Postcolonial Melancholia

The resurgent imperial power of the United States has made multiculturalism an aspect of the clash of integral and incompatible civilizations, diereby transmitting an additional negative energy into this delicate postcolonial process. Of course, the briefest look around confirms that multicultural society has not actually expired. Rather than lament the end of the various initiatives that have discredited the wholesome dream of multicultural society and reduced it to the dry dogma of a ready-mixed multiculturalism, this chapter offers an unorthodox defense of this twentieth-century Utopia of tolerance, peace, and mutual regard. Today, any open stance toward otherness appears old-fashioned, new-agey, and quaintly ethnocentric. It is more fruitful to interpret the easy refusal of cosmopolitan and humanistic desire as a failure of political imagination. The habitual resort to culture as unbridgeable division needs to be interpreted with care. Race had been essential in the elaboration of nineteenth-century political anatomy.