Multicultural Conflicts: The ‘Feminist’ State

Abstract

In this book, I have used the concept of multicultural nationalism to describe how a racialized nationalism continues to underpin state practices, even when they take on an explicitly multicultural aspect. I have attempted to move beyond superficially appealing yet theoretically unsustainable distinctions that describe these practices in terms of sincerity or intentionality, trying instead to understand the contradictions of multicultural nationalism as shaped by an underlying crisis in state discourses of race. This orientation has put into question the necessary coherence and transparency of such discourses, and has enabled me to consider the ways in which they may be divided within themselves. If the ‘dilemmatic’ nature of multicultural nationalism indicates ‘a divide in the prevailing ideology’ (Billig et al., 1988: 109), then our critical task becomes one of describing how this ideological divide is manifested in state practices; of accounting for how contradiction plays itself out.