Multicultural Horizons
Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:19th Mar '08
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£47.99(9780415396073)
The intensity of feeling that multiculturalism invariably ignites is considered in this timely analysis of how the ‘New Britain’ of the twenty-first century is variously re-imagined as multicultural. Introducing the concept of ‘multicultural intimacies’, Anne-Marie Fortier offers a new form of critical engagement with the cultural politics of multiculturalism, one that attends to ideals of mixing, loving thy neighbour and feelings for the nation.
In the first study of its kind, Fortier considers the anxieties, desires, and issues that form representations of ‘multicultural Britain’ available in the British public domain. She investigates:
- the significance of gender, sex, generations and kinship, as well as race and ethnicity, in debates about cultural difference
- the consolidation of religion as a marker of absolute difference
- ‘moral racism’, the criteria for good citizenship and the limits of civility.
This book presents a unique analysis of multiculturalism that draws on insights from critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis.
Multicultural Horizons reveals that cultural and racial differences are inescapably caught up in the signification of surfaces: whether these are attached to media visualities or to the prescriptive and judgmental gazes of institutions or neighbours. Fortier's contribution is to show how these inscriptions are embedded in and animated by actual bodies whose singularity is obliterated by being repeatedly called upon to prove their allegiances on the very grounds of their differences in an obsessive and dehumanising cycle.
Sneja Gunew
University of British Columbia, Canada
More systematically than any other work before it, this book puts emotions and the affective body at the centre of inter-cultural relations. This not only yields a sharper and more nuanced understanding of those relations, it also opens up a far richer 'horizon', as the author puts it, for thinking the future. As such this book must be read by all those interested in multiculturalism whether as academics, as activists, public servants or community workers.
Ghassan Hage
University of Melbourne, Australia
'...an ambitious and innovative agenda...'
'Multicultural Horizons is a slim book that packs in a lot of ideas.'-Karim Murji, The Open University, in Cultural Sociology
ISBN: 9780415396080
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 540g
150 pages