The Public Life Of Australian Multiculturalism

This book argues that in a globalising world in which nation-states have to manage population flows and intensifying cultural diversity within their borders, multicultural policy and approaches have never been more important. The author takes an extended case study approach, examining Australia’s experiments with pragmatic forms of multiculturalism and multicultural policy since the early 1970s up to the present. The Public Life of Australian Multiculturalism challenges some larger assumptions about multiculturalism – either that it undermines national identity or that it is, and should strive to be, a post-national approach to identity issues. Instead, it argues that framing multiculturalism by inclusive national identity has been the key to multiculturalism’s continuity and general success in Australia. The book also directly challenges the claim that we have entered a post-multicultural world, making a case instead for the continuing relevance of pragmatic approaches to multiculturalism. Students and scholars researching in sociology, politics, migration, multiculturalism, ethnic and racial studies, nationalism, and identity studies will find this study of interest.

Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant concerns in political theory over the last decade. To date, this inquiry has been mostly informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and increasingly, the European contexts. This volume explores for the first time how the Australian experience both relates and contributes to political thought on multiculturalism. Focusing on whether a multicultural regime undermines political integration, social solidarity, and national identity, the authors draw on the Australian case to critically examine the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies. These essays by distinguished Australian scholars variously treat the relation between liberalism and diversity, democracy and diversity, culture and rights, and evaluate whether Australia's thirty-year experiment in liberal multiculturalism should be viewed as a successful model.

This book is a documentary history and critique of the concept and policy of multiculturalism in Australia for the period 1970 to 1986. The book brings together for the first time a range of documents charting the emergence and implementation of multiculturalism across the main institutions of Australian society and culture. The institutions covered in the book are education, health and welfare, the Church, law, media, the realm of work and, as a summarising chapter, human rights and race and community relations in Australian society in the 1980s. The wide range of documents and the critical thematic introduction and contexting make the book ideal as a teaching text for students in many disciplines and an invaluable research source.

The Cunning of Recognition is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture. Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy. The Cunning of Recognition argues that the inequity of liberal forms of multiculturalism arises not from its weak ethical commitment to difference but from its strongest vision of a new national cohesion. In the end, Australia is revealed as an exemplary site for studying the social effects of the liberal multicultural imaginary: much earlier than the United States and in response to very different geopolitical conditions, Australian nationalism renounced the ideal of a unitary European tradition and embraced cultural and social diversity. While addressing larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, political theory, cultural studies, and liberal theory, The Cunning of Recognition demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete—and not just philosophical—effects on the world.

The book analyses the career of the concept of multiculturalism and the policies which have been associated with that concept in Australia. The central task is the development of a theoretical framework which has the power to generate understandings of such critical issues as the role of the state in shaping multiculturalism as an instrument of social control.