Undoing Multiculturalism

Undoing Multiculturalism
Author: Carmen Martínez Novo
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822988089

President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens’ Revolution and other “Pink Tide” governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era.

Multiculturalism without Culture

Multiculturalism without Culture
Author: Anne Phillips
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2009-02-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400827736

Public opinion in recent years has soured on multiculturalism, due in large part to fears of radical Islam. In Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips contends that critics misrepresent culture as the explanation of everything individuals from minority and non-Western groups do. She puts forward a defense of multiculturalism that dispenses with notions of culture, instead placing individuals themselves at its core. Multiculturalism has been blamed for encouraging the oppression of women--forced marriages, female genital cutting, school girls wearing the hijab. Many critics opportunistically deploy gender equality to justify the retreat from multiculturalism, hijacking the equality agenda to perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Phillips informs her argument with the feminist insistence on recognizing women as agents, and defends her position using an unusually broad range of literature, including political theory, philosophy, feminist theory, law, and anthropology. She argues that critics and proponents alike exaggerate the unity, distinctness, and intractability of cultures, thereby encouraging a perception of men and women as dupes constrained by cultural dictates. Opponents of multiculturalism may think the argument against accommodating cultural difference is over and won, but they are wrong. Phillips believes multiculturalism still has an important role to play in achieving greater social equality. In this book, she offers a new way of addressing dilemmas of justice and equality in multiethnic, multicultural societies, intervening at this critical moment when so many Western countries are poised to abandon multiculturalism.

Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region

Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region
Author: Suvi Keskinen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2019-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351347365

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138564275_oachapter1.pdf This book critically engages with dominant ideas of cultural homogeneity in the Nordic countries and contests the notion of homogeneity as a crucial determinant of social cohesion and societal security. Showing how national identities in the Nordic region have developed historically around notions of cultural and racial homogeneity, it exposes the varied histories of migration and the longstanding presence of ethnic minorities and indigenous people in the region that are ignored in dominant narratives. With attention to the implications of notions of homogeneity for the everyday lives of migrants and racialised minorities in the region, as well as the increasing securitisation of those perceived not to be part of the homogenous nation, this volume provides detailed analyses of how welfare state policies, media, and authorities seek to manage and govern cultural, religious, and racial differences. With studies of national minorities, indigenous people and migrants in the analysis of homogeneity and difference, it sheds light on the agency of minorities and the intertwining of securitisation policies with notions of culture, race, and religion in the government of difference. As such it will appeal to scholars and students in social sciences and humanities with interests in race and ethnicity, migration, postcolonialism, Nordic studies, multiculturalism, citizenship, and belonging.

Undoing the Knots

Undoing the Knots
Author: Maureen O'Connell
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807016659

A personal and historical examination of white Catholic anti-Blackness in the US told through 5 generations of one family, and a call for meaningful racial healing and justice within Catholicism Excavating her Catholic family’s entanglements with race and racism from the time they immigrated to America to the present, Maureen O’Connell traces, by implication, how the larger Catholic population became white and why, despite the tenets of their faith, so many white Catholics have lukewarm commitments to racial justice. O’Connell was raised by devoutly Catholic parents with a clear moral and civic guiding principle: those to whom much is given, much is expected. She became a theologian steeped in social ethics, engaged in critical race theory, and trained in the fundamentals of anti-racism. And still she found herself failing to see how her well-meaning actions affected the Black members of her congregations. It seemed that whenever she tried to undo the knots of racism, she only ended up getting more tangled in them. Undoing the Knots weaves together narrative history, theology, and critical race theory to begin undoing these knots: to move away from doing good and giving back and toward dismantling the white Catholic identity and the economic and social structures it has erected and maintained.

The Crises of Multiculturalism

The Crises of Multiculturalism
Author: Alana Lentin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2011-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1848135823

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 projection of neoliberal anxieties onto the social realities of lived multiculture. Nested in an established post-racial consensus, new forms of racism draw powerfully on liberalism and questions of 'values', and unsettle received ideas about racism and the 'far right' in Europe. In combining theory with a reading of recent controversies concerning headscarves, cartoons, minarets and burkas, Lentin and Titley trace a transnational crisis that travels and is made to travel, and where rejecting multiculturalism is central to laundering increasingly acceptable forms of racism.

Unthinking Eurocentrism

Unthinking Eurocentrism
Author: Ella Shohat
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2013-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136121889

This excellent book corrects eurocentric criticism from media studies in the past by examining Hollywood movie genres such as the western and the musical from a multicultural perspective.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism
Author: Andrew Shorten
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509551778

The idea that diverse cultural and ethnic groups should co-exist within a country and that assimilation should not be forced upon immigrant groups – “multiculturalism” – was orthodoxy 20 years ago. Today it’s coming under pressure. In this introduction to the political theory of multiculturalism, Andrew Shorten surveys the leading theories of multiculturalism, the critiques that have been levelled against the idea, and the debates surrounding cohesion, integration and diversity. He then goes on to demonstrate how multicultural political theory can be renewed, arguing that a single, monolithic vision of multiculturalism must be replaced by a multiculturalism made up of different strands, responding to distinctive but interrelated issues, and inspired by real-world policy debates about how political communities should respond to differences of religion, language and nationality. After tracing the influence of earlier multicultural ideas on these debates, Shorten reveals some new and surprising possibilities for mutual learning. Containing an up-to-date overview of multicultural political theory and its various offshoots, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the politics of cultural, religious, linguistic and national diversity.

Undoing the Knots

Undoing the Knots
Author: Maureen O'Connell
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807016756

A personal and historical examination of white Catholic anti-Blackness in the US told through 5 generations of one family, and a call for meaningful racial healing and justice within Catholicism Excavating her Catholic family’s entanglements with race and racism from the time they immigrated to America to the present, Maureen O’Connell traces, by implication, how the larger Catholic population became white and why, despite the tenets of their faith, so many white Catholics have lukewarm commitments to racial justice. O’Connell was raised by devoutly Catholic parents with a clear moral and civic guiding principle: those to whom much is given, much is expected. She became a theologian steeped in social ethics, engaged in critical race theory, and trained in the fundamentals of anti-racism. And still she found herself failing to see how her well-meaning actions affected the Black members of her congregations. It seemed that whenever she tried to undo the knots of racism, she only ended up getting more tangled in them. Undoing the Knots weaves together narrative history, theology, and critical race theory to begin undoing these knots: to move away from doing good and giving back and toward dismantling the white Catholic identity and the economic and social structures it has erected and maintained.

Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom

Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom
Author: Virginia Lea
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780820497129

At the start of the twenty-first century, government mandates and corporate practices are resulting in growing inequities in the U.S. educational field. Many view this as being driven by whiteness hegemony. Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom is a comprehensive effort to bring together, in one volume, educultural practices and teaching strategies that deconstruct whiteness hegemony, empower individuals to develop critical consciousness, and inspire them to engage in social justice activism. Through music, the visual and performing arts, narrative, and dialogue, educulturalism opens us up to becoming more aware of the oppressive cultural and institutional forces that make up whiteness hegemony. Educulturalism allows us to identify how whiteness hegemony functions to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite, and reproduce inequities and inequalities within education and wider society.