Culture/Wars

Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy

Bibliographic Data

ID2967067
AuthorsNikhil Pal Singh (0009-0003-5312-0823, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume50
Issue3
Pages471-522
Publication date1998-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.1998.0032
OpenAlexW2048510655
LanguageEN
Citations received58
References cited34

Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy Nikhil Pal Singh* (bio) In this essay I will begin to sketch a provisional history for the culture wars in the United States, in order to understand how the problematic we engage today in the name of multiculturalism emerges and gains a functioning intellectual value and role. In general, the current discussion that counterposes multiculturalism and universalism as principal, opposed terms in the culture wars, simplifies a much more unruly set of issues, involving a series of determinations and mediations of both a local and global kind. As a corollary, this discussion is often conducted in a parochial spirit, as if the controversy around multiculturalism is an internal, and wholly recent, U.S. affair. In this oft repeated story, multiculturalism is understood as both a settling of accounts from the 1960s and a continuation of politics by other means within the state-educational apparatuses and the culture industries. The fulcrum of this discussion turns upon a narrow debate about whether or not it is legitimate to pursue knowledge-projects based upon the goal of "preserving separate minority group cultures" within the United States. 1 The larger stake in this debate is the proper historical interpretation of American pluralism. In this, a more or less cold war understanding of pluralism as the privileged theory for achieving a managed consensus within a diverse, democratic polity, is pitted against post-1960s senses of pluralism as a referent for the harshest, most enduring and intractable divisions within American life, usually those associated with racial and/or cultural difference. Yet, the very instability of the meaning [End Page 471] of a term like pluralism (or multiculturalism) is emblematic of what is most confusing about the culture wars: the way we understand the grounds of the discussion determines much of what we end up speaking for, or against. Is multiculturalism a minority plot to "disunite America"? Is it a corporate project to work through and profit from "diversity"? Is it a hopeful, even global, vision of cultural justice? Is it a defensive retreat into increasingly narrow, local forms of cultural identity? These are all real possibilities. Thus, taking seriously today's frequent injunction that we need to get "beyond multiculturalism," I also want to redefine some of the terms and grounds of the discussion. 2 I suggest that going beyond multiculturalism does not mean once again crossing the teleological threshold in which U.S. intranational differences and divisions are understood as the associated commonalities of some great national abstraction (that is, the state, the founding documents, the ideals of the revolution, and so forth). Instead, if we are even to consider going beyond multiculturalism, we must first assess in a more thoroughgoing manner just what it has actually meant in recent history (and what it might mean in the future) to rely upon the U.S. nation-state as a stable container of social antagonisms, and as the necessary horizon of our hopes for justice. 3 In order to accomplish this task, it will not be helpful to imagine a debate in which universalism is presumed to be a singular, embattled term, any more than to try and adjudicate internal, U.S. squabbles over the status of group differences. Rather, in the essay that follows I try to account for some specific historical conditions and intellectual traditions and dispositions that have shaped the culture wars in their dominant, U.S. form since World War II. I thus propose the following question as a more productive starting point for thinking about multiculturalism and universalism: How are socially consequential forms of intranational and supranational identity constituted in relation to the normative political structures and presumptive universals of Euroamerican modernity: the nation-state, democratic citizenship, and the public sphere? By framing the question in this manner, and by examining several paradigmatic—and socially hegemonic—ways in which it has been answered in the United States since World War II, I hope to demonstrate the impossibility of coming up with properly "multiculturalist" and properly "universalist" prescriptions in the current conjuncture. At the same time, I elucidate some of the alternatives that may have been repressed in the ruling social and intellectual

Democracy · Empire · Epistemology · Multiculturalism · Pluralism (philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · Universalism · Cuban History and Society · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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