Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy
Author(s)
Singh, Nikhil Pal
Abstract
Author sketches 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.
