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)