Abstract
This chapter describes the idea and practice of multiculturalism in the 1970, 1980s and 1990s in Western democracies, as related to “postmodern” pluralism and decentralization. Mukherjee’s stance was that both idea and practice had to be developed further beyond ideologies towards a new “social imaginary” capable of connecting socio-cultural minorities and majorities, and which could be provided by merging literature and painting in particular.
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Notes
- 1.
Bharati Mukherjee, Unpublished Interview, by Judith Hilber, University of California at Berkeley, October 1994, p. 1. Consecutive quotes from this interview will be given parenthetically in the text as UIV and p.
- 2.
Judith Hilber and Roland Benedikter: The Postmodern Mind. A Re-Consideration of John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975) from the Viewpoint of an Interdisciplinary History of Ideas. In: Open Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 2, No. 1/2012 (February): 63–72, http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=17469.
- 3.
Wolfgang Zumdick: Joseph Beuys als Denker. PAN/XXX/ttt: Sozialphilosophie – Kunsttheorie− Anthroposophie, Mayer, Stuttgart und Berlin 2002: 12ff.
- 4.
Bharati Mukherjee: Beyond Multiculturism: Surviving the Nineties. Iowa Humanities Board Lecture, 21 May 1994: 7.
- 5.
Multiculturalism is of course a particularly encompassing and complex field of inquiry, and we cannot render the vast literature on it here appropriately. Rather, in the restricted framework we have, we focus on Mukherjee’s own contributions to it meant to innovate the field by innovating imagination, or more precisely the social imaginary. To think through how a more extended and elaborated analytic framework on the topic of multiculturalism might be developed in inter- and transdisciplinary ways remains a desideratum beyond this aspiration.
- 6.
Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada: Statement by the Prime Minister on Canada Day, July 1, 2017, https://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2017/07/01/statement-prime-minister-canada-day.
- 7.
Ayeshea Perera: Justin Trudeau in India: Is the Canadian PM being cold-shouldered? In: BBC World, 18 February 2018, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43109029.
- 8.
Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada: Statement by the Prime Minister on Canada Day, loc cit.
- 9.
How far the recent, startling wave of suicides of indigenous people in Canada despite many constructive attempts towards inclusion over the past decades may point to an ongoing problem of ethnic and socio-cultural integration, and if so, who is responsible for it, is difficult to say. Cf. Robin Levinson-King: Searching for an indigenous driven approach to suicide prevention. In: BBC U.S. and Canada, 23 March 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39371690.
- 10.
Jeremy Z. Muller: Us and Them. The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism. In: Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008. Cf. our critique in Roland Benedikter: Extremism and Ethnicity—Reloaded. In: Ethnopolitics Papers. Edited by The Specialist Group Ethnopolitics of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom (PSA) published jointly at the Exeter Centre for Ethnopolitical Studies of the University of Exeter and the Centre for the Study of Ethtnote 11 Queen’s University Belfast, Volume 6, No. 42, April 2016, pp. 1–35, https://www.psa.ac.uk/sites/default/files/page-files/EP_No_42.%20Benedikter.pdf and https://www.psa.ac.uk/psa-communities/specialist-groups/ethnopolitics/blog/ethnopolitics-papers-volume-6-2016; and Roland Benedikter: Das Südtirol-Modell in der internationalen politikwissenschaftlichen Diskussion. In: Politika 2010. Jahrbuch der Südtiroler Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaften / Annuario di politica della Società di Scienza Politica dell’Alto Adige / Anuar de politicadla Sozieté de sciënza politica de Südtirol (threelingual: German, Italian, Raetoroman), hrsg. von Prof. Dr. Günther Pallaver, Raetia Verlag, Bozen 2010, S. 443–477.
- 11.
Clifford Geertz: Thick Description. Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture. In: Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York 1973: Basic Books, pp. 3–30, http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/Geertz_Thick_Description.php
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Benedikter, R., Hilber, J. (2018). The Western Global. Lands of Difference—Lands for Building?. In: The Art of Multiculturalism. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89668-7_1
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