The space of multiculturalism

The issues of diversity, difference, and discrimination, the focus of attention among intellectuals for two decades, are now passionately felt and debated by citizens in every country in the world. As we all ask how we can live together, we face a block that is at once practical and theoretical: the way that nations continue to enforce discrimination and separation spatially.

This systematic, sectoral division of the world into discrete spheres of control and management of human populations creates a severe challenge to those committed to creating a truly democratic, equal, diverse but coherent world.

How does the “nation”, its narratives and its ideologies, work to block progress in this direction? And what part, if any, can “multiculturalism” play today in unblocking it?

David Theo Golberg’s article is part of an openDemocracy debate, “Multiculturalism: translating difference”, which also features articles by Paul Gilroy, Neal Ascherson, Alana Lentin, Maruf Khwaja, and Elia Zureik

Two kinds of multiculturalism

At the heart of the mythology of the nation remains a deep–seated if largely silent presumption that nations consist of homogenous, self–contained, and largely self–reproducing population groups. After all, what is a nation if it is not born of the like–spirited and like–bodied?

In this conception, familiarity and familiality run together; replication, cultural as much as biological, is the ground of nation–making. If we make ourselves through others, those others must be largely just like us for us to be who we really are collectively, “nationally”. This might be called the cloning theory of nation–states.

Nationalism of all kinds is predicated on a monocultural understanding of the nation. The logic of replication it depends on makes its response to cultural clash or national crisis one of exhortation to “patriotic” character and conduct. Anatol Lieven traces this process in the context of the post–9/11 United States, and how racial anxieties among descendants of the ““original” white Anglo–Saxon and Scots–Irish populations” in the greater south impact on political trends.

In this context, what might “the multicultural” mean? Two versions are currently on offer. The first is a “descriptive multiculturalism” that at best grudgingly describes the increasing heterogeneity in most post–1945 societies as a result of global political economic changes and (in societies like Britain, France, the Netherlands, even Canada) the rapid migrations following the demise of formal colonial regimes in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia.

The second is a “normative multiculturalism” that insists on cultural diversity and a proliferation (even relativism) of values at the expense of ideas of national cohesion and unified norms. This entails an acknowledgment, occasionally even celebration, of descriptive diversity on the ethno–racial register. It places “ethnic and identity politics”, claims for right and restitution, and cultural sensitivity at the centre of the political agenda.

“The multicultural” has been caught in an oscillation between these two understandings: description and prescription. It has come to represent the contest with the values, long considered settled, of presumed homogeneity. The scope of multiculturalism has thus remained confined by the historical period after the “birth of the nation”, and of the homogeneous kinship and familiality presumed to have arisen from it.

Multiculturalism, in short, is assumed to be what happened to nations once their essential purity was challenged by the influx of racial others. This is the stuff of histories racially conceived. Consider the longstanding requirement, only now eroding, that eligibility for German citizenship be restricted to those with “German blood”; or the purging of those deemed non–white from apartheid South Africa by restricting them to “homelands” or relocating them from urban to segregated residential spaces to maintain the fantasy of “original white” space.

The difference within

The actual historical experiences of two societies, the United States and South Africa, raise especially interesting questions about the founding assumptions of the purity myth and the continuing articulation of the monocultural nation. Their respective historical landscapes, even preceding European settlement, have always been far more heterogeneous than monocultural racial mythology would acknowledge.

The descriptive multicultural of South Africa’s history and heritage is well known, if only recently celebrated: around a dozen linguistic groups, tied to varying kinship legacies, migrations from elsewhere and within, multivalent social and sexual intercourse; indigeneities entangling with migrating African populations stretching back nearly two millennia, and with more recent – more “modern” – migrations from multiple Euro–originating sources, but also from Malaysia, India, and China.

The condensed summary of South African heterogeneity comes close to an accurate characterisation of the United States’s historical experience too. Multicultural diversity marks this history as much within as across groups, including among American Indians before and after European colonisation. Boundaries between the United States and Canada or Mexico were planted only with “modern” state formation. European arrival, itself involving “people flow” from multiple sources and many destinations, involved also massive slave importation from Africa and the Caribbean and – in the wake of abolition – to a significant East Asian presence, especially in the west coast United States.

These regional distinctions suggest, not a patchwork of racially discrete nations, but rather local landscapes of homogeneity and heterogeneity, of mixture and (perceived) purity. Amidst all this flux, purity – kinship or lineage, subspecies or stereotypical, cultural or ethnonational – can’t even get off the ground. A monocultural history of South Africa or the United States would be a fabrication.

The creation of white space

In these circumstances, how could the idea of the nation be made to work for those whose interests lay in defining it? A crucial component here is the use of space.

In South Africa, apartheid inherited from the colonial period the spatial imposition of homogeneity; its rule self–consciously utilised prevailing demographic patterns to exacerbate this, indeed formalising it into a devastating logic of biopolitical and biospatial governmentality.

80% of the landmass of apartheid South Africa was reserved for 20% of the population. Whites insisted on the most arable land, the most beautiful and environmentally safest residential space, forcing all those deemed not white into contained, poorer, distant areas. The creation of the passbook system, and the severe consequences for non–whites caught without them in “white” areas, suggest how important spatial segregation was in upholding the whole superstructure of racial purity and superiority.

A similar spatial logic marks American racial rule. In the 1880s, 90% of whites lived in the urban north, and a similar proportion of blacks lived in the rural south. But by the 1940s most black Americans had moved off the land largely into segregated urban ghettoes. Segregation, which had been regional, became neighborhood–based. Since the 1980s, the result of rapid white suburbanisation is that blacks and Latinos have tended literally to live in different cities from whites. American segregation has become predominantly urban.

Meanwhile, the prison population has spiraled, rising from 200,000 in 1970 to over 2 million in 2003 (a rise of 900%). Blacks, 12% of the national population, make up roughly 50% of America’s prison population, whites less than 25%. A third of black men between the ages of 19 and 39 have a criminal record; a third are HIV–positive. The prison population is overwhelmingly illiterate; the majority of inmates were unemployed and earning less than $10,000 per year at the time of arrest.

There is at present not a single African–American senator in the United States (there have been only four since 1790). The “two nations” analysed by WEB Du Bois remain as much a reality today as a century ago – and this is a spatial reality as much as a political, social or economic one.

At a macro level American urban space is shared; New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles are racially mixed. But at a micro level, segregation – enforced through unequal access to capital – is profound, and far more marked than in equivalent European cities.

The formalism of spatial shaping has given way recently in both South Africa and the US to a less formal replication of monoracial landscapes. These interlace race with class, and operate via the “neutral” modalities of individual preference schemes and privatised choices rather than official policy. In the post–apartheid and post–segregation eras, whites and blacks still tend to inhabit separate spatial worlds. In both societies, the formalism of racial apartheid and segregation has been replaced by the comparable devastations of class apartheids.

In the process, yesterday’s insistence on the assimilation of the subordinate group into the monocultural nation has become today’s assertion of a colour–blind racelessness and of “universal” models of culture. The shift conceals racist continuities, changing modes of exclusion, and moral panics concerning the uncontainability of multiculture. As descriptive multiculturalism proceeds, so does a repressing insistence upon normative national sameness, value homogeneity and exclusive cultural identity.

The potential of cities

In this perspective, the fashionable question about what the limits of multiculturalism might be (often posed today in the context of immigration) both collapses the distinction between descriptive and normative and can be seen to embody a key assumption that the experience of South Africa and the United States belies: the existence of a racially pure past that is now under threat from difference and heterogeneity.

If the distinction is applied, and the assumption refused, a deeper question about multiculturalism comes into view: in a world of difference, to what extent are we open and prepared – really open, really prepared – to live in a world of shared possibilities, transforming modes of meaning–making, challenged ways of expression, contested ways of world–fashioning?

This question is not about a choice between homogeneity and heterogeneity, or between a liberal society tolerant of others and one repressive of difference and distinction. Rather, it is about determining the broad, generalised shared values by which collective life extends itself.

The city is the place, and space the idea, where this question is today posed most acutely. From the end of the 19th century, post–slavery racial arrangements were increasingly embodied in shifting urban demographies. But large, diversifying cities with vibrant cultural and commercial intercourse came also to represent the potential for undermining racial repression and restriction.

Cities where residents intimately live, work and intermingle within relatively restricted spatial areas tend to develop far more progressive political ideas than those where people live in a dispersed fashion, commuting to work in different urban locations, often on suburban trains or in isolated and cocooning automobiles. The experience of rubbing shoulders, the pressing of bodies, being thrown together in unexpected ways with the different, creates its own effect. The politics of such cities may get loud, even disturbing, occasionally violent; but they demand taking notice of others, attending to their condition, refusing to turn away too easily. The space of the multicultural is at once the politics of space.

A bridge to the future

The argument needs a concluding counter–line. The multiculturalism predicated here would forego the need for multicultural insistence, let alone resistance. The multicultural, I am suggesting – normative as much as descriptive – is no more than provisional.

If we take seriously the descriptive realities of heterogeneity, historically and spatially, we would have no need for multicultural insistence. Until then, however, multiculturalism can serve usefully as a bridge to an awareness of the exclusivities propagated in the name of purity (biological, social, political, cultural), and to point us towards more productive possibilities. So: multiculturalism provisionally, until we come to terms with heterogeneities, with impurity, with the nation – then and now, here and there, and all that they entail.