribed with relations of power, such that Taylor quotes the attempt to connect culture with politics a half-baked neo-Nietzscheanism (in his book:70). Without consideration of class struggle, and even resisting to affirmative action (his book: 64), Bannerji criticizes, "his idea of difference invloves a combination of aesthetic resting in a sort of cultural genetics--as a phenomenon of ontology and taste" (p. 132).

For Bannerji, Taylor's use of the terms "us" and "them" reveals his hidden assumptions about his perspectives. Bannerji states:

Speaking in terms of a social dialogue, this "we" extends a gesture of communitarian hospitality--creates a space where the readers can come in if they feel themselves to be a part of this "we." But this is where a trouble arises when some readers, unable to claim an insider's status of the culture that Taylor sees as "our" culture, fall into the category of "they" about whose multiculture Taylor talks about...After all, the very need for recognition of some by others signals to relations of power and ties cultural recognition to power/knowledge. (134-136).

Bannerji states that, although Talyor turns into a philosophical role to arbitrate cultural differences, at the bottom lies his sens of cultural crisis from the influx of multicultures, as quoted on the page 63.

Another problem Bannerji points out in Taylor's theoretical horizon is that he essentializes third world culture as "traditional" and religious, which is contrasted with European post-Enlightenment. Thus, they are at most to be tolerated. After all, Taylor calls for voluntary recognition in responding to the identity needs of others, thus depoliticizing the context where parties with power differentials struggle for their rights. Therefore, For Taylor, "'they' are merely unable to know what 'they' really want, thus the politics of social justice needs to be displaced by the politics of charitable recognition" (p. 143). Bennerji contests that Taylor's elitism thus offers condescension in the name of community, where a struggle to end exploitation and injustice, not a plea for recognition, takes place. Thus, for Bannerji, what is necessary to deal with cultural contestation is not an accolade of worth or equal value but a political organization that sustains structural and legal conditions to wage such struggles.

Finally Bannerji briefs liberal theorists' disagreement with Taylor: For Habermas, specific and traditional group cultures are not significant. Important to him is to bring about a common liberal culture through debates and discussions in the public space at the spirit of modernity and liberal democracy. That is to say that non-Westerners can be absorbed into this secular, rational and public culture.

Bannerji places Kymlicka as the primary theorist of the liberal Canadian state's multiculturalism: in theorizing official multiculturalism, he links group rights with individual rights and consider the constitution of different cultural groups in Canada within definitions of multi-nationality and poly-ethnicity. He also propose cultural sovereignty and emphasizes affirmative actions.

Chap. 5. A Question of Silence: Reflection on Violence Against Women in Communities of Colour (151-174)

Reflecting on women of color within the context of cultural nationalism or multicultural community politics, Bannerji argues that these women must claim various political movement in Canada as their own. She states:

We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed in the name of cultural authenticity, identity, and community, any more than we can be duped by the mythologies of social democracy proffered by a racist and imperialist bourgeois state. (p. 173)

Nations without nationalism

Kristeva, Julia. (1993). (Trans. by Leon Roudiez). New York: Colombia University Press.

Translator's introduction (ix-x11)
Roudiez reads the notions of strangeness and otherness and a feeling of difference in Kristeva's work. He notes the merge of the notions of "strange" and "other" in her book "Stranger to Ourselves", stating, "the final emphasis is on the stranger within, the other within the same" (xii).

[This compassion seems necessary for her to understand others free from the constraints of nationalism, which she describes as a defensive hatred against others. ]

What of Tomorrow's Nation? (pp. 1-47)
Kristeva describes that the values crisis and the fragmentation of individuals has caused a loss of identity and as a result, leading them to the cult of national origins. According to Kreiteva, it is the most massive, regressive and common denominator. Kristeva states, "the cult of origin is a hate reaction, " expressing hatred to others who do not share the same origins as well as hatred toward oneself that undervalues one's own quality and freedom.

Observing a recent immigration tendency, Kristeva asks the following question:

[T]he assimilation drive of the new migrants emphasizes above all the desire to enjoy social benefits and does not at all involve giving up their own typical, behavioral, religious, cultural, or even linguistic features. What sort of common life and what degree of mixing remain possible under such conditions? (p. 8)

Examining the immigration history of the United States, Kristeva points out that American nationalism has established hierarchies within itself such that it accepts immigrants by creating a special entrant status on the fringes of the law and without that immigrant enjoying all social benefits.

Stating her own position as cosmopolitan, Kristeva states her own perspective:

I maintain that in the contemporary world, shaken up by national fundamentalism on the one hand and the intensive demands of immigration on the other, the fact of belonging to a set is a matter of choice. (pp. 16-17)

Kristeva sharply points out a brutal persecution of foreigners in the name of nationalism in the French Enlightenment, for instance, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that maintained the distinction between human beings and citizen. Opposing to a nationalist, regionalist, and religious fragmentation that has aroused hatred and violence and destroyed humanities, Kristeva calls for universality for the rights of man, or a symbolic dignity of the humankind. In order to achieve the universality, she maintains, it is necessary that we "recognize ourselves as strange in order better to appreciate the foreigners outside us instead of striving to bend them to the norms of our own repression" (p. 29).

For Kristeva, recognition of our own strangeness and otherness is required for understanding foreigners. What does she mean by strangeness of oneself? Roudiez describes the strangeness in the sense that people live apart in their own rituals and fight among themselves.

As to feminism and nationalism, Kristeva maintains a little strange perspective:

Considerable watchfulness is thus needed in order to ward off that too facile symbiosis between nationalism and, if not "feminism," at least a certain conformist "materialism" that lies dormant in every one of us and can turn women into accomplices of religious fundamentalisms and mystical nationalisms as they were of the Nazi mirage.

According to Kristeva, the French nationalism is far from the spirit of the people. She writes:

The French national idea, which draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment and is embodies in the French Republic, is achieved in a legal and political pact between free and equal individuals. (p. 40)

Besides its contractual quality, Kristeva characterizes the French national idea with transitional and cultural aspects. By transitional, Kristeva is in tune with Bhabha's temporality. She states that the nation is characterized with a series of differences and thus demands particular rights be highlighted; therefore the nation is open-ended. Looking at this contractural, transitional and cultural nation, Kristeva calls for the right of foreigners to be integrated as a participation to this nation.


The Nation and the Word (pp. 65-76)
Kristeva asserts that the political became concretized during the twentieth century in the idea of nation. She further notes that de Gaulle, in particular, achieved it through his powerful use of the symbolic to appeal public opinion amid the world wars and other conflicts. She states:

By means of worshiping the Nation as a living and evolutionary unit and by anchoring his action on people's conscience in the radiance of the Word that gives access to each one's unconscious: de Gaulle has succeeded where the paranoid falls. (pp. 69)

Kristeva rephrases the formation of the national discourse as follows:

There you have a President who is conceiver and strategist of the national discourse, who creates realities by means of symbols while avoiding the pitfalls of tyranny and modifying circumstances for the good of an increasingly enlarged community, having in mind the interests of its members. (p. 75)

According to Kristeva, now is the time to revisit the nationalism in order to facilitate integration inside and outside of its borders. Here she, as a declared cosmopolitan, suggests that we force political discourse to move away from national constraints, recognizing others, and to build the bond among human beings.

Modernity versus Postmodernity

Habermas, Jürgen. (1981). New German Critique, 22 (Special Issue on Modernism, 3-14.

Habermas's primary focus lies in a disturbed communicative infrastructure of everyday life, which is caused in the process of social modernization for economic growth and accomplishments of the state by subordinating human life-world to systems' imperatives.

In this ground, he sheds light on cultural modernity, which he notes stems from a doubt of the project of modernity and criticism of modernity. Habermas draws the conceptual framework of cultural modernity from Max Weber, who characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason of religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres: science, morality and art. From this foundation, Habermas finds the root of the modernity in the project of Enlightenment in the 18th century. According to Habermas, the Enlightenment, which aimed at the rationalization of every day life by developing objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art under the control of specialists, came to impoverish real life and diminish everyday communication.

Observing surrealists' approach to art, negation of art, Habermas asserts, "nothing remains form a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory does not follow". Looking for alternatives, Habermas contests that the project of modernity has not yet fulfilled, suggesting that the project should relink modern culture with everyday life and a new kind of societal modernization is a prior condition of the cultural reconnection.

Habermas distinguishes three conceptions surrounding modenity: the antimodernism of young conservatives, the remodernism of old conservatives and the postmodernism of neoconservatives.[my emphasis... This analysis is somewhat ambiguous.]

Framing the Margins

: the social logic of postmodern culture. Harper, Phillip Brian. (1994). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Introduction: the postmodern, the marginal, and the minor (pp. 3-29)

According to Harper, postmodernism begins with its specific ontological perspective: the individual human psyche is fundamentally incoherent, fragmented, or decentered. This decenteredness is on Harper's focus. Within this context, Harper restates the argument between Habermas and Lyotard on the topic of modernity and postmodernity and stresses that both regards the decentered experience as the postmodern condition despite their positions constitutes. Harper writes:

Habermas characterizes modernity as a motivated undertaking based in the Enlightenment impulse to provide for "the rational organization of everyday social life" This rational organization would follow from the establishment of effective communicative interaction among the three spheres of "objective science, universal morality and law, and the autonomous art," which, in the context of early modernity, had been developed as specialized realms "according to their inner logic"...Habermas identifies as postmodern the acquiescence to or embracement of the disengaged autonomy that characterizes the specialized realms of human activity in the contemporary era. This disengagement itself manifests as decenteredness in that, if there is no effective interplay among the different spheres of activity, then neither can there be any centralized "legitimating" narrative that comprises them all; but insofar as social progress for Habermas depends on just such a (modernistic) synthesizing vision, postmodernist decenteredness presents itself to him as a fundamentally conservative phenomenon to be vigorously resisted. (p. 5)

On the other hand, Harper notes that for Lyotard transparent communication as a basis of consensus consensus is both false and dangerous because of its tendency toward totalization. Harper interprets Lyotard's position:

Lyotard, in theorizing the postmodern as approximating the experience of the Kantian sublime--which is itself founded on a sort of cognitive gap, the difference between out ability to conceive of certain ideas and our inability to represent them--specifies subjective disjunction and fragmentation as key factors in the postmodern condition. (p. 8)

As to the political significance of fragmentation, Harper states that whereas for Habermas, it is a fundamentally conservative development in contemporary society, for Lyotard, it is a progressive strategy of demystification.

Harper characterizes postmodernism as the presentation of a decentered human subjectivity--here he means incoherent fragmentation of an individual psyche. He suggests that the marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness--hooks' term 'uncertainty'--is an unacknowledged factor of the general postmodern condition. Within this theoretical foundation, Harper looks into social marginality in literature. He delineates as social marginality a phenomenon reflecting political disenfranchisement due to class, gender, sexual orientation, and racial identification, and so on.

The Postmodern Explained

Lyotard, Jean-François. (1993). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 1. Answers to the Question, What is the Postmodern? (p. 1-16)

Lyotard describes the key concept of the postmodern as "war on totality" (p. 16). In the conceptualization, he opposes in particular to Habermas on his quest of modernity through unifying experiences. Lyotard writes succinctly:

In short, Habermas demands of the arts and the experience they provide that they form a bridge over the gap separating the discourses of knowledge, ethics, and politics, thus opening the way for a unity of experience. (p. 3)

Opposing the concept of unity, Lyotard asserts that the postmodernity reexamines the thought of the Enlightenment, the idea of a uniform end of history, and the idea of the subject.

[Lyotard's idea of the postmodernity revolves primarily around aesthetic judgment.] He holds, "aesthetic judgment would only have to reach a verdict on whether a particular work conforms to the established rules of the beautiful...political academicism understands and imposes a priori criteria of the 'beautiful,' criteria that can, in one move and once and for all, select works and their public." (p. 7).

According to Lyotard, art and literary work is threatened by cultural politics coupled with a capital market order. Thus reality in such work is now to be confirmed by both science and capitalism, and we discover the lack of reality in reality. It is a condition of modernity, he argues.

Lyotard distinguishes modern/avant-guard art and postmodern/transavantguard art in terms of the representation of the "unpresentable". He states:

"[T]he avant-guardes continually expose the artifices of presentation that allow thought to be enslaved by the gaze and diverted from the unpresentable...The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refused the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquiries into new presentation--not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable." (pp. 12-15).

For Lyotard, postmodern artists are a philosopher who constantly investigates the preestablished rules to establish new ones.

Chapter 2. Apostil on Narratives (pp. 17-21)
Defining the project of modernity as the realization of universality, Lyotard argues that the project is "liquidated". He contests that, while contemporary capitalist technoscience was instrumental to fulfilling the project, it became part of the subject that humans tried to master. As a result, contemporary technoscience profoundly "destablized" the project, as seen the populicide at Auschwitz, for instance. Within this context, Lyotard discredits the grand narratives of legitimation and calls for postmodernity, not as the end of modernity but as its anti-thesis.

Chapter 4. Memorandum on Legitimation (pp. 39-59)
In this chapter, Lyotard approaches totalitarianism from the perspective of legitimation. In the quest, he shows his political perspective. He states:

[R]ight cannot be de facto; real society draws legitimacy not from itself but from a community that is not properly nameable, merely required. One cannot deduce what a people ought to be from what it is today, nor can one deduce the concept of the universal citizen from its French or American name--only the reverse is possible. This is why, as I remarked earlier, the ferment and decomposition of the real community are inscribed in the principle of republicanism and in the history it develops. Sovereignty belongs not to the people but to the Idea of the free community. History simply marks the tension of this lack. The republic invokes freedom against security. (p. 51)

This statement implies that republicanism is based on the power of universality. Lyotard argues that totalitarianism borrows its universalizaing power from republicanism and decompose people into "masses" as its identity through authorized parties.

Chapter 7. Note on the Meaning of Post
A simple distinction Lyotard makes between modern and postmodern is that post means "a new direction from the previous one" (p. 76). On the other hand, he states as to modernity:

"The very idea of modernity is closely correlated with the principle that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking." (p. 76).

[Lyotard, however, argues that the ideal of modernity has been destroyed for the reasons described earlier.]

The Location of Culture

Bhabha, Homi. (2004). London and New York: Routledge Classics. (First published in 1994)

Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition (ix-xxv)
Bhabha's interest focus on the hybrid forms of life that the marginalized produce amid the situation where their cultural integrity is negated through the ignorance of their differences. He distinguishes two discourses of globalization. In this criticism of the predominant discourse, global cosmopolitanism, he asserts that it focuses on neo-liberal forms of governance and free-market forces of competition. He states:

A global cosmopolitanism of this sort readily celebrates a world of plural cultures and peoples located at the periphery, so long as they produce healthy profit margins within metropolitan societies. States that participate in such multicultural[sic] multiculturalism affirm their commitment to 'diversity', at home and abroad, so long as the demography of diversity consists largely of educated economic migrants--computer engineers, medical technicians, and entrepreneurs, rather than refugees, political exiles, or the poor. (p. xiv)

Instead, Bhabha calls attention to globalization that deals with difference within, such as problems of diversity and redistribution at the local level and the rights and representations of minorities in the regional domain. From this view, he suggests the term vernacular cosmopolitanism, which measures global progress from minorities perspective and their claims to freedom and equality are marked by a right to difference in equality. He states:

The vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to a 'right to difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation or authentication of origins and 'identities,' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices. (p. xvii)

Bhabha sharply criticizes Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. The Article declares the rights of minority to preserve their cultural inheritance. (The current statement is as follows) "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." Bhabha contests that this statement neglects inter-cultural affiliation across minority communities. He states:

Article 27 emphasizes the need for minorities to 'preserve' their cultural identities, rather than to affiliate across emergent minority communities. For all its good intentions, such rights neglect the 'inter-cultural' political existence and ethical imperative...(p. xxii)

[The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with the sentence, "All human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms." But it is quite intriguing that Arendt once wrote, "we are not born equal, but become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights" (The Origin of Totalitarianism, p. 297) Although the two approaches aim at the same goal of preserving human rights, Arendt emphasizes the need for struggle to achieve the goal, thus allows us to see the inveterate power differentials in our society.]


Introduction (p. 1-27)
Bhabha delineates an innovative theoretical approach as thinking beyond narratives of initial subjectivities and focus on processes produced in the articulation of cultural differences. He calls them"in-between" spaces. With respect to cultural engagement, Bhabha states:

The social articulation of difference, from minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation...The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definition of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress. (p. 3)

Bhabha explains postcoloniality: (1) it focuses on the persistent 'neo-colonial' conditions within the 'new' world order and the multinational division of labor, and (2) it look at cultures 'otherwise than modern'. He describes this phrase, "Such cultures of a postcolonial contra-modernity may be contingent to modernity, discontinuous or in contention with it, resistant to its oppressive, assimilationist technologies; but they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to 'translate', and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity" (p. 9).

Under the postcolonial condition, Bhabha introduces the concept of unhomeliness, meaning the recess of the domestic space or simply displacement. He assert that it is inherent to inter-cultural rites and becomes historically the most intricate invasion, blurring the borders between home and world as well as private and public. [THIS REMINDS ME OF ARENDT'S ARGUMENT OF THE PRESERVATION OF PRIVATE DOMAIN]

Chapter 1. The Commitment to Theory (28-56)
Bhabha emphasizes the political commitment of a theory. Opposing to singularity, he states that hegemony requires iteration and alterity to be effectively produce politicized populations. Within this context, he argues that theoretical statements should be made through negotiation and recognition of heterogeneity, where hybrid forms of knowledge can be produced. He writes:

A knowledge can only become political through an agnostic process: dissensus, alterity and otherness are the discursive conditions for the circulation and recognition of a politicized subject and a public 'truth'. (p. 34)

He maintains that in the negotiation between politics and knowledge, theories cannot be a metanarrative claiming generality and should not lag the time and space of politics.

Bhabha notes that cultural diversity, the recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs, gives rise to liberal notion of multiculturalism.

His perspective on the relationship between cultural meaning and language is worth to look at. [Is it similar to poststructuralism?] In his view, the act of cultural enunciation [making known] is crossed by the difference of writing. Refusing a traditional emphasis on the content of symbols and functions within different cultures, he emphasizes the structure of symbolization shaped by language. In his view, the process of language itself is crucial to creating (cultural) meanings. Thus, meaning and symbols of culture is created beyond a simple act of communication between two people and is "mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious " (p. 53). Therefore, this Third Space constitutes the act of cultural enunciation, which is a contradictory, ambivalent, and indeterminate space. The acknowledgment of this Third Space of cultural enunciation is critical to understanding the historical identity of culture. He states:

The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, and expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homegenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. (p. 54)

For Bhabha, the nature of culture lies not in purity, fixity, or unity but in hybridity that a Third Space produces. Bhabha describes this Third Space as an alien territory, a split-space, or inbetween space. He argues that the theoretical recognition of this space may help conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or cultural diversity in a liberal sense but on the articulation of culture's hybridity.

By emphasizing the Third Space and the hybridity of culture, he calls attention to a discontinuity of cultural identities that people bring forward in their liberatory struggle. He observes that by destroying the continuity of the nationalist tradition, people can translate and negotiate their new culture within a new context. Bhabha states:

The people are now the very principle of 'dialectical reorganization' and they construct their culture from the national text translated into modern Western forms of information technology, language, dress. The changed political and historical site of enunciation transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future. (p. 56)

Bhabha distinguishes himself from nationalists who call for the true national culture as a safeguard against colonial cultural imposition. As he notes, his perspective resonates in Fanon's. Bhabha writes, "for Fanon, the liberatory people who initiate the productive instability of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers of a hybridity identity" (p. 55).

[It seems that the reason why he is called a post-colonial scholar is that his emphasis on a departure from the legacy of colonialism on the basis of the changing culture from the people.]

Chapter 7. Articulating the Archaic: Cultural difference and colonial nonsense (175-198)
Bhabha opposes to the restoration of cultural essence or authenticity. According to him, this approach is taken from the perspective of relativism for the recognition of cultural difference. Defining cultural difference as a problem caused by cultural plurality, he argues that cultural difference is not acquisition or accumulation of additional cultural knowledge, but the momentous extinction of the recognizable object of culture. Thereby he continues to emphasize a discontinuity of culture at the edge of experience. For him, culture is not a fixity, but a fluidity, disrupted by time and space.

[His discussion is not much about cultural collision within an immigrant society, rather a nation-state in a post-colonial period.]

Chapter 8. DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation (199-244)

Focusing on the emergence of the modern nation from the mid-nineteenth century, he defines the Western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the "locality" of culture. He argues that in the act of writing the nation, which is an apparatus of symbolic power, a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia or cultural difference. But Bhabha argues that by focusing on the nation-space, the narrative of nation fails to address the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the 'modern' experience of the Western nation. Thus his focus is placed on the temporality of the modernity.

Within this context he warns that cultural difference must not be understood from the perspective of pluralities in the "homogeneous empty" time of the national community. He states:

The question of cultural difference faces us with a disposition of knowledges or a distribution of practices that exist beside each other, abseits designating a form of social contradiction or antagonism that has to be negotiated rather than sublated...The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization [my emphasis]...[that] serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. (p. 232-233)

[I seems that Bhabha regards the other spaces produced in the hybrid conditions as a site of potential subversion, but it could be and in-between culture is not powerless, however his perspective is narrated without enough evidence. The in-between culture is negotiated and can be either subversive or obedient to the totalization.]

chapter. 9 The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: the question of agency

According to Bhabha, postcolonial criticism revolves around unequal cultural representation. In order to do so, they intervene in the discourse of modernity, in particular around its rationalization, that normalizes the unequal and differential representation. Thus, they attempt to reconstitute cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in order to reveal the oppressive function of modernity. He states that, in the discourse of cultural difference, they oppose to the continuity of an authentic 'past' and a living 'present'. Instead they see culture as a strategy of survival and focus on the transnational dimension of cultural transformation, such as migration, diaspora, displacement and relocation. Thus, he argues that the postcolonialism challenges a consensual and collusive liberal sense of cultural community. Instead, they look at culture as a disturbing practice of survival and focus on a process of alterity, which construct cultural and political identities.

Comment to the Politics of Recognition

Walzer, Michael. 99-104

From Talyor's argument, Walzer derives two kinds of liberalism: (1) Liberalism 1 is committed to absolute individual rights and guaranteed by a state's neutrality and (2) Liberalism 2 allows state intervention to preserve a particular culture or nation within the boundaries where the basic rights of citizens are protected. Walzer delineates the first kind of liberalism as the official doctrine of immigrant societies like the United States (and federal Canada), as Rawls formulated as social unions. Under this rule, the plural unions are free to do what they need to do but without help from the state.

In reality, however, there is inequality among nationalities, social unions or cultural communities and some are more at risk than others; and the state is called upon to take responsibility for everyone's cultural survival. From this perspective, Walzer carefully proposes "Liberalism 1 chosen from within Liberalism 2" to respond to multiculturalism, that is liberalism governed by "the social condition and the actual life choices of these[sic] men and women" (p. 103). Not rejecting the idea of Liberalism 2, Walzer holds tight to the concept of Liberalism 1 in particular with respect to immigrants who made an individual choice and were prepared to take cultural risks. Thus their lives are significantly shaped by the liberal idea of individual rights. Walzer argues that this choice and their rights should not be curtailed. In addition, he contests that Liberalism 1 does not exclude support for studying otherness.

Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism: Between Race and Ethnicity

Gunew, Sneja. (1997). The Yearbook of English Studies (The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism), 27, 22-39.

Gunew alludes that discussion of multiculturalism has become inevitable because increasing migration across borders rendered traditional national models anachronistic, but states that multiculturalism means different things in different context. For example, multiculturalism is produced out of necessity by nations and aspirants to geo-political cohesiveness despite heterogeneity within. Cultural studies focus on politics of representation in the discussion of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is also invoked within post-colonial discourses that criticize the predominance of Western culture.

Gunew calls attention to the distinction between state multiculturalism (dealing with the management of diversity) and critical multiculturalism (minorities' participation in the public sphere based on their difference). She characterizes state multiculturalism as such:

"State multiculturalism followed 'assimilation' (a term deriving from digestion and indicating 'becoming the same as') and 'integration' (separatism plus common values) and represents a kind of liberal pluralism which implies both a hidden norm from which minority groups diverge while failing to recognize prevailing power differentials." (p. 24)

Gunew notes that as seen in curriculum where ahistorical ethnic culture is celebrated, state multiculturalism holds a stance of liberal pluralism. This tendency extends to immigration deeply rooted in prejudice against minority. Gunew writes, "[i]n contrast to supposed Western tolerance the minority is often represented as primitive or uncivilized, importing its social pathologies" (p. 24)

Some implications in the discourse of state multiculturalism
Gunew points out that the emphasis on community in supporting cultural difference often leads to oppress women because, amid struggles for the maintenance of culture or tradition, women tend to be left out without agency of their interpretation or participating as a community leader.

Gunew also points out that multiculturalism's focus on culture tends to occlude or minimize political activisms and their histories: for example, literary cultural focus on black women's texts aids to depoliticize social struggles.

As observed in the public debate on political correctness and a conservative tone of multiculturalism, there has been a concern that multiculturalism carries the connotation of 'special interests' in opposition to 'general interest', or highlights oppositional minority positions.

Critical Multiculturalism
Observing pitfalls of state multiculturalism, Gunew states:

"[T]he future for critical multiculturalism lies in an alertness to the inherent 'hybridity' and diverse affiliations of all subjects which may be mobilized in varying combinations by particular
projects or events. Coalitions may be built around 'mutual and reciprocal relativization'" (p. 26-27)

Gunew refers to race, ethnicity and diaspora as three hidden reference points in the discourse of nation-building within a context of multiculturalism, in particular, in Australia). Observing that the term race is replaced by ethnicity, Gunew summarizes that while ethnicity, largely conceived as a cultural term, is structured to a concomitant desire for citizenship, race, once prevailed as irreducible differences, is structured by the desire to be human. Gunew's quote from Goldberg succinctly describes the oppositions between the two term.

"As Goldberg states, 'Race is irrelevant, but all is race' (p. 6), that is, irrelevant because while there are no non-arbitrary or absolute markers of race, debates about and struggles around race in a variety of societies are really about the meaning and nature of political consittution and community: 'Who counts as in and who out, who is central to the body politic and who peripheral, who is autonomous and who dependent?' (p. 83). Another way of putting it is to see it in this period of history as a struggle over who controls the codes and practices of nation-building." (p. 30) [Goldberg, Racist Culture]

Gunew asserts that diaspora hinges the oppositions of race and ethnicity and is seen as threats to a cohesive nation. As to the impact of diaspora, she states:

"Diasporic allegiances along the race ethnicity vector breach the homogeneity of the nation state with other affiliations, of increasing importance in the new structures of globalization. To some extent this movement of global connections is also happening amongst the indigenous peoples who are forming alliances across those nation-states imposed on them as a way of confirming solidarity for claims often grounded in land rights." (p. 30)

In spite of the emphasis of recent multiculturalism on a recognition of differences, Gunew criticizes that state multiculturalism, prevailing in the US, Canada and Australia, fails to see power differentials among competing minority groups, thus hold a profoundly conservative pluralist model.

Observing the floating meanings of whiteness, Gunew questions practices of cultural critiques and states:

"Appeals to the facts of a nation's history are not really at issue here, since we are dealing rather with metaphors and signifying systems mobilized as part of a rhetoric of the national culture concerned with identifying insiders and outsiders." (p. 36)

To her and other post-colonial scholar, alterity, being otherness, is an important concept. Gunew refers to Said's Orientalism as the founding study for the construction of alterity, while placing Homi Bhabha's work in relation to borders and hybridity (Culture's In Between, Artforum, September 1993).

Finally Gunew's emphasis of critical multiculturalism lies on the intertwined relationship between the local and the global because it introduces minority perspectives while suggesting diasporic networks. In this vein, she maintains that multiculturalism is a floating signifier that gains meaning and strategies only in a specific context. Local contextualization is essential in critical multiculturalism.

Cultural Pluralism: An Overview of the Debate since the 60s

Helly, Denise. (2002). Ethnopolitics, 2(1), 75-96.

Helly, Montreal based, notes that public controversy over the equality of minorities since the 1960s has triggered a large-scale academic debate on cultural differentiation in a modern political system. This article provides an overview of the debate and an examination of the theoretical positions.

Political liberalism and republicanism
Helly suggests political liberalism and republicanism as two extreme political stance in liberty and equality, which came to a target of criticism in the 19th century. Political liberalism, based on classical liberalism, emphasizes an autonomous individual who has unconquerable liberty and freedom. According to this view, thus, cultural diversity is a natural extension of individual diversity and the state cannot intervene to define common morality and cultural values; instead, collectivity in this model can be negotiated only through individual reasoning. Thus Helly notes that the political in this view is instrumental and administrative. This perception is parallel to political relativism, as Gutmann notes.

Republicanism, on the other hand, does not rely solely on individual reasoning to obtain common values. As Helly observes, republicanism recognizes cultural and political dissidence, but it calls attention to "the predatory effect of liberty upon equality" (p. 76), because of the passivity of citizens. Thus, central to republicanism is to place collective interests over individual desires in order to preserve equality among people. From this perspective, republicanism emphasizes a construction of citizenship to instruct an active political behavior and build a public morality. This state's active role in civil society constitutes a sharp contrast with liberalism, which adheres to the insurmountable individual right to liberty.

Critics
Helly examines critics of these perspectives (fictitious argument over liberty and freedom) from various sectors since 1940s in North America. Helly states that Black and feminist movement in the United States and francophone movement in Canada reveals the illusory character of anti-discrimination law enactment. At the center of the critique is the debate on culture: minority rights, communinatianism, and nation and ethnocentrism. (I substantiate the debate around minority rights from Kymlicka and Norman.)

[Citizenship in Diverse Societies, Kymlicka & Norman (Eds.) Intro. 1-41]
Characterizing the Culture Wars in the 1980s and early 1990s as minority rights against cultural dominance, Kymlicka and Norman inquire whether minority rights can coexist the virtue of democratic citizenship and how the rights relate to underlying principles of liberal democracy, such as individual freedom and equality. They argue that the relationship between minority rights or cultural diversity and citizenship ideals is complex and no definite answers have been found yet. In their argument, however, the author allude to the importance of citizenship education and practices to build cohesion and generate common sense and values among diverse cultural groups.

In contrast to the concept of rational individuals, predominantly supported by John Rawls's A theory of Justice (1971), communitarianism (Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982; Taylor) emphasizes individual interaction with others and communities in the process of construction of identity. In this view, cultural inclusion and recognition are crucial to a human's well-being and this recognition has to be won. Taylor states:

"Yet inwardly derives, personal, original identity doesn't enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt can fail. What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail. That is why the need is now acknowledged for the first time." (The Politics of Recognition, 34-35)

Taylor contests that liberalism cannot claim complete cultural neutrality because a scheduling of rights among different cultural interests is inevitable, thus liberalism is a fighting creed. Thus Helly notes that from communitarian perspective, the cultural neutrality of the state is a myth and only reinforces cultural dominance.

Helly asserts Article 27 of the the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as the optimal liberal answer to the protection of minority culture by making it an interpretive clause of individual rights:

Article 27. This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.

Helly locates communitarian responses, in particular from Taylor and Michale Walzer, as a liberal response to demands for multicultural diversity. According to Taylor, a recognition of cultural differences is necessary to obtain individual participation in political and collective life. For him, a politics of recognition is important in two levels: in the intimate sphere, and in the public sphere. As noted earlier, a politics of recognition is important as identity is formed in relation to significant others. This recognition comes to play a bigger role in the public sphere as this recognition refuses second-class citizenship, thus inviting a cohesion among the diversity. (FIND THE PHRASE)

As a republican response to demands for multicultural diversity, Helly notes that republican emphasizes political commonality and the unity of sovereign people reinforced by anti-discriminatory legislation and public intercultural education. Notable is Tourain. Helly summarizes his perspective: Tourain, criticizing a policy of cultural pluralism, focuses on ways in which social rules make reconcile individual sovereignty over their own life experience and diverse cultural identities. Thus for Tourain, democracy is an instrument of cultural communication and public school must be a place for the formation of respect for cultural differences, toleration, and for the intercultural.

(Touraine, Alain, 1994, Qu'est-ce que la Démocratie? Paris, Fayard.
; 1997, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? Égaux et différents)

Helly states that an inherent tension of the modern state lies between the cultural foundation of a specific society and its universal principles. Instead of relying on the abstract rationality of the state or universalism, the state exercises its sovereignty by intentionally integrating populations in different territories and creating a political identity in order to complement the abstract notion of the political identity.

It is interesting to note the way Helly approaches the formation of nationalism in the 19th century in Europe. Borrowing Gellner's argument, she sheds light on the ways in which capitalism played a role in forging nationalism by homogenizing culture and experiences and creating the sense of belonging to a territorial entity. In this process, she notes, citizenship and nationalism flourished and a good citizen became a patriot.

As to minority nations, Helly observes the idea that the state must become multinational (Resnick 1994; Gagnon and Rocher 1997; Bourque and Duchastel
2000). She asserts the implication of this idea in Canadian context:

"In Canada, this solution implies the sharing, amongst Quebecois and also some sixty native nations, of powers relating to the organization of collective life (Royal Commission 1996), as well as an alliance with the federal state in matters of money and international politics." (p. 87)

In response to the liberal argument that cultural rights would form closed communities and harm the unity among cultural groups, Helly argues that cultural rights concerns persons, not groups, and cultural rights do not interfere with the collectivity among the groups. For instance, Article 27 does not annul the predominance of the two official languages in Canada. She further notes that the only granted collective right in the Charter is the right to impose French as official language in Quebec. [This indicates that Quebec is a special case in Canada among many national groups. Quebec itself is not composed of the same cultural group, but the predominance of French culture is recognized as such in the federal level. Looking at Quebec at a micro level is an interesting topic to see how a cultural diversity is played out.]

As to a post-modern response to cultural plurality, Helly points out that post-modernism denies the unitary idea of living together and all controls exerted by the state codify a particular form of cultural plurality and create a illusion of commonality and social unity.

Lastly Helly states as to social cohesion:

"It affirms that 'social cohesion' grows out of cooperation between individuals and constitutes a source of social peace, equality and a sense of social belonging. It suggests that this cohesion is eroded by the decline of civic life, of political interest, of social solidarity, and an absence of any
sense of social obligations on the part of individuals." (p. 89)

The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics

Gutmann, Amy. (1993). Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (3), 171-204.

Gutmann examines political controversies over social justice in multicultural contexts. She begins her argument by defining multiculturalism as "the state of a society or the world containing many cultures that interact in some significant way with each other" whereas a culture id defined as a human community associated with a set of social standards of seeing, doing and thinking.

Her aim in this essay:
(1) understanding the essential challenge of multiculturalism to social justice
(2) assessing three responses: cultural relativism, political relativism, and comprehensive universalism
(3) proposing deliberative universalism as a more defensible response

The response of Cultural Relativism
Gutmann notes that social justice, according to cultural relativism, is the distribution of social goods responding to their cultural meaning. As seen the debate on polygamy among Mormons, such meanings change over time. Thus, if there exist multiple meanings for any given good, cultural relativism will require reformulation to deal with these competing meanings to apply to social justice, Gutmann explains.

Gutmann rightly points out that because cultures are often distinguished by a set of dominant social understandings, cultural relativism can threaten to identity social justice with the dominant social norms, as seen examples of justifying slavery or women's role. She states that there has been no demonstrated general consensus to the dominant discourses. She states:
"Because social understandings are typically not shared among all members of a culture and dominant understandings do not determine justice, cultural relativism does not fulfill its promise of dissolving multicultural conflicts. It often does not even recognize moral conflicts within cultures, let alone resolve them." (p. 178)

Political Relativism
Gutmann states that social justice, according to political relativism, is achieved through institutional mechanism to adjudicate internal disagreement over social meanings and adjust distribution of social justice based on the outcome. Gutmann argues that political relativism is more adequate response to multicultural conflicts than cultural relativism because its recognition of a political community, where disagreements over social meanings are discussed and negotiated, and a provision for certain forms of procedural justice, such as forums for argument, negotiation, and so on, highlights a necessary condition of social justice; this condition, just procedures, alone, however, cannot guarantee the complete morality, she critiques.

Gutmann implies that democracy is a procedure and does not necessarily determine justice, although democratic procedures may be the best for provisionally settling many conflicts. She continues to argue, "[i]n situations of racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts within democratic societies, majoritarian procedures may deny minorities personal security, basic liberty, and decent living standards" (p. 180).

Observing cases where political procedures failed to bring just outcomes, Gutmann states:

"The strength of political relativism lies in its recognition that disagreements over social meanings should be publicly discussed, negotiated, and adjudicated. Its weakness lies in its silence regarding standards, other than social agreement, by which to judge the justice of procedures or their results." (p. 182)

The Relation Between Relativism and Personal Identity
Gutmann asserts that people, belonging to multiple cultures at a time, as well as societies are multicultural even within an orthodox religious group, for instance. This nature, however, does not lead to a cosmopolitan view about social justice, Gutmann notes. People negotiate their identities. Gutmann writes:

"Cultural and political identities are neither given like hair color nor chosen like high cuisine. People select, interpret, and evaluate stories, histories, and customs in attempts to make the best out of the various cultures given to them. They also interpret and evaluate the institutions, laws, practices, and procedures of the political community they inherit...Cultural and political relativism leave too little room for recognizing this distinctively human capacity, exercised most self-consciously by people who endure systematic social injustice." (p. 185)

The Challenge of Relativism
Gutmann argues that a fundamental challenge of relativism lies in that it fails to explain an Archimedean point outside any cultural or political community from which to justify the overriding of local understandings. Looking at Nazi Germany's dominant favor for racial discrimination yet unjust, she calls attention to certain universal values. She clarifies universalism:

"Universalism depends on the possibility of justifying actions to people who do not share the same communal attachments, and this possibility is not undermined by the idea that moral criticism comes from within particular cultures." (p. 192)

Gutmann states that universalism, in practice, better fits the force of criticisms of arbitrary arrests and systematic deception by regime.

The Response of Comprehensive Universalism
Gutmann refers to comprehensive universalism as another response to the challenge of multiculturalism. By comprehensive universalism, she means an ethical application of a set of comprehensive principles of justice to all modern culture. In comparison, she defines deliberative universalism as follows:

Deliberative universalism [sic] relies partly upon a core of universal principles and partly upon publicly accountable deliberation to address fundamental conflicts concerning social justice, conflicts that reason has yet to resolve. (p. 193)

Partly because a universalist political ethics cannot be comprehensive in practice and comprehensive univeralism overlooks moral disagreements, such as individual choice vs. abortion, concerning social justice within a specific local context, Gutmann favors for deliberative universalism, which leaves room for local negotiation.

The Response of Deliberative Universalism
Gutmann succinctly writes:

"Unlike comprehensive universalism, deliberative universalism explicitly recognize that some conflicts over social justice cannot now (or perhaps ever) be resolved by a comprehensive, universally justifiable set of substantive standards. These conflicts are best addressed and provisionally resolved by actual deliberation, the give and take of argument that is respectful of reasonable differences." (p. 197)

In this way, she convenes relativism and universalism. Gutmann's favor for deliberative universalism partly stems from the condition that the reasonable argument can create. She writes:

[T]he give and take of respectful argument can create the broadest justifianle consensus across a range of reasonable but conflicting positions because mutual respect enjoins an economy of moral disagreement, the search for substantive points of convergence between fundamentally irreconcilable positions. (p. 199)

Gutmann alludes that the difference between deliberative universalism and political relativism lies in that social justice consists of deliberation as well as substantive principles that are necessary to secure basic human well-being. (p. 200) In this respect, Gutmann stresses that there should be certain conditions for deliberation to work in society, because "deliberation not only supplements substantive principles of justice but also presupposes certain substantive principles as well as procedural requirements." (p. 200) Thus she calls for substantive and procedural principles that make deliberative universalism distinctively suitable for making decisions about social justice.

Another reason for favoring deliberative universalism that Gutmann mentions is that "multiculturalism requires deliberation on many matters of social justice" (p. 204).


[Gutmann's emphasis on deliberative universalism is comparable with Charles Taylor's 'minimal rationality', as Bhabha summarizes (the location of culture, 2004). For Taylor, a plurality of standards which stem from incommensurable cultures does not rule out judgments of superiority. Rather, it is the plurality that exist between the incommensurable that leads to such judgments. He states:

What more is involved comes out of in the different judgments we make when we compare incommensurable cultures and activities. The judgments take us beyond merely formal criteria of rationality, and point us toward the human activities of articulation which give the vale of rationality its sense. (Philosophy and the Human Sciences, p. 151)

Thus, Talyor refutes pluralism and calls attention to the rationality that is formed through our comparative judgments between incommensurable cultures. This rationality not only avoids inconsistency among cultures but also constitutes superior judgments out of our attuned and humane interests in other cultures that coexist in the same space.]

Will Kymlicka

Immigration, Multiculturalism, and the Welfare State
Will Kymlicka & Keith Banting (2006). Ethics & International Affairs, 20(3), 281-304.

In spite of a increasingly prevailing public assumption of a potential trade-off between inclusive immigration policies and the maintenance of a robust welfare state, Kymlicka and Banting argue that there Besides the issues of security and terrorism that prevail in many circles about massive immigration, Kymlicka and Banting point out that there is little evidence about the impact of increasing ethnic diversity on the welfare state and the claim of an inevitable trade-off between them may be premature.

Kymlicka and Banting defines two concerns in this debate: (1) A growing heterogeneity/ethnic diversity in society will inevitably loosen national solidarity across ethnic lines, thus resulting in making more difficult achieving redistribution of resources or sustaining a robust welfare state (the heterogeneity/redistribution trade-off) (2) Multiculturalism policies that promote recognition of each culture will exacerbate weaken the politics of (economic) redistribution (the recognition/redistribution trade-off).

In the first case, the authors state that a general acceptance of the trade-off is generally drawn from case studies done in the United State, where scholars concluded that there is a universal tendency for people to resist interethnic redistribution. The authors argue that the studies are deeply rooted in the country's peculiar history of slavery and segregation, thus providing little evidence for a potential erosion of Canadian welfare state as a result of a growing ethnic diversity that new immigrants bring into the society.

Secondly, the authors observe the debate even among multiculturalism defendants over the dilemma between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution in the process of their commitment to social justice and equality. In this regard, the author state that this concern, unlike the first one, is not based on empirical studies but entirely speculative and conjectural.

Within this context, the authors conclude their research on the trade-offs as follows:

"There is no evidence here that countries with large immigrant populations have greater difficulty in sustaining and enhancing their historic welfare commitments. But large changes do seem to matter. It is the pace of social change rather than the fact of ethnic diversity per se that stands out here as politically unsettling." (p. 293)

Examining change in social spending as a proportion of GDP and change in the redistributive impact of taxes and transfers between 1980 and 2000 in twenty-one countries, the authors conclude that "the countries with the strongest immigrant multiculturalism policies did better than the other groups, providing a hint that perhaps multiculturalism policies may actually ease possible tensions between heterogeneity and redistribution." (p. 295)

They support this conclusion with a similar study conducted with indigenous peoples and national minorities: there is no evidence a politics of recognition that entails a trade-off with a politics of redistribution. Instead, the authors suggest that it is state management and politics that turns ethnic diversity into a source of erosion of the national welfare state and solidarity and trust among peoples.

The authors delineates three ways in which multiculturalism policies promote solidarity: (1) in contrast to claims made by critiques of multiculturalism, multiculturalism policies can help to combat the stereotypes and stigmatizations that currently erode feelings of solidarity across ethnic and racial lines. (2) the policies should be supplemented with nation-building policies, such as language training programs, citizenship education in the schools, the shared celebration of national heroes and holidays, citizenship ceremonies for immigrants, and so on. (3) What's more, these policies should be sustained with the national adoption of multiculturalism as a national identity. In this regards, the authors write, "Multiculturalism arguably plays this role in Canada. Affirming multiculturalism has become part of what it means to ‘‘be Canadian,’’ and, more specifically, part of what it means to be a ‘‘good Canadian" (p. 301). Thus the authors call attention to multiculturalism as an essential Canadian nationhood.

The authors' nation-centered narrative seems to stem from their perspective on nation solidarity:

"On the one hand, our findings cast doubt on pessimistic claims about the conflict between diversity and solidarity, and this should indirectly lend support to the struggles of noncitizens, making greater space for an open-minded consideration of their claims on their own merits. On the other hand, however, our findings do not cast doubt on the importance of national solidarity, and our own best guess is that those countries that have done well in combining diversity and solidarity have done so by linking immigration and multiculturalism to the promotion of national citizenship." (p. 303-304)

Liberal Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Justice. (2006). In Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka states, "at the heart of citizenship rights are individual liberties" (p. 128).

He regards the nation-state as the privileged locus for political participation, self-government, and solidarity. Looking at the model of citizenship developed within the liberal democratic political system in the West in the past two centuries, Kymlicka points out that this political reordering was nearly universal and embarked on "'national-building' policies aimed at the diffusion of a common national identity, culture, and language throughout the territory of the state" (p. 129)

He argues that, while this model of "liberal nationhood" succeeded in ensuring democracy, individual rights and economic prosperity, it involved injustice against immigrants, indigenous or regional minorities and neighboring nation-states.

Refuting the thought that these injustices are not intrinsic to liberal nationhood, Kymlicka contests that they are inherent risks of the pursuit of liberal nationhood and in fact responsible for many harms executed in the twenties century. In this dilemma, Kymlicka argues two options: (1) taming liberal nationhood approach, by adopting a multicultural concept for immigrants, a multination concept for indigenous and substate minorities to condone autonomy, and geopolitical agreements with neighboring nation-states. or (2) transcending liberal nation by building postnational or cosmopolitan citizenship.

In his response to Benhabib's call for cosmopolital norms instead of liberal nationhood, Kymlicka argues that the two concepts are commensurate. He states:

[O]ne concept of the nature and function of cosmopolitan norms is precisely to pomote (a tamed form of) liberal nationhood, and that this conception is conceptually coherent, politically feasible, and morally progressive. (p. 131)

Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. (2001). New York: Oxford University Press.

For Kymlicka, crucial in the theories and practices of West democracies is to see claims for minority rights as a defensive response to an assault on the basic dignity and respect in the process of state nation-building, instead of 'special status' or 'privilege'. He states that the Western democracies are a complex package of robust forms of nation-building constrained by robust forms of minority rights.

Kymlicka refutes the discourse of minority rights as the old liberalism-vs-communitarianism debate, such that communitarians supported rights of ethnocultural communities whereas liberalism opposed them in the name of individualism. He asserts that debates over minority rights within liberalism are increasingly about fair accommodations of cultural diversity within liberal institutions.

Kymlicka also argues that human rights are insufficient to ensure justice between ethnocultural groups, thus minority rights must supplement human rights.

Chapter 1.
Kymlicka summarizes that the debate over minority rights before 1989 was characterized with theoretical confrontation between liberals and communitarians. Kymlicka explains that liberals prioritize individual freedom to choose the good life, whereas communitarians dispute the concept of autonomous individuals and rather regard individuals as the product of social practices which define the good life. In this stage, minority rights were viewed as the communitarian critique of liberalism, defending communal group rights against liberal individualism.

This dichotomy, however, is an old one, according to Kymlicka. Kymlicka highlights recent debate over minority rights within a liberal perspective. Central to this debate is to distinguish 'good' minority rights to supplement individual rights.
Kymlicka observes the current tendency of nation-building efforts in modern liberal states by creating a societal culture that involves a common language and social institutions, as seen in the United States. Kymlicka questions the impact of nation-building on minority rights and justice.

Observing the recent public recognition that difference-blind rules may cause disadvantages for minority groups, Kymlicka rightly points out that multiculturalism is widely accepted although there remain profound disagreements over specific policies of multiculturalism. Along with this general disposition, he remarks another common argument that recognition of minority rights threatens to erode citizenship. With this respect, Kymlicka argues that recognizing minority rights, on the contrary, would strengthen solidarity by removing barriers that prevent minority from full participation in political institutions.

Chapter 8. The theory and Practice of Immigrant Multiculturalism (152-176)

"The first country to officially adopt such a 'multiculturalism' policy at the national level was Canada in 1971" (p. 154).

For Kymlicka, demands for multiculturalism is a response to the government's nation-building of pressuring immigrants to integrate into common educational, economical and political institutions operating in the national language. In particular about immigrant multiculturalism policy, Kymlicka disputes critiques that multiculturalism continues to ghettoize immigrants and balkanizes society. He emphasizes that the policies are clearly integrationist and promotes institutional integration through education and citizenship practices. He argues:

The idea that multiculturalism is promoting an apartheid-like system of institutional separatism is, I think, wholly misplaced. But is it promoting a kind of mental separatism, encouraging immigrants to dwell on the life they left behind, rather than the opportunities available in their new country? This is a more plausible worry. However institutional integration is likely to generate over time a sense of psychological identification. The fact that common institutions bring together the members of different ethnic groups has important ramifications both personally and politically. At the personal level, it means that people meet (and indeed often fall in love with) members of other ethnic groups, propmoting inter-ethnic friendships and marriages. These relationships are intimately tied up with one's new life here, not with the Old World. (p. 167-168)

[Criticism: his division between new world and old world, new opportunities are not that rosy in the new world, some interpersonal relations do not melt inveterate racism and other hierarchy. In fact, people do not mix as much as he imagines.]

According to Kymlicka, immigrants must engage in common institutions and contribute to democratic citizenship under the institutional multiculturalism policies. He states:

Politically, it[multiculturalism] means that people must learn how to negotiate with the members of other ethnic groups...The inevitable result is that groups must focus on how to contribute to the new life here, rather than simply dwelling on the society left behind. In short, institutional integration makes possible the kind of civic engagement that supports democratic citizenship. (p. 168)

Kymlicka calls his view of multiculturalism 'pluralizing' or 'hybridic', which "does not involve the preservation of distinct cultures (since ethnic identities weaken and incorporate aspects of the larger culture), but nor is it assimilation (since ethnic groups change the larger society as they integrate)" (p. 168-169). He asserts that immigrants common demands for language training assistance, for instance, indicate their intention of integration. Central to his argument appears to be the backlash against immigrant multiculturalism among native-born citizens. He argues:

[T]he logic of multiculturalism involves accepting the principle of state-prescribed integraion, but renegotiation the terms of integration...So immigrants accept the principle of integration into common institutions: they are simply seeking fairer terms of integration. If the state is going to pressure immigrants to integrates into common institutions operating in the national language, then immigrant groups understandably want to ensure that the terns of integration are fair. This demand is not only justified, but long overdue. (p. 169)

Feminism and multiculturalism: foes or companions?

Okin, S. M., Cohen, J., Howard, M., & Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Is multiculturalism bad for women? Princeton University Press Princeton, NJ.

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan M. Okin. 7-24
Liberalism's Sacred Cow. Homi K. Bhabha. 79-84.
A Plea for Difficulty. Martha C. Nussbaum. 105-114.

By questioning, “Is multiculturalism bad for women?” in Boston Review in 1997, Okin (1999) contests that multiculturalism in the name of group rights tends to provide rationales for perpetuating gender inequality in minority cultures. Examining the French accommodation of polygamy in minority groups while prohibiting Magrbin girls from wearing headscarves at school in the 1980s, Okin suggests intrinsic tensions between feminism and multiculturalism that commits to group rights for minority cultures.

She claims that most cultures are patriarchal and many of the cultural minorities calling for group rights are more patriarchal than the ‘surrounding culture’. This assumption of the nature of minority cultures stems partially from a view that regards a culture as a self-defined and well-bounded static entity. As Song rightly points out, Okin overlooks that cultures are interconnected and shaped by interactions between majority and minority cultures. What’s more, her approach to the issue of gender inequality in minority cultures is based on a biased view that Western societies are more liberal with respect to gender equality. This premise is observed in her clause us versus them:

Surely it is not enough, for one to be able to "question one's inherited social roles" and to have the capacity to make choices about the life one wants to lead, that one's culture be protected. At least as important to the development of self-respect and self-esteem is our place within our culture [sic]. And at least as important to our capacity to question our social roles is whether our culture instills in and enforces particular social roles on us [sic]. To the extent that their culture is patriarchal, in both these respects the healthy development of girls is endangered. (p. 22)

Okin supports her idea of the likely contention between multiculturalism and feminism on the two basis: (1) almost legal cases related to women’s rights are grounded in their individual rights were violated by the practices of their cultural groups and (2) As Amy Gutmann pointed out, the majority of challenges of multiculturalism has to do with gender inequality. Okin maintains that this multicultural commitment to cultural diversity/defense can violate individual rights to the equal protection of the laws. On the grounds that gender discrimination in minority cultures tends to remain private, she calls for special care in looking at the inequality issue within the cultures.

Okin’s forceful argument aroused debate among scholars. Bhabha responds to Okin’s argument by stating that Okin falls into monolithic, though gender-differentiated, characterization of minority cultures by focusing on patriarchal cultural defense for certain crimes, thus missing the liberal grounds where multiculturalism and feminism might negotiate. Bhabha insinuates that Okin’s pitfall stems partially from her view to evaluate minority cultures from a perspective of liberal Western culture. Instead, he insists on placing cultural defense or group rights in the context of the current lives of minorities in the Western cultures. In this regards, he states, “[w]hat is considerably more problematic than the inappropriate application of "external" norms is the way in which the norms of Western liberalism become at once the measure and mentor of minority cultures” (p. 83).

In contrast to Okin’s perspective, Bhabha maintains that a Western liberalism interacts with and is inscribed in the exclusionary division of post-colonial practices. Thus he writes, “[a]n awareness of the ambivalent and "unsatisfied" histories of the liberal persuasion allows "us"--postcolonial critics, multiculturalists, or feminists--to join in the unfinished work of creating a more viable, intra-cultural community of rights” (p. 84).

In responding to Okin's argument of sex discrimination in religion, Nussbaum states that it is a difficult task to define the complexity of the relationship between religion and feminism but Okin makes it sound too easy. In this regard, Nussbaum is attentive to civil movements, in particular feminist movement, grounded in religion. She writes:

By treating the original core of the religion as equivalent to certain patriarchal stories, Okin simply bypasses centuries of debate within each of the religions, debate highly pertinent to religion's role in the search for women's equality.(p. 107)

Nussbaum argues further that by ignoring religious struggle for justice, Okin alienates potential allies and makes her own feminist struggle difficult. With regard to state's political intervention to religious practices, Nussbaum hesitates to present a clear view, writing:

It is indeed difficult to say how far the state should accommodate comprehensive religious views that seem at odd with secular liberal political values. But this is my point: it is [sic] difficult, rather than easy. (p. 108)

She agrees with a special protection for minority religions because of their vulnerability in all societies. Questionable to her is how state should intervene. She proposes that we should ask whether a proposed law, banning child marriage or polygamy, for example, really does impose a 'substantial burden' on people's free exercise of their religion. If the answer is no, the law may go forward, she argues. On the basis of her argument, she calls for respect for different lives one choose to lead before delving into the complexity of this issue.