PREDICTABLY, CONSERVATIVES IN many countries were not enthusiastic about the “seismic shift” manifested in these decolonizing projects. In the United States, the right accused multicultural “identity politics” of causing racial “balkanization” and “ethnic separatism.” In a faux populist attack stage-managed by elite circles in the Republican Party, the right ridiculed these projects as a new politically correct version of the communist menace. Right-wing polemicists mocked what they saw as oversensitive do-gooders stifling free speech in the name of touchy-feely sympathy for minorities. In an analogy that aligned the tumultuous 1960s with the French Revolution and the politically correct 1990s with the Reign of Terror, journalist Richard Bernstein accused multicultural leftists of wanting to install a “dictatorship of virtue.”1 Recycling Cold War rhetoric, conservative figures such as Allan Bloom, William Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, and Lynne Cheney, in tandem with liberals such as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., denounced any identity-based critique of inequality as un-American. Thus, George H. W. Bush in May 1991 publicly denounced the “political extremists … setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.” In a sense, the right was retrofitting its old “class warfare” rhetoric—that is, the notion that to call attention to class inequality was to wage “class warfare”—to the issue of race. To speak of racial inequality, by analogy, was to wage “race warfare,” just as to speak of gender inequality was to wage “gender warfare.”
The virulence of these attacks manifested a fear not only of greater racial, economic, and political equality but also of nonexceptionalist narrativizations of history. Thus, Schlesinger ridiculed “underdog,” “compensatory,” and “there’s-always-a-black-man-at-the-bottom-of-it” approaches to historiography, whose sole function was to provide “social and psychological therapy” and “raise the self-esteem of children from minority groups.”2 But if minorities have indeed been traumatized by their experience in dominant educational institutions, “therapy” is clearly preferable to “trauma.” Why should only the dominant Euro-American group have its narcissism massaged by official histories, while others suffer the body blows of stereotype and marginalization? In any case, the call to decolonize historical pedagogy was not ultimately a question of self-esteem. Nor was it a question of a bland “I’m OK, you’re OK” history or of “telling both sides.” Apart from the fact that historical debates have innumerable “sides,” a polycentric anticolonial history by definition would benefit the dissenting voices that have been excluded from official history. Nor is it a question of randomly “adding” voices but rather of taking on board voices that challenge the dominant, top-down version of history. Nor was it a matter of “lowering standards” but rather of raising them by requiring knowledge of more cultures, more languages, more perspectives.
In a literary corollary, the partisans of multicultural politics were portrayed by the right as wanting to eject all the great writers—the notorious “dead white males”—from the literary canon. For William Phillips, “politically correct” teachers were “denouncing the traditions and values of the West … [and substituting] African and Asian traditions and values.”3 The race-conscious left was depicted as eager to replace the great writers, in a literary/pedagogic coup d’état, with mediocre authors whose only qualification was their gender or their color. Alice Walker was replacing Shakespeare! But the goal was never to eliminate Shakespeare but rather to expand the canon, and even to explore the multiculturality of Shakespeare’s capacious Globe, which embraces not only European culture in all its exuberant diversity but also the ethnic relationality of Moor and Venetian in Othello, of Egyptian and Roman in Antony and Cleopatra, of European and African/indigenous American in The Tempest, and of Jew and gentile in The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, The Tempest’s confrontation between Prospero and Caliban has generated a vast anticolonial posttext. It is this multiculturality that makes it possible to reread The Tempest, as Aimé Césaire, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Jean Franco have done, as anticolonialist or to see The Merchant of Venice as sympathetic to Shylock or to relocate Romeo and Juliet in the barrios of New York (West Side Story) or in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Maré).
But the most frequently reiterated charge was that of “separatism,” as evidenced in the constant recourse to metaphors of “balkanization,” “Lebanonization,” and “tribalism.” For Charles Krauthammer, multicultural identity politics “poses a threat that no outside agent in this post-Soviet world can match—the setting of one ethnic group against another, the fracturing not just of American society but of the American idea.”4 The most extreme accusation was to speak of ethnic cleansing as a logical end product of multiculturalism, as when P. J. O’Rourke defined multiculturalism as “that which is practiced today in the former Yugoslavia.”5 Thus, the right gave the impression that the Serbs, the Bosnians, and the Croatians, fresh from reading Cornel West and bell hooks, were rushing into fratricidal slaughter brandishing the banner of “identity politics.” Arthur Schlesinger was the most vocal proponent of the “disuniting” perspective and, not by coincidence, a vociferous opponent of the “rainbow curriculum” designed for New York schools. Formulations such as Schlesinger’s that portray a “common culture” threatened by ethnic difference come close to blaming the victim by implying that cultural difference itself causes social strife, when in fact it has always been the inequitable distribution of power that generates divisiveness and tension. The critics were generally unable to cite any actual multicultural writers or activists calling for separatism, for the simple reason that the “separatists” did not exist; rather, they were imaginary creatures, ideological ogres invented to frighten the uninformed. In fact, many of the multiculturalists were shaped directly or indirectly by the struggle against segregation. Yet the separatist charge has been repeated so often that it has become part of the received wisdom, even, as we shall see, for some on the left.
The right also portrayed left identity politics, in an oxymoronic characterization, as at once puritanical and hedonistic. One of the right’s public relations coups was to associate the left with negative personal attributes such as self-righteousness, as a diversion from what was really an argument about social change and political power. Thus, the label of “political correctness” was affixed only to those who were calling for more egalitarian relations between races, genders, ethnicities, and sexualities. In a new twist on Cold War imagery, the multicultural left was portrayed as lugubrious, dour, and drab, in short, as neo-Stalinist. In a historical inversion of letters, the CP (Communist Party) became PC (political correctness). Amplifying the preexisting association of communism with austere rigidity, the right portrayed all politicized critique as the neurotic effluvium of an uptight subculture of morbid guilt-tripping.6 At the same time, paradoxically, the right depicted the cultural left as the heirs of the permissive 1960s. An incoherent portrait presented the same people as at once uptight puritans and as self-indulgent do-your-own-thingers. The contradiction arose from the melding of the negative portrayals of two very different historical lefts: (1) the Stalinist Communist Party left of the 1930s through the 1950s and (2) the more ludic “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s.
In any case, the “PC” rubric generated its own ontology, ultimately taking on a life of its own and spreading, due to the reach of U.S. media to other regions such as Europe and Latin America. The various decolonizing projects unleashed fierce polemics not because they were separatist but because they called for a decisive transformation in the ways history would be written, literature would be taught, art would be curated, films programmed, cultural resources distributed, and political representation shaped. They challenged the regnant doxa prevalent in education and the media up until the 1960s. While the left wanted to wrest control of the political from elites, the right wanted to place the political back in elite hands. What was left unsaid by the right was the assumed desirability of the status quo ante. At least by implication, the right was calling for a return to the pre-1960s default position of white male heteronormative hegemony, a time when there were virtually no students of color and relatively few women on campuses, when history texts were blandly noncommittal about slavery and segregation, and when Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, along with women, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, had very little voice. What was for the right an object of nostalgia was for minorities a searing memory of trauma.
If the right was hostile to identity politics, liberals and some on the left were critical as well. Some feminists, such as Susan Moller Okin, called multiculturalism “bad for women.”7 Some liberals lamented the assault on the Western canon. Some Marxists, meanwhile, saw identity politics as “dividing the left” through a cultural detour that distracted from “real” struggles over class and power. Those who would press critical race issues were caught between the “dividing-America” arguments from the right, the “dividing the left” arguments from the left, and the “dividing the feminist movement” from (usually white) liberal feminists. While some leftists rejected multicultural identity politics as mere liberalism, rightists conflated it with Afrocentrism, ethnic separatism, Marxism, and Islamo-fascism. We find a recent illustration of the partial convergence of left and right on these issues in two February 2011 denunciations of “multiculturalism,” one by the conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron, the other by radical leftist Slavoj Žižek. The former asserted in a speech that multiculturalism had failed, that tolerance had led to Islamic radicalism, and that what was needed was a “robust liberalism” and a return to Western values and pride in British identity. For Cameron (and other conservative leaders such as Sarkozy and Merkel), it is multiculturalism—and not discrimination—that creates separate communities; thus, they blame the proponents of a solution to a problem for the problem itself. Žižek, meanwhile, in an interview on Al Jazeera (February 1, 2011) about the democratic movement in Egypt, also denounced the multiculturalists who supposedly believed that “Egypt has a separate culture and does not need democracy.” While Cameron sees liberalism as the answer to radicalism, Žižek has long argued that multiculturalism is not the opposite of neoliberalism but rather its ideal form. Both Cameron and Žižek were speaking up for Western Enlightenment values, although Cameron was channeling Adam Smith, while Žižek was channeling Hegel and Marx.8 In the interview, Žižek mixed valid political critiques—in this case of U.S. and Israeli policies in the Middle East—with a rant against an imaginary bogeyman, that is, multiculturalists rejecting freedom and democracy in the name of culturalist separatism. (We have no idea where Žižek finds “multiculturalists” who claim that “Egypt does not need freedom because it has a separate culture.” There are of course people who say such things; we call them “colonialists,” “racists,” “Orientalists,” and “Samuel Huntington.”)
At this point in history, some of the keywords have become exhausted. “Multiculturalism,” for example, has suffered a fate reminiscent of that suffered earlier by “socialism,” whereby a call to fuse political democracy with economic equality was dismissed by some on the left as too soft and co-optive and denounced by the right as merely another form of “totalitarian communism.” In the next three chapters, we frequently refer to “multiculturalism” and “identity politics” not because they form our ideal rubrics for the variegated critical work already referenced but rather because those keywords came to encapsulate favored targets for right and for some left critics, becoming synecdoches for a whole set of complexly affiliated fields. The deeper race/coloniality issues got lost in superficial polemics. Through much of the 1990s, figures representing antipodal points in the political spectrum heaped opprobrium on something they called “multiculturalism.” Lynne Cheney and Slavoj Žižek, Samuel Huntington and Pierre Bourdieu, Dinesh D’Souza and Tzvetan Todorov, strangely, have all been hostile to multiculturalism. This chapter explores what might lie behind this partial convergence between ideological adversaries.
What is surprising, then, is not the right’s hostility to identity politics but rather that of some on the left. After mapping the general direction of the left arguments, we will address specific interventions by Walter Benn Michaels, Pierre Bourdieu/Loïc Wacquant, and Slavoj Žižek. Some left critics expressed apprehension about what they saw as the supervalorization of culture over political economy. This critique was less about the “multi-” than about the “culture,” seen as an inconsequential distraction from the economy as the determinative instance shaping all other spheres. Yet while political economy is absolutely essential to any substantive left critique, it is also important to articulate culture and economy together, to conceive of them as existing in and through each other. In the post-Fordist era of globalization, culture has become a privileged site for the articulation (and sometimes the disarticulation) of the reproduction of capitalist social relations. For Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, culture gains political efficacy when it enters into contradiction with political or economic logics of exploitation and domination.9 The point is not to look for a utopia of pure resistance outside of capitalism but rather to discern what elements emerge historically in difference with and in relation to capitalism. Here many people have questioned forms of Marxism that exalt class struggle while belittling struggles revolving around other modalities of social inequality. Feminist theory, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, queer theory, coloniality/modernity theory, critical whiteness studies, and indigeneity theory all offer conceptual instruments relevant to multiple, historically sedimented forms of inequality. Rather than replace class struggle, these projects complicate it, seeing multiaxial forms of oppression as engendering similarly multiaxial forms of resistance and struggle, shaping new social actors, new vocabularies, and new strategies.
Another leftist critique claims that multicultural identity politics itself is ethnocentric, custom designed only for a prosperous and liberal Global North that imposes its concepts on a reluctant South. According to this view, “Northern” or “First World” multicultural ideas end up providing a new, apparently progressive, veneer for Western cultural domination. Yet we would argue that multicultural left politics partly emerged from the Global South and from racialized communities in the Global North with links to the Global South, forging a critique relevant to all the settler-colonial states in the Americas and to the Black and Red Atlantic.10 As we shall see in the case of Brazil, most of the Americas configure similar racialized stratifications forged by colonial history, including not only indigenous genocide (true of the Americas), slavery (likewise), and discrimination but also immigration (from Europe and beyond), along with cultural syncretisms of all kinds. Historical dynamics generate differentiated yet in some ways analogous configurations in the various settler states, resulting in social patterns that are not so much identical as eminently comparable and relationalizable. The demographics might vary, yet issues of indigenous sovereignty, multicultural pedagogy, Affirmative Action, and reparations are pertinent to the entire hemisphere. The Global South and the Global North, Center and Periphery, are co-implicated, linked in multifarious but uneven ways. The 2001 Durban Conference on Racism and Xenophobia brought representatives not only from the Black and Red Atlantic world—Africans, indigenous peoples, African Americans, and black Brazilians—but also from the world at large (for example, Dalit from India) to accuse the dominant powers (including some nation-states in the South) of complicity with colonialist racism, making them the object of demands for compensatory measures. These issues, in sum, are not relevant only to the prosperous North.
The notion of a unilateral “Northern” imposition on the South, furthermore, assumes that the South exercises no intellectual agency, when in fact such projects partially come “from there.” North and South are intellectually commingled in a transnational discursive space. Many of the source theories—anticolonialism, dependency theory, the critique of Enlightenment humanism—have been associated as much with the South as with the North. The objection about Northern imposition often has less to do with the work itself than with the institutional location of the production and dissemination of some work that seems to privilege certain national sites (the United States and the United Kingdom), certain languages (especially English), certain Anglo-American institutions, and a largely European and Euro-American corpus of writing and theory. But the North/South divide, while heuristically and politically useful as pointing to deeply entrenched power differentials, is premised on overly stark lines of separation; the lines in fact are much more porous.
Todd Gitlin, in his 1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams, blames the decline of the American left on “identity politics” as expressed by “groups overly concerned with protecting and purifying what they imagine to be their identities.” The left, in Gitlin’s view, abandoned what he sees as the real struggle in favor of a narcissistic quest for a chimerical identity.11 Neglected in his account are the diverse causes of left decline: the right-wing attack on the ’60s legacy, the murderous repression of the Black Panthers, the conservative agitprop of well-funded think tanks, a rigged two-party system, winner-take-all politics, laissez-faire economics, a Constitution favoring conservative rural states, the corporate corruption of Congress, the wedge-issue tactics of the Republican Party, and the ideological vacillations of an ever more corporate-dominated Democratic Party. An analysis that scapegoats multicultural identity-politics for left decline offers a flattened version of a complex historical narrative, forgetting the global and local factors that have undermined the left generally as an overarching progressive project: globally, the end of actually existing socialism, the embourgeoisement of Third World liberation movements, and the weakening of unions and the workers’ movement.
The scapegoating analysis forgets that (1) the left has historically often been fragmented for reasons having little to do with “identity politics”—one need only recall the left’s self-cannibalizing due to the Stalinist/Trotskyist/Marxist/Leninist/Anarchist/Socialist/Spartakist schisms that plagued the left during much of the 20th century; (2) the Old Left versus New Left debate had more to do with ideological vision, generational tensions, and political tactics than with identity politics; (3) the Marxist left has declined in much of the world due to the collapse of actually existing socialism, often in situations where identity politics played little role; (4) anxieties around race, class, gender, and sexuality were present in U.S. left politics long before the advent of “identity politics” (evident, for example, in black intellectual disenchantment with the CP in the 1930s); (5) participation in race-inflected left politics in no way precludes participation in other forms of left politics; and (6) the major exceptions to left decline in the world—Latin America and now the Arab Spring—have often embraced cultural identity and social movements as an integral part of coalitionary politics. If it is true that the multicultural left has been more effective in defending the right to difference than in guaranteeing political-economic equality, that does not mean that the left has not achieved political-economic equality because of the multicultural achievements.
Quite apart from identity politics, divisions based on race, class, and gender have shaped American history from the very beginning. Propertied, slave-holding white men have classically used race to hide class by “conferring” the cultural capital of whiteness on nonpropertied whites. The color line also subtly marked even left organizations, from the Communist Party to labor unions, which privileged whites over working-class people of color despite ideologies of equality. Blaming identity politics for left division is thus a form of sideways scapegoating. Gitlin’s derisive reference to “groups overly concerned with protecting and purifying what they imagine to be their identities” is an especially low blow. It betokens a privileged, pseudo-objective standpoint that deems itself in a position to judge which identities are authentic and which imaginary, as if Gitlin knows the “real” identities of people of color better than people of color themselves do. Social identities are neither a luxury nor imaginary; they are historically shaped and have consequences for who gets jobs, who owns homes, who gets racially profiled, and so forth. Rather than an investment in a phantasmatic affiliation, identities have to do with a differential relation to power as lived in the world, with discrepant experiences of the judicial system, the medical system, the economy, and everyday social interchange. Social identities are not pre-fixed essences; they emerge from a fluid set of diverse experiences, within overlapping circles of belonging. It is these overlapping circles of identity and identification that make possible transcommunal coalitions based on historically shaped affinities. Anxieties about identity are asymmetrical. While the disempowered seek to affirm a precariously established right, the traditionally empowered feel relativized by having to compete with previously unheard voices. What is missed in the dividing-the-left argument is that each “division” can also be an “addition” within a coalitionary space. Disaggregation and rearticulation can go hand in hand.
The debates over identity have featured a complex range of positions, ranging from essentialism to social constructivism. If the right’s attack on “identity politics” was framed in nationalist terms, the left’s critique was framed either in political terms or in philosophical poststructuralist or skeptical postmodernist terms. For many scholars, the goal was therefore to avoid both essentialist and anti-essentialist traps, whence “strategic essentialism” (Spivak).12 That identities are socially constructed does not mean that they do not exist and have real-life consequences. In this vein, the postpositivist “realist” approach advanced by such scholars as Linda Martin Alcoff, Satya P. Mohanty, and Chandra Mohanty offers an alternative conceptualization to the postmodern skeptical view of identities as merely fictional constructs.13 For advocates of this approach, identities are markers of history, social location, and positionality, lenses through which to view the world. Rather than ethno-characterological essences, identities are chronotopic positionings within social space and historical time, the place from which one speaks and experiences the world. The class-based argument against identity politics ignores the difference that race makes and the ways that the refusal of cross-racial coalitions have hurt the left itself. One axis of analysis (class) is applauded, while others (race, gender, sexuality) are derided. Opposition to the “special” claims of racial minorities, as George Lipsitz has suggested, often masks the hidden “identity politics” of the dominant group’s possessive investment in white Europeanness.14 Although a certain kind of salami-slicing identity politics can turn identity into a form of cultural capital in a competitive fight for status, the denunciation of “identity politics” itself can also subtly normativize the dominant identity.
The various left critiques of multicultural identity politics share certain motifs but also touch on distinct notes. A class-over-race hierarchy dominates Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity.15 His argument, in its simplest form, is that “we love race and identity because we don’t love class.”16 Most of the book consists of formulaic permutations of the same basic structural grammar of mutually exclusive paradigms, along the manner of “We love to talk about A (race, diversity) because we refuse to talk about B (class, economics, capitalism).” In a zero-sum approach, each and every invocation of race implies a denial of class. Within a grammar familiar with only two conjunctions—“either/or”—we are exhorted to choose between “a vision of our society as divided into races” or as divided “into economic classes.”17 Sentence after sentence is premised on a rhetoric of stark dichotomy—“We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty”18—or of invidious comparison: “We like the idea of cultural equality better than we like the idea of economic equality.”19
We cannot emphasize enough that we applaud Michaels’s critique of the erasure of class, especially in the United States. Unfortunately, he merely replaces one erasure (of class) with other erasures (of race, culture, identity). Although Michaels’s vaguely socialist politics differ sharply from those of a Dinesh D’Souza, he shares with D’Souza the fantasy that racism was basically outlawed and eliminated in the 1960s. Deploying a tacitly white liberal “we,” Michaels writes that “we like programs such as affirmative action because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve and that solving it requires us to give up our prejudices.”20 The formulation is unfortunate, however, since (1) Affirmative Action today is under constant attack, including by the Supreme Court, (2) even its supporters are not defending it very vigorously (Obama seems to prefer a William Julius Wilson–style class-over-race approach), and (3) Affirmative Action was about concrete legal/practical issues such as hiring minorities and correcting past injustice, not about a mushy and unrealizable “giving up prejudices.”
Michaels’s sunny portrait of an America “in love with diversity,” moreover, ignores many ominous clouds. Although university brochures prominently feature the word “diversity” and proudly display photographs of chromatically diverse students and faculty, that is hardly the same as achieving substantive social equality. There seems to be a race-informed difference of perception here. While Michaels describes campuses as “in love with diversity,” many black, Latino, and Middle Eastern students call American campuses, including even diversity-friendly campuses such as UC Berkeley, “hostile environments.” A 2004 survey at the University of Virginia, for example, found that 40 percent of the black students had been the target of a direct racial slur, while 91 percent had either experienced or witnessed an act of racial discrimination or intolerance.21 Meanwhile, black students are vanishing from U.S. campuses as the race and class divides worsen under the onslaught of the financial crisis, trickle-up economics, high-priced education, and the assault on Affirmative Action.
As evidence of the American “love of diversity,” Michaels cites the absence of “pro-hate rallies.”22 But this sets a terribly low bar. The KKK and the white militias do not call their demonstrations “hate rallies,” but that is what they are. Even Hitler, after all, did not call the Nuremberg rallies “hate rallies,” but one suspects that Jews and Bolsheviks, gays and gypsies got the drift. Building on a long tradition of paranoid, nativist political speech, venomous celebrities such as Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck stage the mediatic equivalents of hate rallies, with TV audiences larger than those of any Nuremberg spectacle. The galling experience of watching TV shows such as Lou Dobbs Tonight and The O’Reilly Factor or of listening to the hate radio of Michael Savage or Rush Limbaugh reveals at the very least a deep ambivalence about “diversity.” And while the election of Obama offered evidence of another America that does indeed love diversity, right-wing voices that do not love diversity have become even more strident since his election. Rather than demonstrate that Americans have become “postracial,” the irrational hostility to Obama has shown just how many Americans still adhere to the “racial contract.” The doubt cast on Obama’s Americanness is allegorically addressed, and received, as an insult to all Americans of color.
Race as an analytical category is crucial because racism structures social advantage. Every economic crisis that afflicts whites—for example, the subprime lending crisis—impacts racialized communities even more dramatically. When white America sneezes, black America gets influenza. The Great Depression, as a bitter black joke has it, was a time when white Americans got to live the way blacks had always been living. The wealth divide, meanwhile, is even larger than the income divide. “For every dollar owned by the average white family in the U.S., the average family of color has less than one dime.”23 For blacks, as Mel King puts it, “white men of means” often coincide with “mean white men.”24 Thus race and class must be seen as interarticulated, since they are so completely “imbricated in the consciousness of working-class Americans,” as David Roediger puts it, “that we do not ‘get’ class if we do not ‘get’ race.” Indeed the refusal to engage the complexities of race can result in the “retreat from class” just as surely as can “a reductive obsession with race as an ahistorical essentialist category.”25 A certain left wants to move “beyond race,” but in fact a retreat from race, as Roediger points out, will not solve the problem of the denial of class and will ultimately “get us closer to addressing neither.”26 Although Michaels thinks “we” are overly “eager” to centralize race, in fact race and class (and gender and sexuality) are at the burning core of American politics. Underscoring the symbiotic interconnection of race and class, Marx saw chattel slavery as the pedestal on which wage slavery was based. Du Bois spoke of “the wages of whiteness.”27 Later, Martin Luther King, Jr., asked, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”28 Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., noted that “the black job ceiling has been the floor of white opportunity.”29 Black Marxism told us that race and class were interarticulated, while black feminism reminded us that race, class, and gender all intersect.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the black liberation movement has been engaged in a complex debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Marxism in terms of explaining and remedying black oppression. Critical race theory, for example, points to the political limitations of both liberalism and Marxism. While liberalism reduces racism to attitudinal bigotry, Marxism reduces racism to an epiphenomenon of class. Although Marxism has provided a powerful theory of the dialectic of social oppression, the historical forces that produced Marxism as a theory, as Charles Mills points out, “have now thrown up other perspectives, other visions, illuminating aspects of the structured darknesses of society that Marx failed to see.”30 Although Michaels claims to shift our attention from individual prejudice to the social system, he sets up a false dichotomy between individual and society when he asserts that even when “we” as individuals “are racist, the society to which we are committed is not.”31 Bypassing all the critical race scholarship on institutional, systemic, and even epistemic racism, this claim of societal innocence is ultimately rooted in a U.S.-American exceptionalist discourse.
An emerging left consensus assumes that (1) race is not a biological reality—human beings share 99.9 percent identical DNA, and all humanity shares a common ancestor in Africa; (2) the issue is not race but racism and racialization; and (3) race as a social construct and racism as a social practice shape the contemporary world by skewing the distribution of power and resources. Rather than move from race to discrimination, it is in some ways more useful to move in the opposite direction, from the discrimination revealed by statistics (e.g., the disproportionate incarceration of black people) to the categories that explain the discrimination, whether having to do with race, color, national origin, religion, accent, or some other visible or audible difference. The very concept of “race,” moreover, has been historically transfigured. Nowadays, Du Bois’s “color line” has been retraced and blurred. Some prominent American blacks such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice can be “deracialized” to join the white side. Islamophobia and the War on Terror, meanwhile, have racialized a religion (Islam) embracing people of many colors, rendering its followers subject to suspicion and profiling.32 Today the color line involves not only what is visible—color—but also less visible social demarcations involving religion, clothing, body language, speech, etiquette, cultural capital, and Europeanness. Yet “race” and “racism” still serve to designate the persistence of strong inequalities linked to race, despite the lack of scientific substance to the notion of race itself.
Michaels mocks the politics that “consists of disapproving of bad things that happened a long time ago.” Here he forgets (1) that such radically reconstructive historiography is aimed at countering a dominant historiography that ignores those “bad things” or even paints them as “good things” and (2) that those “bad things” still shape and help explain the present. Michaels echoes the conservative caricature of identity politics as invested in preserving “the differences between blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whoever.”33 But the issue is not one of preserving difference for difference’s sake—a notion redolent of salvage anthropology rescuing “tribes on the verge of extinction”—but rather of recognizing discrepancies in historical experience. Like French intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut, Michaels belittles accounts of the victimization of racialized communities as a form of narrative envy in relation to Jews, an accusation already mounted against Said’s articulation of a Palestinian counternarrative in the late 1980s. Citing Leslie Marmon Silko’s mention of the sixty million Native Americans eliminated by Europeans, Michaels responds, “They aren’t just engaging in a kind of victimization one-upsmanship. They aren’t trying to replace the Jews; they’re trying to join them.”34 In this account of competition over ethical and narratological capital, it is as if Native Americans, who have been lamenting (and fighting) genocide since 1492, were trying to hitchhike on the prestige of the Holocaust.
The ethnocentric limits of Michaels’s dichotomization of class-versus-race and culture-versus-economy become manifest in his analysis of Latin American activism. “There’s a big difference,” he writes, “between dealing with indigenous peoples who want to protect their culture and socialists who want to nationalize their industry…. When Evo Morales talks about ‘nationalizing industry,’ he is speaking as a socialist; when he talks about fulfilling the dreams ‘of our ancestors,’ he is speaking as an Indian.”35 In his embrace of the socialist Morales as against the Indian Morales, Michaels overlooks not only Morales’s self-characterization as both socialist and Indian (and specifically Aymara) but also the mutual imbrication of culture and political economy in present-day Bolivia. By lauding Morales only as a socialist, Michaels ignores the public perception of Morales as “indio,” as well as the cultural politics that got him elected. The victory of Morales and MAS (Movement for Socialism), confirmed again in the elections of December 2008, forms a historic landmark for a country shaped by the oligarchy’s racism toward the Quechua and Aymara majority. The new constitution recognizes the “multinational” character of the nation. For much of Bolivia’s history, as Morales himself has frequently pointed out, “Indians” were not allowed to share the sidewalks with the criollos. Morales’s enemies, for their part, are defined not only as capitalists but also as Bolivian “whites.” Thus, it was in great part by “speaking as Indians” that the indigenous movement managed to coalesce into a powerful force able to challenge transnational corporations and the Bolivian oligarchy.
Any analysis like Michaels’s that is based on the stigmatization of an abstract “identity” per se is likely to create a number of theoretical problems. First, the stigmatization of identity is usually asymmetrical; it rejects certain identities but not usually the identity of the analyst, which is assumed but silenced. Second, the very abstraction of the term makes it easy to practice guilt by association between the various “identitarians.” Michaels, for example, compares the Aymara in Bolivia to Samuel Huntington, on the basis that both Huntington and the Aymara want to preserve identities. Such a formulation completely overlooks the question of power, rather like equating the politics of David Duke and Cornel West since both want to preserve their (respectively, Aryan and Black) identities. Michaels amalgamates the situations of a well-connected geopolitical strategist (Huntington) speaking a dominant language, with an Aymara people victimized by a five-century siege. Renewing the linguistic spirit of the Conquest, Michaels calls the disappearance of languages such as Aymara a “victimless crime.”36 As anyone knows who has lived situations without having a language available for communication, language is a form of power; to lose one’s language is to be disempowered. It is passing strange to hear someone whose identity and livelihood derive from mastery of a hegemonic language be so cavalier about language, but that is perhaps why Michaels can be so cavalier; he knows his language is not about to disappear.
There is increasing recognition on the left that the social movements in Latin America, from Zapatismo to the indigenous movements in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, are now at the cutting edge of social change. In the wake of indigenous activism and the UN declaration of indigenous rights, Ecuador and Bolivia have begun to inscribe indigenous rights and even the “right of Nature not to be harmed” into their constitutions, and Bolivia now has a “Ministry of Decolonization.” The era of neoliberalism and the weakened nation-state has brought more and more direct confrontations pitting transnational corporations against indigenous groups defending their rights, in a new “contact zone” (Pratt) where land, biodiversity, and intellectual copyright are all at stake.
While classical Marxism is anticapitalist yet ultimately productivist, the Andean movements are often more radically anticapitalist in their assertion that “mother earth” should not be commodified. This culturally instilled refusal of commodification was one force-idea that helped energize the Bolivian movement and enabled it to prevent the corporated privatization of water and “even the rain.” Activists speak of communal forms of politics and of what Arturo Escobar calls “the political activation of relational ontologies.” In Escobar’s account, the activists call for (1) substantive rather than merely formal democracy, (2) “biocentric” sustainable development, and (3) interculturality in polyethnic societies. The goal is to move beyond capitalism, liberalism, statism, monoculturalism, productivism, Puritanism, and the ideology of “growth.”37
For many indigenous people and societies, “culture” implies a norm of egalitarian economic arrangements, ecological balance, and consensus governance. Thus, indigenous culture and economic globalization confront each other in the form of very real battles fought in the name of “biodiversity,” communal “intellectual property rights,” and the noncommodification of nature.38 Culture and economics, in sum, are deeply enmeshed in the Andes, with some ancestral traditions of communal property and collective decision-making combined with a rejection of instrumental/productivist attitudes toward nature. Indigenous resistance thus passes through culture. The Bolivian left won victories against the transnational corporations by mobilizing the cultural memory of the ayllus, or the chronotopic space-time of indigenous sovereignty. They won by not choosing between socialism and culture and instead constructing a socialist culture and a culturally inflected socialism.
Two of the most widely disseminated left attacks on multicultural identity politics took the form of two essays coauthored by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, the first on neoliberalism and what they call “American multiculturalism,” and the second on globalization, race, and Brazil. The essays suit our purposes here because, first, they exhibit the political passions, even in the early 21st century, invested in the “culture wars” and, second, as a French commentary on these issues, they reveal the transnational/translational dimension of the debates. In this chapter, we focus on the first essay, reserving the second for a later chapter.
Hailed in some quarters as a landmark refutation, Bourdieu/Wacquant’s first essay commingles a completely legitimate critique of the mystifying doxa of neoliberal globalization with a misfired attack on multicultural identity politics. To our minds, their very brief commentary forms a remarkable condensation of how not to articulate issues of race, nation, multiculture, and transnational intellectual exchange. Their static and monolithic theoretical model will hopefully serve here as a productive foil for the more dynamic, polycentric, and multidirectional approach that we are proposing. In fact, the arguments in both essays seemed to conflict even with Bourdieu’s method in general, as if his usually subtle argumentation becomes shrill when misinformation and a submerged national agenda inflect the analysis. While hardly major interventions in the “culture war” debates, the two essays achieved high visibility and thus serve as samples of an unproductive approach undergirded by nation-state-based and class-over-race assumptions.
Although some readers might wonder why we bother to refute an ill-informed diatribe by intellectuals with whom we would normally be politically aligned, a response strikes us as important for a number of reasons. First, the strong and contradictory responses to the first essay are a sure sign that something major was at stake. Broadcast by a prestigious name from a powerful platform (Le Monde Diplomatique), widely translated and disseminated, the essay was taken as authoritative by many readers around the world. At the same time, a “critique of the critique” can help us clarify other larger theoretical, methodological, and political problems inherent in their approach, bringing to the surface larger anxieties that go far beyond this specific polemic.
Our goal is not to criticize Bourdieu’s work in general, which has had the salutary effect of repoliticizing the social sciences and even the humanities. We applaud Bourdieu’s critique of neoliberalism and his highlighting of the role of symbolic domination in hiding and reinforcing social inequality. Nor do we have any sympathy for the positivistic American sociology rejected by Bourdieu. As Robert Blauner puts it in Racial Oppression in America, “virtually all the new insights about racism and the experience of the oppressed have been provided by writers whose lives and minds were uncluttered by [American] sociological theory.”39 Furthermore, we are vastly more sympathetic to leftists such as Bourdieu/Wacquant than we are to “pro-American” French intellectuals such as Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Finkielkraut, and Pascal Bruckner. Not only do we favorably cite and deploy Bourdieu’s concepts and those of many Bourdieu-influenced scholars such as François Cusset and Pascale Casanova, but we also support many aspects of his life and work: his early solidarity with the Algerian independence struggle; his critique of colonialism in his collaborations with Abdelmalek Sayad; his dissection, in Reproduction and The Inheritors (with Jean-Claude Passeron), of the structures of privilege in the French educational system; his analysis of the social stratifications of taste in Distinction; and his activism on behalf of marginalized social groups in France (the homeless, the unemployed, striking workers, illegal immigrants, gays and lesbians), as well as his 1995 intervention in support of striking students and workers. Bourdieu’s critique of neoliberal globalization and of the incursion of market values into the intellectual field, as well as his “new internationalist” campaign against the catastrophic effects of neoliberal economic policies, have been indispensible contributions to progressive politics.
Furthermore, we concur with the authors’ critiques of the U.S. social, political, judicial, and prison systems and of U.S. policy abroad. Bourdieu’s concepts of “habitus,” “field,” and “cultural capital,” moreover, can illuminate processes of cultural domination. Bourdieu’s conceptual categories, to put it paradoxically, can be productive even in deconstructing some of Bourdieu’s (and Wacquant’s) own assessments. Indeed, a number of scholars have extended Bourdieu’s concepts by “racing” them through such ideas as “racial capital,” “racial habitus,” and “racial doxa.” Wacquant, for his part, has done valuable work on prisons in the United States and France and has popularized Bourdieu’s work. In sum, our argument is not with their work as a whole but rather with their narrow views of a complex intellectual field.
Although Bourdieu/Wacquant devoted only a few short paragraphs in the first essay to multicultural identity politics, those paragraphs managed to distill a remarkably dense concentration of historical elisions and methodological blind spots. To avoid caricature, we present most of what Bourdieu/Wacquant say about these issues in this essay:
In all the advanced countries, international c.e.o.s and administrators, media intellectuals and high-flying journalists are beginning to speak a strange new language: … “globalization,” “flexibility,” “governance,” “employability,” “underclass” and “exclusion,” “new economy” and “zero tolerance,” “communitarianism,” “multi-culturalism,” and their cousins “postmodernity,” “ethnicity,” “minority,” “identity.” … American “multiculturalism” is not a concept, nor a theory, nor a social or political movement, while pretending to be all those things at the same time. It is a screen-discourse whose intellectual status results from a gigantic effort of national and international allodoxia [the act of confusing one thing with another] which deludes those who are part of it as it deludes those who are not part of it. It is an American discourse, even though it presents itself as universal, in that it expresses the specific contradictions of academics who, cut off from all access to the public sphere and submitted to a strong compartmentalization in their professional milieu, have no other place to invest their political libido than in campus quarrels disguised as conceptual epics.40
Here Bourdieu/Wacquant extrapolate a few valid insights into a broad-brush caricature. The insights have to do, first, with the disastrous impact of capitalist globalization and the dissemination of neoliberal doxa around the world, second with the fact that American exceptionalist discourses do falsely present themselves as universal, and third with the fact that many U.S. academics are indeed cut off from the public sphere—although usually not of their own choosing—and are subjected to careerist pressures and a “strong compartmentalization.” Thus, there is a disconnect between campus radicalism and the steady drift toward the right of the American polity as a whole. In this sense, the American homo academicus shares some of the traits of homo academicus universalis generally, along with some local peculiarities.41
The arguments made by Walter Benn Michaels and those made by Bourdieu/Wacquant are only partially congruent. While they all share class-over-race assumptions, Bourdieu/Wacquant are more concerned with American imperialism and global capitalism. Yet like the Michaels book, the Bourdieu/Wacquant essay is riddled with false dichotomies: academics must either do real politics or do multiculturalism, the oppression of blacks in the United States is either about access or about recognition, and so forth. Although the essay portrays multicultural identity politics as completely detached from the public sphere, the American right’s hostile reaction bespoke precisely the opposite fear: that such projects were having too much impact on the public sphere. Where Bourdieu/Wacquant discern a wall between academe and public sphere, moreover, we see a permeable membrane. Ironically, the U.S. right, especially in the Bush-Cheney era, did not see academic multiculturalism as apolitical but rather as “politicizing the university.” Right-wing foundations such as the John M. Olin Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Scaife Foundation all spent millions of dollars to combat such projects. Lynne Cheney, wife of the former vice president, during her tenure as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities systematically blocked all projects having to do with revisionist history, racism, multiculturalism, imperialism, and genocide. Was it the hallucinatory force of multiculturalism, with “its power to delude those who are part of it and those who are not part of it” that made Lynne Cheney misrecognize as anti-American and subversive what the two sociologists see as neoliberal and pro-American?
Bourdieu/Wacquant conflate a partial insight—the relative isolation of “campus quarrels”—with a false conclusion that these quarrels are inconsequential. Bourdieu-influenced intellectual historian François Cusset offers a more complex account in his French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States:
Despite [its] isolation … the university is a focus of national concern in the United States, and is often the sounding box, or the dramatic relay point, for some of the most pressing questions of American society. To use Gramsci’s distinction, one could even say that, although it is separated from civil society, the university nonetheless maintains a close link with American political society, because of its role as an ideological crossroads and in the formation of elites. Hence the far-reaching echoes, resounding well beyond the bucolic campuses, of the polemics set off there.42
Critical projects in the United States, furthermore, have often focused attention on the socially crucial areas of pedagogy and the teaching of history. The sulfurous mid-1990s debate about “National History Standards,” for example, pitted the advocates of a critical, multivocal “history from below” against the advocates of the American exceptionalist account.43 Since the educational arena, as Bourdieu’s own work demonstrates, is crucial in both reproducing and demystifying dominant ideologies, the teaching of history has immense social significance in forming citizens and shaping debates. The more radical versions of the multicultural project have questioned American myths of innocence. Radical pedagogy, for example, disputes the dominant racist and imperialist narratives. It seems spurious to lament American provinciality and at the same time to oppose the challenges from within to American exceptionalist discourse.
Like Bourdieu/Wacquant, we too would prefer that critical intellectuals enjoy more access to the so-called public sphere, but where does the “public sphere” begin and end? Do the contours of all public spheres necessarily resemble one another? Since the Enlightenment, and more specifically since the Dreyfus affair, French intellectuals have enjoyed a special status. When asked to arrest Sartre in the 1960s, de Gaulle famously objected that “one does not arrest Voltaire.” Figures such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, and later Bourdieu have been regarded in France (and elsewhere) as designated spokespersons for the universal, even when they themselves call for more modest “specific intellectuals.” Bourdieu was widely seen as having occupied the space left empty by Foucault’s death. But whose interests are served by a hierarchical maître à penser model with a single magisterial figure at its apex, even when the scholar in question is politically progressive? Bourdieu/Wacquant measure the efficacity of intellectuals according to a French standard, despite the fact that the French model of the universal intellectual brings with it the problems highlighted by Foucault concerning “speaking for others.” The Bourdieu/Wacquant formulations also risk reproducing a gendered splitting between “hard” masculine public politics and “soft” feminine private culture, when in fact both spheres are intimately linked and reciprocally inflect each other in a complex interchange.
In an unwittingly paradoxical account, Bourdieu/Wacquant describe multiculturalists as powerless domestically yet all-powerful globally. Restricted to “campus quarrels” and thus impotent in national terms, they become omnipotent in international terms due to their shadowy alliance with corporate globalizers. Isolated from the public sphere, multiculturalists yet form part of the overpowering hegemony that cunningly dominates the globe. Like U.S. right-wingers, Bourdieu/Wacquant see multiculturalism as allied with powerful forces. But the U.S. right attributes this power to a cunning communism, while Bourdieu/Wacquant attribute it to a cunning imperialism. For U.S. right-wingers such as Paul Weyrich, multiculturalism has a “death grip” on the body politic, on the Church, the academic community, and the entertainment industry, threatening to control every aspect of our lives.44 (Weyrich made this claim, ironically, in a historical conjuncture in which the right dominated all three branches of government, much of the media, and even parts of the Democratic Party).45 While Bourdieu/Wacquant mock derisory “campus quarrels,” Weyrich sees multiculturalism as a powerful form of “Cultural Marxism” dominated by an “alien ideology … bitterly hostile to Western culture.”46 Both accounts, we would suggest, are partial and even paranoid, although the paranoia springs from opposite political sources.
The paranoid anticommunism of the U.S. right has a long historical pedigree, going back to the Red Scare persecution of anarcho-syndicalist immigrants in the 1920s, the repression of the black-leftist alliance in the 1930s, and the FBI targeting of communist “outside agitators” supposedly stirring up Civil Rights protests in the 1950s and 1960s. In a belated version of the old right’s misrecognition of the Civil Rights Movement as “communist,” Frank Ellis sees “today’s ‘political correctness’” as the direct descendant of communist “brainwashing.” And if “the war of attrition” against multiculturalism fails, he warns ominously, “the insanity of multiculturalism is something white Americans will have to live with.”47 What is missed in the Bourdieu/Wacquant account is the fact that both France and the United States have seen similarly orchestrated assaults on the radical heritage of 1968, whether led by politicians such as George W. Bush and Sarkozy or by intellectuals such as David Horowitz and Alain Finkielkraut. Ellis’s arguments, in this sense, recall the French nouveaux philosophes’ equations of Third Worldism with totalitarianism.
For Bourdieu/Wacquant, “multiculturalism” hides social crisis by depoliticizing a struggle “that is not really ethnic or racial but has to do with access to the instruments of production and reproduction.” This formulation creates a false dichotomy, since race partially determines who has “access to the instruments of production and reproduction.” If the struggle is on one level about access, it is not only about access. Rather than have a fixed preordained status, moreover, class is an arena of negotiation mediated and reshaped through race, gender, and sexuality, which is precisely what necessitates discourses of “relationality” and “intersectionality.” In the Bourdieu/Wacquant analysis, one cannot think race and chew class gum at the same time, while gender and sexuality are not there to “chew” at all. In the United States, for historical reasons, the struggle for justice—the fight for entitlements, the broadening of the left into the various antiwar, green, pro-immigrant, and antiglobalization movements—all invariably pass “through” both race and class. Nor can we separate culture and economy in an age when the two are becoming more and more confounded. Jack Lang’s famous slogan “Economics and culture—the same struggle” is not relevant only to France.
Only a dichotomous form of thinking, in any case, would ask us to choose between analyzing “structures and the mechanisms of domination” and “celebrating the culture of the dominated and their point of view.” It is precisely the structures of domination, after all, that make it necessary to celebrate the culture of the dominated, since one of the mechanisms of domination is to devalue the culture of the dominated while normativizing the culture of the dominant. Only those whose “point of view” is customarily empowered could be so dismissive of the “culture of the dominated” and so scornful about struggles to crack open spaces for the dominated “point of view.” This myopically solipsistic, “objective” view fails to see its own vantage point as interested and affiliated, as merely one perspective among others. For those working on critical race and coloniality, moreover, a “point of view” is not a merely subjective issue of psychology; it is a social/epistemological vantage point within social space and historical time.
Interestingly, Bourdieu himself has offered keen and very personal insights into the social dimension of point of view. In Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Bourdieu explains how he was shaped intellectually by the social hierarchies of his rural milieu of origin, in ways that allowed him to “see” the classed nature of prestige in the Parisian “center.”48 He evokes, in other words, the epistemological advantage facilitated by a subordinated social positionality, in this case one inflected by class and region. Gendered and racialized people, in this sense, potentially exercise a similar epistemological advantage due to a multifocal perspective linked to an intimate acquaintance with the quotidian workings of oppressive systems and the concrete need to “code-switch” to survive. Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana exponent of “border theory,” speaks of “la facultad,” or the coping capacities developed by people confronting various forms of oppression in the neoimperial borderlands.49 Structures of oppression and point of view are thus completely imbricated. For Fanon. the psychoanalysis of the colonized point of view in Black Skin, White Masks was intimately linked to the socio-analysis of the structures of colonial domination in The Wretched of the Earth. Bourdieu/Wacquant thus fail to engage with a major intervention performed by critical race and postcolonial studies: the historicized articulations of subaltern subjectivity.
Bourdieu/Wacquant eloquently denounce the doxa of neoliberalism, rejecting a model of “modernization” and “globalization” that would undo the social welfare state in the name of the “market.” They make a metonymic (allodoxic?) slide, however, from the legitimate critique of neoliberalism into an uninformed critique of multicultural identity politics. They do not separate out specific co-optable forms from more progressive forms; rather, they condemn the entire set of projects en bloc. The authors manage this conflation of globalization and multiculturalism not only by ignoring the kaleidoscopic variety of the actual work but also through a series of abstractly rhetorical links between the efficacy of the market and the recognition of identities. The new planetary doxa, for the two authors, include terms such as “globalization,” “racial minorities,” and “multiculturalism,” which impose on all societies specifically American concerns and viewpoints, “naturalizing” one particular historical experience as a model for humanity in general. An update of Borges’s “Chinese Encyclopedia,” this lexicon of the new vulgate forces into the same discursive sack very contradictory terms, with very distinct genealogies and histories of deployment, presenting them as forming part of a coherent and unified reactionary discourse. “Globalization,” “markets,” and “flexibility” clearly emerge from the ideological world of the “Washington Consensus”; “multiculturalism,” “identity,” and “minority” just as clearly do not emerge from that world.
While Bourdieu/Wacquant see multicultural identity politics as quintessentially American, the U.S. right sees the very same project as anti-American and sometimes, ironically, as too “French.” In this sense, the Bourdieu/Wacquant essay exhibits the pitfalls of nation-state framing. Since the authors see “American multiculturalism” as a politically compromised tool of global capitalism from the outset, they do not use the word “co-optability” or engage even the possibility of a more complex narrative that would see a generally progressive project subsequently “co-opted.” Yet even co-optive multiculturalism was co-opting something, in this case what began as the political/cultural mobilization of racialized communities within the United States in tandem with decolonizing movements in the “Third World.” Only later, in the 1990s, was the multicultural theme (but not the project) appropriated through the merely epidermic diversity of corporate advertising. Transnational corporations have sometimes “multiethnicized” their image to sell products through a skin-deep display of chromatic exoticism, while simultaneously abusing the marginalized laborers (largely women of color) who helped generate their profit margins. But corporations have never invoked “multi-culturalism” as a sociopolitical project, preferring blander terms such as “diversity” and “cultural sensitivity,” terms more easily instrumentalizable for doing business in a global market. Bourdieu/Wacquant do not distinguish between bottom-up movements and discourses and the top-down instrumentalization of those discourses. And if the dangers of nationalism are very real, nationalism can also be encoded in the rejection of multiculturalism as well.
To define multiculturalism as always-already complicitous with corporate neoliberalism places all the burden of left purity on just one project within a broad spectrum of progressive movements. Blaming that project for the collapse of left unity is simplistic. In the United States, the multicultural left projects entered into a world already shaped by the fait accompli of the violent FBI crushing of the radical Black Power, Young Lords, and American Indian movements, in tandem with the harassment of the white radical left. Moreover, the charge of a general depoliticization could easily be extended to academic life in the many countries that have witnessed massive retreats from historical materialism, Third Worldist revolution, and radical politics. This worldwide retreat from radicalism—and here indigenous, Latin American, Middle-Eastern, and alter-globalization activism form luminous exceptions to the rule—has variously been named postmodernism, the eclipse of utopias, and the end of metanarratives. From a neoliberal point of view, it was a return to capitalist normalcy, a state of homeostatic complacency revealed to be factitious with the bursting of the various financial bubbles in 2008. The capitalist euphoria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall gave way to the anxieties about cracks in another wall: Wall Street. Even if the hegemonic United States has been the leading reactionary Western power ever since the dissolution of the European empires, and even if the dominant political debates in the United States are in many ways pitched far to the right of cognate debates in Europe and in Latin America, one cannot attribute a general depoliticization to a single national site or to a single project.
Bourdieu/Wacquant, subtle analysts of their own “national fields,” commit an act of symbolic violence by denying any conceptual or theoretical validity to what they mislabel “American multiculturalism.” For them, multiculturalism is a particular American discourse that “presents itself as universal.” The right-wing polemicists in the United States, paradoxically, usually score multiculturalism for a “cultural relativist” refusal to invoke universal values. And in what sense do multicultural writings claim universality? Here the two sociologists miss the radical situatedness of such work. Surely Bourdieu/Wacquant are not suggesting that revisionist American historians believe that their site-specific critique of exceptionalist U.S.-American historiography can be borrowed wholesale to apply to Poland and Thailand or that critical race theorists’ deconstructive reading of the U.S. Constitution is meant to apply literally to the legal documents of France, Senegal, and China?50 Since radical versions of the multicultural project critiqued the “false universalism” of Enlightenment modernity, it is not clear why the authors would not see that critique as allied with their own.
We can only applaud Bourdieu’s denunciation, in Acts of Resistance, of the “false universalism of the West [and] … the imperialism of the universal.”51 Indeed, many multicultural, feminist, and postcolonial scholars have questioned the “false universalism” of both the American and the French Revolutions, whose liberatory discourse did not prevent them from enslaving blacks or disempowering women. The critique of false universalizations does not go far enough, however, for the question is not one of critiquing only one national form of false universalism but rather of interrogating the very premises by which the West in general has constructed and been constructed by the “universal.” Who gets to speak on behalf of the universal? Who are its caretakers and regulators? Who gets relegated to the merely “particular”? What are the articulations between the particular and the universal, the local and the global? It was colonialism as a global enterprise, after all, that projected onto a world scale the very notion of the “universal.” To detach U.S.-style false universalisms from this broader colonial genealogy is myopic, ethnocentric, and covertly nationalist.
It is questionable, furthermore, whether multiculturalism can be reduced to an “American” discourse. Self-declared “liberal multiculturalist” Canadian scholar Will Kymlicka argues that “the specific models of multiculturalism and minority rights being advanced by IOs [international organizations] … are not drawn primarily from the American experience…. Similarly, international debates about the rights of ‘indigenous peoples’ are not dominated by American models or scholars.”52 At a historical moment when critical scholars have troubled homogeneous conceptions of national belonging, Bourdieu/Wacquant never clarify the meaning of the term “American.” Within their essay, it carries a strong odor of negativity. While the United States richly deserves its unsavory reputation as a criminal violator of human rights and international law, in Bourdieu/Wacquant’s prose, “American” becomes part of a fixed, essentialist mode of dismissal. Resistant scholarship is tainted, as it were, by virtue of its provenance. Even an imperialistic nation, after all, can serve as a scapegoat or a decoy. The scapegoating function does not depend on the innocence of the scapegoat but rather on the phantasmatic uses to which the scapegoat is put.
The meaning of “American,” then, slides from nation-state location to inferences about intellectual substance. Some of the critical work produced in North America—much generated by scholars who are not Americans by birth or ancestry—might better be called “adversary” or “counterhegemonic” scholarship that questions the reigning nationalist doxa embedded in the myth of “America” itself. This scholarship at times questions the very legal/moral foundations of the United States as a settler-colonial state rooted in genocide and slavery. When a revisionist historian such as Francis Jennings dismantles American founding fictions such as the “right of discovery” and “manifest destiny,” his work is deeply demystificatory of American exceptionalism. When Native American critics such as Oren Lyons, John Mohawk, Jack Forbes, Annette Jaimes Guerrero, Ward Churchill, and Andrea Smith deconstruct the shared antiecological and productivist substratum of both capitalist and Marxist philosophies, or when critical race theorists preform between-the-lines critical readings of the U.S. Constitution to expose the class/racial/gender ghosts lurking in the interstices of the law, their discourse is not reducible to a nation-state qualifier.
Bourdieu/Wacquant share with many left critics a basic lack of familiarity with the decolonizing corpus. The bibliography of their later “imperial cunning” essay references only two neoconservative critics of multiculturalism (Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza). One looks in vain for any reference to the many left intellectuals who address race and class, economy and culture.53 In the French context, sociologist Michel Wieviorka speaks of the “rigged” aspect of a certain leftist anti-Americanism: “The U.S. is criticized for its racism, for example, but also for its attempts to combat racism.” Rather than a complex society characterized by competing modes of thinking, the United States is imaged as a monolith that must be kept at a safe distance, lest “France run the danger of losing its identity, its soul, its cultural personality.” Anti-Americanism becomes an ideology, Wieviorka argues, “when it is the premise and not the conclusion of an argument.”54
The Bourdieu/Wacquant argument seems to be founded on an unarticulated syllogism: The United States is imperialist; American discourse is imperialist; multiculturalism is an American discourse; ergo, multiculturalism is imperialist. But a strictly national framing provides only a very blunt instrument for reflecting on transnational intellectual flows. The multicultural project emerged, within a number of nation-states, due to concrete historical conditions, notably the formation and dissolution of colonial empire and the overlays of multiply diasporized cultures existing in relations of subordination and domination within nation-states, all combined with the copresence of academics knowledgeable about those cultures operating in institutional spaces where it became possible to articulate those issues. For complex historical reasons, including the Civil Rights Movement, “minority” activism, changes in immigration laws, the South-North “brain drain” and other migratory cross-currents, and the Thatcherization of the United Kingdom, the U.S. academy has played host to a mélange of diasporic postcolonial intellectuals, becoming a magnet for what George Yúdice calls “centripetal and centrifugal academic desires,” resulting in the “deterritorialization and denationalization of academic debates.”55 Postcolonial theory, for example, partially gained strength in the U.S. academy because a number of diasporic intellectuals moved to the United States, but it would not have succeeded had not ethnic studies, area studies, and Third World studies already created a hospitable space for such theory. At the same time, U.S. geopolitical interventions and neoliberal globalization provoked the movement of political refugees and economic immigrants toward the United States—a process summed up in the postcolonial maxim “We are here, because you were there.” An in some ways racist, imperialist, and often xenophobic nation, paradoxically, became a refuge for antiracist and anti-imperialist thought, much as France in the 1930s—to evoke a partial parallel—was simultaneously the seat of a racist empire and a shelter for anticolonial thought.
In describing multicultural identity politics as symptomatic of three “vices” of “American national thinking”—notably “groupism,” “populism,” and “moralism”—Bourdieu/Wacquant resort to a Volkish vocabulary alien to both Marxism and to French republicanism. A discourse of “national traits” is distinctly unhelpful in the realm of transnational intellectual exchange. Redolent of 19th-century pseudosciences such as phrenology and mesmerism, talk of “national vices” seems incongruous in the writing of leftist social scientists. In line with postnationalist theories of “imagined communities” (Anderson) and “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm), we would question analyses premised on cultural-essentialist systems of explanation.56 Although nation-states have characteristic interests and policies, and peoples might have a dominant cultural style, there is no single national spirit or ethos regulating the “national thought” of any nation, much less the variegated “multinations” of the Black Atlantic. Virtually any nation, furthermore, will have its “groupists,” its “populists,” and its “moralists.” The word “vices” itself, ironically, exemplifies the very moralism being attributed to others.
The label “American” monoculturalizes a complex set of projects by seeing them through a homogenizing grid that stabilizes what the more radical work had tried to destabilize. Who, then, are the real “identitarians”: the very varied participants in a transnational project, or those who reduce that movement, in a kind of repli identitaire, to a kernel of alien nationality? Identitarian thinking, after all, does not operate only in relation to one’s own group; it also operates in relation to the projected identities of other groups. Moreover, Bourdieu/Wacquant overlook the French and Francophone dimensions of this supposedly “American” discourse. When a text written by a non-French scholar bears the traces of French or Francophone discourses, that text, in its écriture at least, becomes hybrid, transnational, in-between. Far from depoliticizing French theory, it could be argued that U.S.-based race/coloniality scholars pushed French theory into a more politically engaged direction by bringing Derridean ideals onto what François Cusset calls “the battleground of identitarian discourses,” thus becoming “champions of subversion.”57
The dismissal of multiculturalism as “not a theory,” finally, is a red herring. Rather than a grand Theory with a capital T, it is one of many umbrella terms sheltering a constellation of critical discourses. Yet on another level, multicultural discourse at its most radical did inherit, and transform, a specific set of theoretical frameworks, to wit, the diverse theories, methods, and perspectives forming part of the “decolonization of knowledge,” including Marxism, feminism, dependency theory, poststructuralism, standpoint theory, the coloniality/modernity project, and so forth. To claim that multiculturalism is not a social movement, similarly, is a genre mistake, since it is not an organized political movement per se but rather a discursive formation potentially allied to a number of social movements as part of a loose coalition for justice and equality. That coalition, moreover, has had real-world effects in changing the demographic makeup of institutions, in diversifying faculty and students in higher education, and in de-Eurocentrizing the canon. Like any complex critical formation, such projects do not deploy a single discourse but rather constitute a heteroglossic arena of competing and sometimes contradictory currents, which cannot be reduced simply to any one national banner. The United States is just one terminal in a transnational network of ideas, not a point of origin or final destination.
Another vigorous voice raised against multicultural identity politics has been that of theorist Slavoj Žižek. Here again, we would distinguish between the op-ed Žižek of political pronouncements, with whom we are usually in agreement, and the Eurocentric Žižek analyzing race and coloniality, with whom we are not. Žižek is a tremendously agile and engaging writer and in many ways a progressive theorist. We applaud not only his provocative film criticism but also his critiques of global capitalism, of right-wing populism, and of nationalistic ideologies. His critiques of liberalism, published in Le Monde Diplomatique, are incisive and on point. His ideas are compelling in part, as his exegete Jodi Dean puts it, because “they open up and enliven what has become fixed and stale.”58 The problem occurs when Žižek pontificates on issues about which he is ill-informed.
In “Multiculturalism, or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” Žižek calls multiculturalism “the ideal ideological form of global capitalism.” Transferring the Marxist critique of the merely formal democracy of interest-group liberalism as a mask for bourgeois domination, Žižek usefully questions the liberal view of the American state as a “simple formal framework for the coexistence of ethnic, religious, or life-style communities.”59 But two slippages operate in Žižek’s writing. One moves from the “United States as a multicultural society” to multiculturalism as a project. Another moves from multiculturality to global capitalism, a conflation that elides those numerous multicultural voices that decry the role of global capitalism as rooted in colonialism and imperialism. Contemporary transnational corporations inherit the unequal structures and tendentious ideologies bequeathed by centuries of colonial/imperial domination. While some liberal forms of multiculturalism might be compatible with certain forms of global capitalism, it is not clear why multiculturalism would be its “ideal ideological form,” given that the neoliberal ideology of market fundamentalism—which hardly references race or multiculturalism at all—was serving quite well, at least until the world economic meltdown, as “the ideal form of global capitalist ideology.”
We of course applaud Žižek’s critique of global capitalism. Matt Taibbi’s description of the Wall Street investment company Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” could easily be extended to global capitalism generally.60 To say that the real struggle is against global capitalism has an immediate appeal. Most of what is wrong with the contemporary world can be traced to global capitalism’s privatization of virtually everything—land, natural resources, public utilities, health care, and even war. There is scarcely any American social problem—militarism, gun control, health care—that does not have corporate greed as its trademark. If we could defeat global capitalism, one might argue, it would seem that we would not even have to worry about trivialities such as race. If the United States were truly socialist, would not race be irrelevant? Perhaps so, but the case of Cuba suggests that even socialist societies still struggle with racism. A perspective more attentive to race, gender, and coloniality, moreover, would offer a fuller account of the genealogy of global capitalism itself as rooted in racialized conquest, slavery, and the oppression of women. The “vampire squid,” in this sense, has been largely white and male and spawned in the Global North, while the “face of humanity” has been largely brown and female and located in the Global South. And while capitalism still reigns, what antidote do we offer against existing racism, discrimination, and Islamophobia? Brandishing “universality” and Saint Paul will simply not do.
At times, Žižek equates multiculturalism with “tolerance” as an apolitical category that leaves power relations untouched. But the concept of “tolerance,” which goes back at least as far as the Jewish ve-ahavata le-re’kha kamokha (Love Your Friend/Neighbor as yourself) or to Jesus’s “cast not the first stone” or to Ahel al-Kitab (People of the Book) in the Islamic world, is in no way central to many multicultural projects. Indeed, the more radical wings of those projects have rejected the paternalism inherent in “tolerance” and, more generally, have criticized psychologistic and moralistic approaches to racism. “Tolerance” is premised on a prior normativity, an assumption of major and minor elements in a society. Even the tolerance within the Abrahamic “religions of the book” marginalizes those who adhere to other nonmonotheistic religions or to nonscriptural religions or to those who prefer no religion at all. Tolerance also encodes class superiority by forgetting that the powerless can also practice “tolerance” without learning it from their “betters.”
Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism mingles the class-over-race rhetoric of Walter Benn Michaels with the multiculturalism-equals-globalization arguments of Bourdieu/Wacquant. His portrayal of multiculturalism as “ideal ideological form” implies that economic neoliberalism has no problem accommodating race, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism and that only a socioeconomic analysis poses a meaningful challenge to global capitalism. It is indeed true that transnational capitalism and its ideological forms inevitably pressure and work over all contemporary political projects. Global capitalism has been highly creative in its capacity to absorb and contain opposition movements and discourses. However, the struggle against neoliberal globalization, like that against colonialism and neocolonialism earlier, inevitably also involves struggles against the racialized and gendered international division of labor, if only because global capitalism especially exploits women of color.
Left critics such as Žižek fail to distinguish between co-optive forms of multiculturalism and more counterhegemonic formations such as the coloniality/modernity project, black radicalism, indigenous activism, transnational feminism, and so forth. Such critics deploy a caricatural version of “multiculturalism” as a metonym for the entire range of race-related anticolonial adversary projects, which are then subsumed under the category of the hegemonic forces evoked by phrases such as “global capital” that give a Marxist veneer to a superficial critique. In his frequent denunciations of multiculturalism, Žižek gathers his examples randomly from a show seen on television, a joke heard in a bar, a comment at a party, ignoring the intellectual labor that went into the projects that he caricatures. Symptomatically, Žižek rarely refers to work performed under the postcolonial banner, where many of the theoretical coordinates are much closer to his own. For Žižek, “multiculturalist” becomes an adjective to be randomly attached to words such as “late capitalism,” “tolerance,” and “postmodernism,” in a discursive conjuncture where the adjective discredits the noun or, conversely, the noun the adjective. The very levity with which Žižek treats such issues signals the lack of a deep engagement.
Žižek deploys colonialism not as a fundamental category of analysis but only as a rhetorical stick to beat multiculturalism with, as in his claim that multiculturalism treats “local cultures in the way the colonizer treated colonized people,” as “natives whose customs should be studied and respected.”61 But it is precisely this colonial paternalism that has been the object of critique in much of the decolonizing corpus, including in its multicultural variant. Žižek’s critique thus involves a series of low blows. In a case of poaching masquerading as critique, Žižek echoes multicultural and critical race arguments, as if they were his own, only to discredit such projects. Indeed, his critique seems persuasive only to the extent that such projects have prepared the ground for its acceptance. In other words, the very field that Žižek rejects has shaped the discursive environment that makes his argument seem compelling.
For Žižek, multiculturalism operates from an invisible vantage point presumed to be universal from which it can appreciate or depreciate other cultures: “The multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.”62 Here again Žižek draws virtually every term and argument from the decolonizing corpus itself. It is as if someone were to borrow Marxist concepts to accuse Marx himself of “commodity fetishism,” without acknowledging Marx as the originator of the concept. The critique of the arrogant yet unmarked Western vantage point has long been a part of the larger race/colonial field. The analysis of normative whiteness as “unmarked,” for example, can be found in the work of Toni Morrison, David Roediger, Vron Ware, Ruth Frankenberg, Caren Kaplan, George Lipsitz, and other scholars. Mary Louise Pratt speaks in Imperial Eyes of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” topos within colonialist travel literature,63 and we have analyzed in Unthinking Eurocentrism the ways that network news sutures spectatorial identification with imperial militarism.64 Indeed, such notions as “writing back,” the “imperial gaze,” and “returning the gaze” are by now taken-for-granted concepts within multicultural and postcolonial critique.65 Nor is such work a cute endorsement of folkloric customs, as Žižek suggests; rather, it deconstructs the binarism that produces “folklore” as an allochronic residue of the past rather than as a form of cultural productivity in the present.
In a strategy of simultaneous externalization and incorporation, Žižek attributes to the multicultural project the very terms and procedures that radical versions of that project have rejected. Žižek’s spatialized social schema positions multiculturalism as instantiating a panoptical vantage point from the observing tower of privilege. The entire project is assumed to come from the heights of power, when in fact multicultural identity politics emerged from very different contexts in different locations, usually in collaboration with minoritized communities. This coalitionary project won for the socially marginalized an institutional “looking space” from which to view the hegemonic social order. Thus, Žižek’s text performs a double legerdemain: it does not acknowledge that the multicultural left has advanced many of the same ideas that he himself is advancing, while it attributes to multiculturalists ideas that they do not claim.
In a rather clumsy class analysis, Žižek assumes throughout that multiculturalism, or what he, like the right, calls “the politically correct,” represents a “narrow elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common people.”66 It is hard to know on what statistical information or sociological analyses he has based this judgment, but he has clearly missed the crisscrossing bottom-up and top-down currents operative in multicultural activism as the product of a coalition of diverse communities of color, and progressive whites. In what sense were intellectual multicultural heroines such as Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa “upper middle class”? Are the working-class black activists in Brazil calling for “multicultural pedagogy” or indigenist anticorporate activists calling for a “multicultural Bolivia” all upper middle class? Only a class-reductionist view, furthermore, would deny that people on the “top” can work together with people at the “bottom” to undermine social/racial hierarchies. Those at the social “bottom,” furthermore, produce theoretical and practical knowledge that feeds into pedagogical projects.
The fact that multicultural identity politics tended to be strong on U.S. campuses did not mean that the movement was “only academic” or, for that matter, “only American.” That Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos now have even a limited voice in the academy was the result of struggles that took place in the streets, neighborhoods, and campuses. Although Žižek paints multiculturalists as elitist, in fact it was the radical movements of the 1960s that made the university less elitist by facilitating the entry of marginalized groups. Žižek’s antielitism here risks aligning itself with the right-wing populism that focuses its hostility not on the corporate-military-political elite but only on the “tenured radicals” of the campus left. The performative act of academics trashing other academics for being academics—as in Woody Allen’s joke that intellectuals, like mafiosi, only kill their own—would suggest a need for a greater measure of critical self-reflexivity. The actual connections between progressives in the universities and resistant communities require a more complex articulation. The parallel struggles to decolonize knowledge production and to transform the demographics of the university cannot be narrated as beginning with conversations only at the high tables of elite universities. Žižek papers over the struggle to reconstitute the university, thus denying intellectual agency to people of color who have formed a quintessential part of a larger coalition.
This same class-over-race prism becomes manifest in Žižek’s casual dismissal elsewhere of black demands for reparations. Gleaning his information not from reparations advocates but rather from the media—in this case from a press report on an August 17, 2002, “Rally for Slave Reparations”—Žižek sarcastically asks “if the working class should get compensation for the surplus value appropriated by capitalists over the course of history.” Here Žižek misses the “nuances” that (1) the white working class was not violently kidnapped from another continent and (2) working-class labor, unlike slave labor, is in principle voluntary and paid! For Marx, a metaphoric “wage slavery” was built on the pedestal of literal chattel slavery. Žižek then moves to a reductio ad absurdum comparison meant to discredit the whole reparations project, wondering if we should not “demand from God himself a payment for botching up the job of creation.”67 Žižek’s tone and argument are reminiscent of the conservatives who lament the “culture of complaint” in the United States or the “cult of repentance” in France.
Behind Žižek’s derisive attitude lies a failure of the historical imagination, an inability even to imagine why oppressed communities might feel the urgency and justice of reparations. While the “true task” is indeed “not to get compensation from those responsible, but to deprive them of the position which makes them responsible,”68 it strikes us that massive transfers of wealth from exploiters to their victims might actually help restructure power relations and thus deprive “those responsible … of the position which makes them responsible.” Here “the best”—the goal of overturning global capitalism—has become the enemy of “the good.” At one point, Žižek claims that he is “not opposed to multiculturalism as such” but only to the idea that “it constitutes the fundamental struggle of today.”69 But this is a straw-man argument, since most multiculturalists make no such claim. We would argue, more cautiously, that anticolonial and radical race critiques form a legitimate and even indispensible part of the larger struggle for equality and justice in a globalized world.
Žižek recycles the diffusionist cliché that European ideas alone inspired the revolt against colonialism. The Congress Party in India, he reminds us, was founded by Indians educated at Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford; their collective endeavor to end English colonialism was therefore in fact “strictly a product of English colonialism.”70 Here we find a demonstration of William David Hart’s point that in Žižek’s writing, the West is “dynamic, historical, revolutionary and universal while the East is not.”71 Behind such denials of the intellectual agency of non-Western people lies all the dead weight of a certain Enlightenment: Hobbes’s view of savages living in a nasty and brutal “state of nature,” Hume’s and Kant’s dismissal of the possibility of black intelligence, Hegel’s view of the primitive world as a décor for the unfolding of the Weltgeist. In this sense, Žižek offers the leftist version of the conservative historiography of a figure like Hugh Trevor-Roper, who in 1965 (!) reduced non-European history to the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque irrelevant corners of the world.” Žižek’s view of decolonization bears a familiar resemblence to Trevor-Roper’s claim that “it is European techniques, European examples, European ideas which have shaken the non-European world out of its past—out of barbarism in Africa, out of a far older, slower, more majestic civilization in Asia; and the history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history. I do not think that we need to make any apology if our study of history is European-centric.”72
While it is true that many anticolonial intellectuals were indeed partially educated in the West and conversant with Western political idioms, they were not “mimic men” (Bhabha) aping metropolitan trends.73 Rather than simply learn about democracy, Third World revolutionaries in the metropole came to discern the hypocrisy of Europe’s democratic claims. Like Caliban, they learned Prospero’s language in order to curse. It is absurd to suggest that the colonized learned their anticolonialism in Europe, if only because anticolonialism was such a weak and dominated current in Europe. The Colonial Exposition of 1931, for example, was seen by some thirty million people; the surrealists were virtually alone in condemning it. Critics such as Žižek speak as if anticolonialists always came into radical consciousness in Europe, when in fact they were often anticolonialist prior to their arrival. The anticolonialists needed the dominant European languages and discourses, as Chinua Achebe puts it, “to transact our business, including the business of overthrowing colonialism itself.”74 In Europe, the Third Worlders came to see the racially defined limits of European humanism. Conversely, the behavior of French abroad sometimes discredited metropolitan ideals. France, as Ho Chi Minh put it, “hosts admirable ideas but, when the French travel, they do not bring those ideas with them.”75 When the French state offered scholarships in order to assimilate colonial intellectuals, their invitation backfired, as African scholars formed anticolonial organizations and journals such as Légitime Défense.
Fanon’s disillusionment, in The Wretched of the Earth, with the false humanism of the European left and his call for a “truly universal humanism” must be seen in this same context. Anticolonialist thinkers did not simply absorb European ideas; they changed those ideas. Thus, Fanon adopts, and criticizes, a whole series of intellectual trends: Sartrean phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Western Marxism. Moreover, a Jarryesque element of “without Poland there would be no Poles” tautology characterizes this familiar argument. It amounts to saying that “without British colonialism there would have been no anticolonialism,” a claim not so different from neocon David Horowitz’s claim that without slavery there would have been no abolitionism. One must admire the retrospective Panglossian optimism that finds a silver lining in every oppressive cloud: colonialism generates anticolonialism, slavery generates abolitionism, and so forth—all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
We are not suggesting that anticolonialists learned nothing from the West but only that the movement of ideas was ambivalent and multidirectional. As we argued earlier, European thinkers themselves partially learned of freedom and egalitarianism from the indigenous Americans or from the writers, such as Montaigne, Diderot, Tom Paine, and Engels and Marx, influenced by native political thought. The indigenous peoples of the Americas, furthermore, resisted European invasion from the very beginning, without the benefit of a European education. Indigenous leaders in the Spanish Americas did not have to study in Salamanca to oppose Spanish conquest, just as natives in North America did not have to study at Oxford or the Sorbonne to oppose the French or the British. The 16th-century Tupinamba leader Cunhambebe, head of the Confederation of the Tamoios in what is now Brazil, similarly, did not learn how to fight the Portuguese in Lisbon. Enslaved Africans did not have to read Hegel on the Master-Slave Dialectic before striking their masters or planning flight. The best “school” for the indigene was the Conquest itself, just as the best school for Ho Chi Minh, Lumumba, and Mongo Beti was the firsthand experience of colonial oppression. Žižek’s diffusionist narrative has liberatory ideas always-already originating in the West, when in fact the sources of egalitarian social philosophies are not exclusively Western, while the West itself has been impacted by non-Western forms of social practice and theory.
Žižek has been explicit about his turn toward what he himself calls “radical Eurocentrism.” His work reelaborates many well-worn Eurocentric leitmotifs: the German romantic and Heideggerian idea of the “Greek breakthrough,” the dismissal of the valorization of indigenous culture as a form of romanticism, and a preference for a paradoxically atheist form of Christianity. Invoking Saint Paul’s claim that within Christianity “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks,” Žižek condemns identity politics as the site of disharmonious differences. Yet Saint Paul’s injunction did not prevent the subordination within Christendom of women to men, of Jews to Christians, and of blacks to whites. Most Christian societies advanced anti-Semitic ideas, whether in the crude Catholic form of the “Christ killer” charge or in the more sublimated form of Old/New Testament Protestant supersessionism. In Žižek’s prose, Saint Paul is canonized alongside secular saints such as Hegel, Marx, and Lacan. (In fact most of Žižek’s saints are either explicitly Christian, like Hegel, or covertly so, as with Lacan’s doctrine of psychic “fall” into the Symbolic.) In The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000), Žižek places Marxism, as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the same side as Christianity against the “neo-pagan” multicultural multitude.76 In reintroducing “pagan” as a put-down, Žižek resurrects the very Christian-versus-pagan dichotomy that was mobilized by Christian Europe to dispossess indigenous and African peoples.
We need not linger on Žižek’s “leftist plea for Eurocentrism” (in Critical Inquiry, 1998), except to point out a fundamental misapprehension that becomes obvious already in the first paragraph: “When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture—to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of protofascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, it is possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy.”77 Apart from the whimsical equation of anti-Eurocentrists with a genocidal Nazi propagandist, the passage displays a twofold confusion. First, the term “Eurocentric” does not refer to Europe as a geographical location, identity, or culture but rather to a hegemonic epistemology that universalizes the West as paradigm. The critique is not directed at the people and cultures originating in Europe but rather at the economic/political/discursive power of Euro-hegemony. Within this perspective, “Europe” is a geographical trope and “turning toward,” hence our coinage “Eurotropism.” In this sense, nothing could be more logical than what Žižek calls “a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy.” It is not even a question of imagining such an appropriation, since that appropriation has been unending, which is why critical race, multicultural, and postcolonial scholars such as ourselves constantly invoke European and Euro-American thinkers and critics. That Žižek thinks it is even a question of whether we can take advantage of the “European political legacy” reveals a fundamental misconstrual of what is at stake.
Although Žižek finds anti-Eurocentrism to be a taken-for-granted concept among “postmodern leftist intellectuals,” publications by writers of color unfold a different story of a frustrating encounter between critical race scholars and their diverse progressive colleagues who react as if all of Western civilization and Marxism with it were being cast overboard. Anti-Eurocentric critique sometimes triggers a kind of rushing-to-defend-the-ramparts syndrome, manifested in such questions as “By attacking Eurocentrism, aren’t you still being Eurocentric?”—a question as fatuous as asking “By attacking fascism, aren’t you being fascistic?” This syndrome is also manifested in the frequent charges of “romanticization,” “idealization,” and “utopianism” as all-purpose put-downs to challenge any claim that democratic or egalitarian ideas might also have emerged from non-European sources. Any positive mention of indigenous societies, for example, instantaneously elicits the “romanticization” charge, usually wielded by those who are utterly clueless about indigenous thinking and its impact on European thought. “Perhaps it is you,” one is tempted to respond, “who romanticizes Europe, modernity, progress, and the Enlightenment.”
Many of the critics of identity politics get hung up on one horn of the Enlightenment antinomy of the “universal” and the “particular,” by choosing to opt only for the universal rather than seeing the mutual imbrication of the two categories. In our view, a philosopher such as Diderot defended a rational universality but also saw that many peoples—he mentions Tahitians, Hottentots, and Indians—were oppressed as groups. For Žižek, true politics is predicated on “universality, in its eminently political dimension,” as opposed to “identifying the specific problems of each group and subgroup, not only homosexuals but African American lesbians, African American lesbian mothers, African American single unemployed lesbian mothers, and so on.”78 But what makes certain struggles particular and others universal? Referring to political movements in the former Yugoslavia, Žižek applauds their appeal to specific demands that at the same time invoked a notion of universality. Yet other activist “specificities,” which happen to be those of people of color, get immediately beaten down with the police truncheon of the universal. An isomorphism operates between the hierarchy of real-world social domination and the hierarchy of the universal/particular asserted in Žižek’s writing. Unemployed black lesbian single mothers, one of the most abused segments of any population, also happen to be the most abused in Žižek’s prose. Their travails simply do not register within Žižek’s view of political/emotional economy—they are the butt of his joke.
In this sense, Žižek incarnates what Adrienne Rich called “white solipsism,” that is, the “tunnel vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant.”79 His blindness resembles that of the Republican U.S. senators who applauded future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s claim that his Italian-immigrant background had a positive impact on his role as an appellate judge but who quickly condemned as racist Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s parallel claim that being Latina would make her a better judge. One expects the mockery of socially induced human pain from the Social Darwinist right but not from a leftist such as Žižek. Indeed, the situation of unemployed black lesbian single mothers can be seen as condensing a series of socioeconomic disadvantages: those of African Americans, those of women, those of the unemployed, of lesbians, and of single mothers lacking the financial security provided by an employed (male) partner. Subjects dwelling on multiple margins, as victims of multiple prejudices—of sexism, racism, and homophobia—one would think, might possess the epistemological advantage of being aware of the oppressive aspects of many borders. Multiple subalternizations in terms of class (as being unemployed), race (as blacks), sexuality (as lesbians), and marital status (as single), one might think, would grant this social category more, rather than less, claim on the universal, once the universal is conceived not as an abstract neo-Platonic ideal but rather as a mottled profusion of intersecting particularities. And it is not merely an issue of superimposed oppressions; it is also a matter of the social creativity of resistant knowledges and code-switching survival strategies.
Žižek revisits the Enlightenment debates by echoing Hegel—for whom Africa lacked the dimension of universality—by accusing multicultural identity politics of exactly the same thing. He advances a more sophisticated version of the accusation advanced by the liberal Schlesinger in Disuniting America. Although Schlesinger and Žižek have almost nothing in common, they do share (1) a failure to acknowledge the decolonizing corpus; (2) a false certainty that multiculturalism, as implied by Žižek’s comic-surrealist enumeration of proliferating social identity differences, is divisive and separatist; and (3) a Eurocentric epistemology that allots universality to a blessed few. For Žižek, the idea that unemployed black lesbian single mothers might make intellectual claims or political demands with a universal dimension is simply ridiculous on its face. Union activists, meanwhile, are something else entirely. But why assume that such women are not also activists in unions or critics of global capitalism? Thus, Žižek reproduces not only the classic Marxist class-over-race paradigm but also the class-over-gender/sexuality paradigm, along with the hierarchies of white over black, heterosexual males over lesbian females, and the West over the non-West.
Žižek echoes the right-wing charge that identity politics calls for “separate” identities, but he adds a leftist touch. “The postmodern identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, and so forth) lifestyles,” he writes, “fits perfectly the depoliticized notion of society,” one “in which every particular group is accounted for and has its specific status (of victimhood) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures.”80 As arbiter of political legitimacy, Žižek depoliticizes movements based on gender and ethnicity by calling them mere “lifestyles” and then blames the movements themselves for depoliticization. Žižek dismisses feminism, multiculturalism, and Affirmative Action as mere diversions from real politics into the dead end of identity, yet all these projects could be seen as an integral part of a progressive left coalitionary politics. Perhaps lurking behind this dismissal are the vestiges of a base/superstructure model, combined with reminiscences of a gendered tropology that favors real, hard politics over soft cultural matters, where a post-Marxist cultural politics does not enter the picture. Nor does Žižek see that gender and sexuality also have an economic dimension in terms of glass ceilings, unequal pay, and tax code discrimination against gay couples. Extrapolating the same dismissive logic to working-class activism, one might just as easily condemn workers for practicing the “politics of the particular” by complaining about their loss of pensions and health benefits.
Žižek productively defines the political struggle proper as “the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized as a legitimate partner.” When those who are excluded protest against the ruling elite, he points out, “the true stakes [are] not only their explicit demands but their very right to be heard and recognized as an equal participant in the debate.”81 Žižek’s formulations echo myriad similar formulations from advocates of the various projects that he so breezily dismisses. His insight that universal claims can be inferentially embedded within concrete local demands, furthermore, can easily be extended to all those groups concerned with social and cultural justice and equity. Alert to the overtones of the universal in some protests, Žižek becomes deaf to the universal in the cries of “unemployed black lesbian single mothers,” relegated to an amusing particularity. Some identities remain locked up in the solitary cells of their specificity, while others “open up” toward the bright skies of the universal. Indirectly relaying the venerable Hegelian binarism of historical and nonhistorical peoples, of European “universal” and non-European “local,” Žižek’s universalizing formulation is paradoxically nonuniversal, in that it refuses to extend its circle of reference.
Žižek frankly privileges class over all other axes of social domination: “I disagree with the postmodern mantra: gender, ethnic struggle, whatever, and then class. Class is not just one of the series.” (The adolescent shrug of “whatever” here downgrades gender and ethnic struggle.) In a move reminiscent of Althusser’s “the economy in the last instance,” Žižek accords the economy a “prototranscendental status.”82 And while political economy is absolutely essential, that does not mean that we can simply “return” to exclusively class-based analyses. An understanding of capitalism, moreover, must pass “through” colonialism, empire, slavery, and race. In an intersectional perspective, all of the axes of stratification work in concert and mutually inflect one another. It is not clear why Angela Davis’s work on class, race, gender, and sexuality, within an overall Marxist and feminist grid, should be any less universal than Žižek’s own work. One could easily argue precisely the opposite, that her multiply intersectional prisms engender a more inclusive universal, one rich in conflictual particularities, a universal in the Shakespearean concrete universal sense, rather than an abstract Racinian universal, cleansed of the vulgar materialities of existence.83
Žižek’s 2009 book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, meanwhile, explores the aftermath of two 21st-century calamities: 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown. We agree with Žižek’s argument, a partial echo of Thomas Frank, that the “culture war is a class war in a displaced mode.”84 For Žižek, populism screams, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m mad as hell and I’ve had enough!” But even here Žižek neglects the key role of racism as an integral part of class war and populist outrage. A clear expression of the right-wing deployment of race to obscure and displace class is found in the right-wing mantra that equates any redistribution of wealth with reparations for blacks. The strategy is to confuse whites, the major victims of trickle-up economics, by nurturing their hostility to blacks, Latinos, and people of color generally. Slogans such as “health reform is reparations on steroids” are designed to catalyze white hostility toward universal health care—or more accurately toward its pathetically inadequate simulacrum—by suggesting that universal health care is actually a favor to blacks. In other words, racial resentment is used to trump class interest in affordable health care. In the context of Europe, Žižek rightly calls attention to the material force of ideology. But his analysis elides the fact that the scapegoating of minorities, an expression of what Appadurai calls the “fear of small numbers,” has been the key to many rightist victories in Europe, in that at least some of the vote was motivated by white petits blancs ressentiment against “aliens” arriving from the Global South.85 (To his credit, Žižek does condemn the European social-democratic left’s endorsement of a “reasonable” racism toward immigrants.)
The new Žižek of First as Tragedy does link a critique of global capitalism to a critique of “postcolonial dependence.” His Eurocentric perspective, however, blocks a materialist conceptualization of colonial history in relation to contemporary globalization. Žižek delineates four major points of antagonism in the present: (1) the threat of an ecological catastrophe, (2) the inappropriate transfer of the notion of private property so as to apply to “intellectual property,” (3) the ethical implications of biogenetics, and (4) the creation of new forms of apartheid. What is missed, however, is that race, colonialism, multiculturality, and indigeneity intersect with all these points of antagonism, because (1) the peoples of the Global South are the major victims of the kinds of environmental catastrophes generated by Union Carbide in India or Chevron in Peru, (2) indigenous people are the primary victims of “intellectual copyright” when transnational corporations patent indigenous knowledge and turn communal biodiversity into a commodity, (3) it is indigenous people who have gone the furthest in rejecting privatization in favor of communal ownership of land and water and so forth, (4) indigenous peoples are in the forefront of the struggle against transnational corporations, and (5) people of color, whether Latinos in the United States, Algerians in France, or Moroccans in Spain, are the primary objects of the new forms of apartheid.
Žižek belatedly discovers the political virtues of indigenous movements in the Global South. The new Žižek acknowledges that the politics of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia “is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle.”86 He hails radical populist Hugo Chávez for following a policy not of “including the excluded” but rather of taking the excluded slum dwellers “as his base and then reorganizing political space and political forms of organization so that the latter will fit” the excluded, thus moving from “bourgeois democracy” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”87 While we do not endorse Žižek’s phraseology as describing either Chávez’s policies or the slum dwellers of Caracas, we do appreciate his invocation of the “commons,” a term increasingly used on the left to evoke shared noncommodified access to nature, open-source collaboration, and practices such as copyleft and creative commons. Defined as “the theory that vests all property in the community and organizes labor for the common benefit of all”88—the idea of “the commons” animates the work of such diverse figures as Peter Linebaugh, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Giuseppe Cocco, Vandana Shiva, Arturo Escobar, David Graeber, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Coming full circle, we would assert a further connection between the commons as conceived by the indigenous cultures of the Red Atlantic (including Evo Morales) and the theory and praxis of the commons within the West itself (going back to the “Charter of the Forest” section of the Magna Carta), all part of a multi-pronged struggle against all forms of “enclosure,” including that of the “intellectual commons.”
While the new Žižek also discovers the Haitian Revolution, that revolution “scans” for him, symptomatically, not thanks to C. R. L. James or Trouillot but rather through Susan Buck-Morss’s essay “Hegel and Haiti,” which calls attention to the Haitian Revolution as the “silent—and for that reason all the more effective—point of reference (or the absent Cause) of Hegel’s dialectic of Master and Slave.”89 In this rather generous recuperation of Hegel’s work—one wonders why Hegel had to keep the reference “silent” and why that would be more “effective” and for whom—the Haitian Slaves’ actually overturning the Masters’ power seems to pale in significance next to the fact that their actions inspired a sly between-the-lines reference in the great philosopher’s work.90 While giving credit to the Haitian revolutionaries, Žižek portrays them as more French than the French, implementing revolutionary ideology better than the French themselves did. This account prolongs Žižek’s earlier portrayal of Third World revolutionaries as conceptual mimic men.91 The unasked question is why it was black Haitians in particular who were able (1) to discern the limits of the mise en pratique of the revolutionary ideologies and (2) to act decisively on that discernment. The intellectual agency, again, remains with Europe. “The West,” Žižek reminds us, “supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past.”92 Yet from another perspective one wonders exactly why we need Hegel, the philosopher who thought that blacks had neither moral sentiments nor intellectual reflexivity, to appreciate Haitian revolutionaries? Were not such revolutionaries implicitly rejecting the racial hierarchies constructed in The Philosophy of History, in which blacks lacked all critical consciousness and were placed, along with the indigenous peoples of the Americas (who gave Haiti its very name), in the bottom ranks of the civilizational hierarchies? Must all revolutions pass through the West?
First as Tragedy also bears telltale traces of the old Žižek as the enemy of “identity politics.” In the paragraph immediately following his praise of Haitian revolutionaries, Žižek endorses Pascal Bruckner’s mockery—which we ourselves mock in the next chapter—of European “self-flagellation” over colonialism and slavery. Žižek then resurrects the old Eurocentric axiom of critical reflexivity as European monopoly: “The true reason some in the Third World hate and reject the West lies not with the colonizing past and its continuing effects but with the self-critical spirit which the West has displayed in renouncing this past, with its implicit calls to others to practice the same self-critical approach.”93 Žižek’s claim here is virtually identical to conservative Allan Bloom’s claim in The Closing of the American Mind that “only in the Western nations, i.e., those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way.”94 This provincial claim of nonprovinciality and this uncritical claim of a unique self-critical capacity substitutes for the right’s “They hate us for our freedom” the Hegelian-Žižekian “They hate us for our reflexivity.”
The contradictory critiques of race/coloniality discourse from left and right bring us back to the domain of the blind men and the elephant. The very same project is described variously as falsely universalist (the Žižek and Bourdieu/Wacquant charge) or as particularist and anti–French republican (as we shall see with Alain Finkielkraut) or as simultaneously dogmatic and relativist (the U.S. right wing’s contradictory charge) or as relativist and patriarchal (a white feminist charge) or as dogmatically revolutionary (the right-wing charge) or as neoliberal (Žižek again) or as divisive of the left (the Todd Gitlin charge) or as divisive of the nation (the Schlesinger charge) or as pro-American (as many French intellectuals assume) or anti-American (the U.S. right-wing charge, echoed by French allies such as Finkielkraut). In the next chapter, we examine how these debates get reinvoiced in the travel back and forth between the French and the American intellectual zones.