Synopses & Reviews
Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Regarded as the failed experiment of liberal elites, commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies; parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national "ways of life" and universal values. This important new book challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by challenging the existence of a coherent era of "multiculturalism" in the first place. The authors argue that what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a rejection of lived multiculture. In documenting mainstream racism and the anxieties that inform it, Lentin and Titley argue that the crisis is a projection of neoliberal societies' disjunctures. Combining theory with a reading of contemporary events, it examines the transnational, mediated nature of crisis itself, and argues challenging this notion provides activists with a chance to transcend resurgent racism.
About the Author
Gavan Titley
Table of Contents
Preface, by Gary Younge
Introduction and acknowledgments
1: Recited truths: the contours of multicultural crisis
The new certainties
Recited truths
The comforts of crisis
The recited truths of (British) multiculturalism: a rough guide
Species of blowback
The long unsettled settlement
2: Let's talk about your culture: post-race, post-racism
Introduction: 'race is irrelevant, but all is race'
Reflections on Reflections: Can Europe be Racialized with Cultural People in it?
The apparatus of race
No race, no power, new problems
An era of post-racialism
The ascent of culture
The fault-lines of postracialism
3: Free like me: the polyphony of liberal postracialism
From evil to relativism
In the mirror, through the looking glass
Liberal populism, and populist liberalism
Europe's prime multicultural experiment
The new realism
Liberal populism, and populist liberalism
The polyphony of 'identity liberalism'
4: Mediating the crisis: circuits of belief
Mediated minarets
From integration debates to integration events
The diminishing returns of honesty and openness
Genres of event
Something rotten, etc, etc
Recited truths, circuits of belief
Petri-dish cities
Coda: on critics
5: Good and bad diversity: the shape of neoliberal racisms
Introduction: Pragmatic, elastic, ubiquitous
Analysing contamination
Racy: racial neoliberalism and the privatization of race
Privatizing racism
The promise, and problem of diversity
Love diversity, hate racism
Diversity politics, and the politics of diversity
Conclusion: the burka as bad diversity and governmental event
6: On one more condition: the politics of integration today
Introduction
The rise of domopolitics
Integrating the Sexual Nation
Not free enough: sexual repression as a barrier to integration
References and bibliography