Diversity Literacy and the End(s) of Multiculturalism

Seminar by Handel Kashope Wright

How are we to make meaning of and articulate identity and belonging within the cacophony of discourses that are in play internationally around "diversity?" The term diversity probably needs quotation marks around it these days as it stands in variously for a particular politics (the counter to a politics of difference) as well as the coexistence of various identities (thus synonymous with multiculturality). Western governments have soured on multiculturalism as preferred discourse and policy (though it is hard to recognize as multiculturalism the caricatured scapegoat that has been decried by European conservative leaders from Germany's Angela Merkel to Britain's David Cameron) and have not only joined the chorus declaring the "death of multiculturalism" but moved on in the case of the EU to interculturalism. Canada is well known for having given the world multiculturalism as social policy but less well known for having a more complex policy situation in which Quebec operates under a parallel policy of interculturalism. Canadians outside Quebec are somewhat left behind recent international developments and some are groping toward interculturalism but with some double-edged embarrassment- having come to the interculturalism party late and also feeling some regret for trying to leave behind the discourse they gave the world, namely multiculturalism. But for some theorists and activists this is all passé as the buzz words are expansive, beyond the scope of the nation-state but also individual and group-based globalization (from above and below), transnationalism (from above and below), cosmopolitanism, diaspora. How are identity, identification, and belonging to be addressed in the present moment of a cacophony of discourses and what does it mean to talk (or eschew) diversity talk at the presumed deathbed of multiculturalism?

Reader

Require readings (downloads)

Wright, H. (2011). Summer Institute Session Reader: Diversity Literacy and the End(s) of Multiculturalism.
Stratton, J. & Ang, I. (1994). Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in Australia and the USA. Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 8(2).

Recommended Readings

Bannerji, H. (2000). The dark side of the nation. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
Buruma, I. (2007). Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of tolerance. London: Atlantic Books.
Nava, M. (2007). Visceral cosmopolitanism: Gender, culture and the normalisation of difference.