Post-Colonial Ruptures and Democratic Possibilities: Multiculturalism as Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Giroux, Henry. (1992). Cultural Critique, 21 (Spring), 5-39.

From the debate about education and democracy in the 1980s, Giroux deduces that culture is a terrain of political and ideological struggle. In particular, conservative attack on multiculturalism drew impact on social movement as well as education in general. Giroux states:

“What is being valorized in the dominant language of the conservative offensive is an undemocratic approach to social authority and a politically regressive moce to reconstruct American life within the script of Eurocentrism, racism, and patriarchy. Similarly, within these discourses, the call to define civilization as synonymous with selected aspects of Western tradition is being matched by a fervent attempt to reduce pedagogy to the old transmission model of teaching and learning.” (p. 5-6)

Giroux analyzes further the implications of conservative cultural offensive: in a larger social context, the conservative backlash was an attempt to dismantle/reverse the gains made by subordinate groups, such as gays and lesbians, women, racial minorities, etc. around a politics of identity. In higher education and public schooling, the attack was manifested against political correctness and multiculturalism. In the conservative view, multiculturalism provokes separatism, threatens western civilization and politicizes universities. D’Souza writes:

“Liberal arts students…are very likely to be exposed to an attempted brainwashing that deprecates Western learning and exalts a neo Marxist ideology promoted in the name of multiculturalism” (Illiberal Education, p. 35)

Conservative diatribes against multiculturalism were side by side with the attack on political correctness, which undermined multiculturalism. Giroux writes:

“The political correctness movement seizes upon the issue of free expression in order to undermine social criticism that opposes cultural chauvinism, racism, and gender discrimination. Political correctness is euphemism used by liberals and neoconservatives to disparage radical professors, cultural workers, and students from displaying ongoing pedagogical interests in fashioning a democratic culture within and outside of higher education. Accordingly, the rallying cry against political correctness is an act of bad faith designed to legitimate and enforce the pedagogical imperative to learn a selected cultural tradition and common culture invented in a monolithic and totalizing discourse.” (p. 10)

Giroux observes that common culture is a counter concept used by conservatives in attacking multiculturalism. Central to this concept is that the common culture of the United States is made up of diverse racial and ethnic groups. Giroux criticizes that this concept depoliticizes and dehistoricizes the idea of culture. In other words, common culture does not acknowledge inequality of power among social groups, the systematic maintenance of power domination, Eurocentric curriculum, social movement and struggle, etc. About this liberal notion of multiculturalism, Giroux critiques:

“Liberal notions of multiculturalism affirm difference within a politics of consensus that erases culture as a terrain of struggle constituted within asymmetrical relations of power, knowledge, and experience.” (p. 14)

Giroux states that, although liberal multiculturalism challenges totalizing and racist views of conservatives, it fails to question ways in which political and cultural authority is maintained in the academic canon and does not call attention to critical issues in forms of ‘domestic colonialism’ expressed in racial violence, unemployment among black and other minorities, etc.
Thus, Giroux observes that both liberal and conservative approaches to multiculturalism refuse to identify culture in the context of white supremacy and unequal power relations. He writes:

[C]onservative and liberal discourses that conflate multiculturalism with the imperatives of a ‘common culture’ generally suppress any attempts to call into question the norm of whiteness as a ethnic category that secures its dominance by appearing to be invisible. In this case, emancipatory interests in liberal approaches to multicultural education are generally limited to the call for either assimilation or the demand to reverse negative images of blacks and other ethnic groups as they appear in various forms of texts and images. (p. 15)

In sum, liberal multiculturalism fails to address post-colonial critiques. Calling urgent attention to constructing difference, Giroux seconds post-colonial approaches to democratic society. He explains post-colonial criticism as follows:

“Post-colonial discourses have pushed against the boundaries of the liberal and conservative debate on multiculturalism by asserting that politics and struggle are central to the discourse of difference.” (p. 18)

Post-colonialism emphasizes a politics of difference in contrast to a legacy of colonialism that veils specific forms of privilege. [Find a quote or two-Gayatri Spivak, Tiffin, Ngugi, Issac Julien, Kobena Mercer] About the central argument of post-colonialism, Giroux writes:
“At stake here is deconstructing forms of privilege that benefit males, whiteness, and property as well as those conditions that have disabled others to speak in places where those who are privileged by virtue of the legacy of colonial power assume authority and the conditions for human agency.” (p. 19)

“[Post-colonial discourses] provide a theoretical foundation for deconstructing the master narratives of white supremacist logic and redrawing the boundaries between the construction of experience and power…post-colonial criticism has illuminated how Eurocentric-American discourses of identity suppresses difference, heterogeneity, and multiplicity in their efforts to maintain racist hegemonic relations of power.”(p. 21)

Thus, Giroux sums that “Post-Colonial discourses represents a space in which to retheorize, locate, and address the possibilities for a new politics based on the construction of new identities, zones of cultural difference, and forms of ethical address.”(p. 22)

Within this context, Giroux calls for a border pedagogy to address power inscription in body, culture, space, history, land and psyche as a means of achieving anti-racist teaching.