- owes a huge amount to a liberal conception of the human subject. Culture is not,
for Taylor, something set apart from human beings, but rather it is through culture
that we acquire the recognition of other people, and so self-respect. Although there
are different theories of multiculturalism they share what may be called a post-
liberal emphasis: that is, they have absorbed liberal conceptions, but at the same
time engage in a critique of them. A consequence is that multiculturalism as an
academic debatecannot be understood as a return to early liberal debates about
religious toleration, debates rooted in a quite different conception of human nature.
It is striking that, with the exception of Rawls’s contribution, religion is not at the
forefront of the theories of multiculturalism discussed in the next section. The
difficulty is that the popular debate– in, for example, the media – does tend to
focus on religion, and especially the relationship of Islam to liberal–democratic
values.
Theories of multiculturalism
In this section we survey four theories of multiculturalism. In thinking through each
of these theories you should ask yourself three questions: (a) How does the theory
conceptualise human identity? That is, to what extent is a person’s communal –
cultural, religious or ethnic – attachments ‘constitutive’ of what that person is, or
what the person values about him- or herself? (b) What are the implications of the
theory for personal freedom? Does the theory imply a greater or lesser freedom
than is the case with ‘traditional’ liberalism? (c) Likewise, what are the implications
of the theory for equality?Multiculturalism as hybridity (Jeremy Waldron)
Waldron takes as his starting point the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s
novel The Satanic Verses. That novel, published in 1988, offended many Muslims,
and resulted in a fatwabeing proclaimed the following year against the author by
the Ayatollah Khomeini. Waldron quotes from an essay in which Rushdie describes
The Satanic Versesas a ‘migrant’s-eye view of the world’. It is, Rushdie says, written
from the experiences of ‘uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis’. He goes on
to say that ‘the Satanic Versescelebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the
transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs’ (Rushdie, cited in Waldron, 1995: 93).
Rushdie argues that ‘mongrelisation’ is the way that ‘newness enters the world’.
The concept of hybridity is at the heart of Waldron’s understanding of
multiculturalism, which, he argues, must be ‘cosmopolitan’. Understood in this way,
multiculturalism represents a challenge to both liberalism and communitarianism.
Against liberalism it implies a less rigid conception of what it means to live an
autonomous life: ‘if there is liberal autonomy in Rushdie’s vision, it is a choice
running rampant, and pluralism internalized from relations betweenindividuals to
the chaotic coexistence of projects, pursuits, ideas, images, and snatches of culture
withinan individual’ (Waldron, 1995: 94).Chapter 15 Multiculturalism 343