![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Lentin sets out to unravel the history of the discourse of culturalism in the post-Second World War period. Culture is now almost universally used to categorize distinct human groups and to refer to the differences between them. As the liberal acceptance of multiculturalism as a recipe for contemporary living affirms, the use of culture as a viable conceptualization of human difference often goes unchallenged in present-day scholarship. Lentin focuses on how the concept of ‘culture’ came to replace the language of ‘race’ in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Looking at the history of the ‘UNESCO tradition’ of anti-racism, she shows how racial categorizations were replaced by cultural distinctions as a means of explaining human difference. Whereas ‘race’ was seen as irrevocably invoking the superiority of some human groups over others, culture was assumed by anti-racist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to imply a positive celebration of difference while allowing for the possibility for progress among groups once considered ‘primitive’. Lentin argues that such a shift, on which the western discourse of anti-racism is grounded, by merely replacing ‘race’ with ‘culture’, fails to expunge the ranking of humanity implied by theories of ‘race’. The essentialization of ‘cultures’ inherent within this cultural relativism is carried through into multicultural approaches to education, policymaking and activism that fail to include the dominant group in their schematization of contemporary social and political relations. Furthermore, the failure of culturalist approaches to counter racism effectively has been attributed to the purported identity politics of ‘minority groups’. Contrary to the notion that culture has come to pervade politics due to a bottom-up call from the marginalized for greater recognition of their cultural ‘authenticity’, Lentin shows how culturalism originated within the anti-racist elite and has resulted in the depoliticization of anti-racism of the racism's actual targets.
Notes
1 See, for instance, David Goodhart, ‘Too diverse?’, Prospect, February 2004.
2 Arun Kundnani, ‘Rally round the flag’, IRR News (online news network), 7 April 2004, available at www.irr.org.uk/2004/april/ak000006.html (viewed 1 August 2005).
3 Cf. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004).
4 Cf. Paul Gilroy, ‘The end of anti-racism’, in James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds), ‘Race’, Culture and Difference (London: Sage 1992).
5 Alana Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press 2004).
6 In my theorization of anti-racism, I used John Rawls's concept of ‘public political culture’ to describe the way in which the various discourses of anti-racism position themselves in relation to the state (Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe). According to Rawls, public political culture is a set of ‘familiar ideas’ that ‘play a fundamental role in society's political thought and how its institutions are interpreted’ (John Rawls, Justice and Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2001), 5–6). I argued that anti-racist principles may be seen as belonging to a wider set of principles contained in the public political culture of western, liberal-democratic nation-states. The extent to which anti-racists adhere to or critique these notions informs us as to their stance on the relationship between ‘race’ and state.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1966); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press 1989).
8 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).
9 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).
10 William Macpherson, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, Cm 4262-I (London: Stationery Office 1999).
11 Martin Barker, ‘Empiricism and racism’, Radical Philosophy, no. 33, Spring 1983, 6–15.
13 Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996), 386.
12 Leo Kuper (ed.), Race, Science and Society (Paris: UNESCO Press and London: George Allen and Unwin 1975).
14 Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso 1991), 37–67.
15 ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’, Current Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 4, 1968, 270–2 (270).
16 Elazar Barkan, ‘Race’, in Theodore R. Porter and Dorothy Ross (eds), Cambridge History of Science. Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003).
17 ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’.
18 ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’.
19 ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’, 270.
20 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO Press 1952).
21 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO Press 1952).
22 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Race et Culture’, in C. Lévi-Strauss, Le Regard eloigné (Paris: Plon 1983).
23 Cf. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle (London and New York: Routledge 1992); Gilroy, ‘The end of anti-racism’.
24 Pierre-André Taguieff, La Force du prejugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte 1989); Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.), Face au racisme, 2 vols (Paris: La Découverte 1991); Verena Stolcke, ‘Talking culture: new boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology, vol. 36, no. 1, 1995, 1–24.
25 Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London: Junction Books 1981), 23–4.
26 Taguieff, La Force du prejugé; Taguieff (ed.), Face au racisme, vol. 1: Les moyens d'agir and vol. 2: Analyses, hypothèses, perspectives; Pierre-André Taguieff, Les Fins de l'antiracisme (Paris: Michalon 1995).
28 Quoted in Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe, 185.
27 Pierre-André Taguieff, La Nouvelle Judéophobie (Paris: Milles et une nuits 2002).
29 Taylor, Multiculturalism.
30 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press 1963); Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press 1967).
31 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 108.
32 Fanon, Black Skins, White Mask, 132.
33 David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York and London: Routledge 1997), 81.
34 Barnor Hesse, ‘“It's your world”: discrepant M/multiculturalisms’, in Phil Cohen (ed.), New Ethnicities, Old Racisms (London : Zed Books 1999).
35 Quoted in Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe, 289.
36 Kundnani, ‘Rally round the flag’.