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Synopsis
Postcolonialism has attracted a large amount of interest in cultural theory, but the adjacent area of multiculturalism has not been scrutinized to quite the same extent. In this innovative new book, Sneja Gunew sets out to interrogate the ways in which the transnational discourse of multiculturalism may be related to the politics of race and indignity, grounding her discussion in a variety of national settings and a variety of literary, autobiographical and theoretical texts. Using examples from marginal sites -- the "settler societies" of Australia and Canada -- to cast light on the globally dominant discourses of the U.S. and the U.K., Gunew analyzes the political ambiguities and the pitfalls involved in a discourse of multiculturalism haunted by the opposing specters of balkanization and assimilation.