Unsettled states

In his recently published cross-cultural critique of modernity, the Canadian scholar Fuyuki Kurasawa argues that – despite more than two decades of sustained academic and public intellectual attention to the acceleration and intensification of ‘cultural pluralism in a globalised age’ – contemporary social theory as understood and practiced in the west continues to lag behind the ‘reality of cultural pluralism’ in both western and non-western contexts. Kurasawa’s diagnosis of this ‘impasse’ is guided by his sense that the challenges posed to the project of re-orienting social theory derive not so much from the de-centring impulse of postmodernism as the re-centring (and re-animating) imperatives of cross-culturally grounded and engaged theoretical analyses. Kurasawa’s own solution is to (re)turn to what he terms the ‘ethnological imagination’ that he discerns in the preoccupation with ‘cross-cultural matters’ of social theorists including Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Rousseau, Foucault and LéviStrauss. His counter-discursive reading of the ‘ethnological imagination’ across these six thinkers offers, for Kurasawa, an antidote to the ways in which modern western social theory has been historically constrained by, on the one hand, its political antecedents in the foundational moments of Empire and, on the other, its structural allegiances with the modern nation-state, with a concomitant emphasis on understanding ‘society’ and ‘culture’ as defined by ‘discrete, self-contained, homogenous’ territories and borders. Kurasawa’s call to contemporary western social theory – and theorists – to reinvent themselves cross-culturally is in effect a call to reinvent the west itself in ways that both expand and unsettle its borders (cultural, theoretical, epistemological, political) in not only transbut also intra‘national’ contexts. While the unsettling of cross-national and cross-cultural borders of many kinds and at many levels has long been part of the praxis of postcolonial thinking proceeding from diverse locales, moments and dispensations, Kurasawa’s take on the ‘ethnological imagination’ strikes for us a particular chord in relation to an issue focused on ‘Unsettled states’. This is in large part because of its relevance to the urgent question of how those of us in contemporary settler states, particularly those of the Australia-Pacific region, might fashion strategies for ‘entering and leaving modernity’ with an eye on post-settler formations of identity, citizenship, country and sovereignty. The emphasis on how to exit with grace, justice and humility a formation that shows terminal signs of collapsing under the weight of its own exclusions, illogics and undecidabilities is particularly pressing at a time when western geopolitical powers are intensifying, rather than loosening, their efforts to salvage certainty, predictability and centrality in a rapidly re-configuring global landscape. Nowhere is this more evident than in countries where competing claims to sovereignty and the meanings of ‘nation’ continue to be haunted by colonial legacies of dominating and disavowing Indigenous and other non-European societies and cultures. Yet nation-states such as Australia are increasingly Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 235–241, 2005