Problematizing Multiculturalism and the "Common Culture.".

At the 1992 MLA Convention, the keynote event of the Presidential Forum addressed the theme of "Multiculturalism. The Task of Literary Representation in the Twenty-First Century." The dominant tenor and majoritarian consensus of humanists on the "culture wars" over canon revision and curricular diversification can be gauged from the speech by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who argues for a pluralist philosophy (Isaiah Berlin is invoked as its chief prophet) where "identities are always in dialogue," monads somehow linked by a hidden telephone switchboard. After a token acknowledgment of "leftist" critiques of late-capitalist reformism, Gates settles for a jazzy style of compromise in which individual subjects "are, like everything else, sites of contest and negotiation, self-fashioning and refashioning" ("Culture Wars" 11). Sara Suleri of Yale University concurs, endorsing this refurbished liberalism as a view that captures "an enlightened dynamic that is the soul of America" (17). I comment on Gates's pluralist legitimation later. Meanwhile, in The Chronicle of Higher Education(1) and journals like Academe, multiculturalism is often celebrated as manna or talisman reconciling the competing claims of an assimilationist "common culture," a slippery American self in a continual process of construction, and the others occupying margins, ruptures, lacunae. Alice Kessler-Harris, director of women's studies at Rutgers University, is at pains to reassure neoconservative critics like Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and Diane Ravitch that "far from undermining the search for unity, identity, and purpose, the multicultural enterprise has the potential to strengthen it" (B7). Skeptics like William Chace, president of Wesleyan University, while conceding that multiculturalism harbors salutary impulses for change, contends that it will not provide "the basic tools of all genuine education: analysis, retention of materials, clear exposition, and intellectual seriousness." For him, "the real pedagogical mission is to bring into association the apparently dissimilar, to reveal the commonality of all forms of discourse and taxonomy, all systems of mental discrimination" (23)--a Platonic drive for the all-encompassing integral One. At best, multiculturalism might represent a wish fulfillment for a freewheeling social order founded on the principle of unity in multiplicity, E pluribus unum. Policy conferences, seminars and workshops in teachers's conventions, publishers's marketing sessions, and curricula of schools now all target "cultural diversity," "multicultural literacy," etc., where once suppressed voices are allowed the chance to be heard. Without invoking the postmodern slogan of heterogeneity and differance, one Asian American artist even claims that "cultural pluralism is the genuine American way" and that "multiculturalism" means "cultural affirmative action" (O'Brien and Little 126). What's the background to this epochal trend and its attendant controversies? Despite claims to the contrary, the national imperative to include courses on cultural diversity (non-Western material) into the general education core curriculum in many colleges and universities springs from a conjunctural crisis. Multiculturalism may be conceived as the latest reincarnation of the assimilationist drive to pacify unruly subaltern groups. It can be interpreted as a strategic response to the deterioration of the social fabric of the country in the decade after the early seventies when progressive policies and institutional reforms gained by the civil rights struggles of the sixties were severely eroded or wiped out. One stark index of the crisis is the 1987 statistic of the gap between the poor and the rich, the largest in forty years: the poorest fifth of all families received only 4.6 percent of the national family income while the top fifth's share was 43.7 percent (Parent) 81; Mantsios). More Americans are ill-housed, poorly educated, and without health care than ever before. …