Can We Ever Truly Engage the Other?
Can We Ever Truly Engage the Other?

Summary/Abstract: The institutionalization of multiculturalism in the United States is a bureaucratic structure purporting to foster minority rights. An outgrowth of the movement in the 1980s on American campuses to revamp the canon, multiculturalism claims to open the canon up to subalterns, exiles, and others. Its call to reinvision the world from a decolonizing and antiracist perspective has triggered reactions on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, multiculturalism was seen as an attack on Euro-American culture. On the Left, it represented not an assault on Euro-Americans, but on Eurocentrism, the discourse that “embeds, takes for granted and normalizes ... the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism and imperialism” (Shohat and Stam 2003: 7). One of multiculturalism’s underlying assumptions was that […]

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