In the end, the impression that we come away with is that multiculturalism attempts to
celebrate and accommodate diversity; but at the same time, it does everything to shield
the limitations of imperial and racial history from the criticism they deserve. This is
perhaps done in order to give a sense of belonging to all for the actualization of equality.
The suggestion of the reversal of the order to truly accommodate the formerly excluded
in the economic and imperial scheme of things, which was made horrible through
colonialism and slavery, remains unacceptable even to the most liberal of the liberals.
Again, Bennett and Bhabha bear this view out:
But the unsettling thing about current ‘minority ‘claims to historical being is that history
is underwritten by the need to come to terms with memory and trauma: there can be no
mirage about a ‘level playing-field’ until the soil is dug up and the whole terrain re-built.
This notion of freedom as looking to the past while ‘working through’ the present is
deeply disturbing to consensual ‘centrists’, however liberal, because it makes the
historical present ‘strange’ to itself, estranged from the sources of its authority, harrowed
in its very presence-ing. (1998:45)The sheer superficiality of the claims of multiculturalism as a reparative concept through
which the formerly marginalized in the imperial scheme of colonialism of all kinds can
be brought into the commonwealth of the present disturbs and refracts from any gains it
offers. The unpreparedness to face up to the horrors of the past and the tackling of the
fundamental questions which seek answers as to why the current dislocation of the
formerly colonized peoples goes, to demonstrate the hidden price tag of the gratifications
of multiculturalism. Not least because, the subtlety with which it operates is an indication
that there is hardly any break from the long history of colonialism. But if there has been a
change at all, it has been only in the area of strategies. In this case, dislocation, to a
number of the formerly colonized subjectivities, gets across as an innocuous enterprise.
In actuality, however, the imperial undercutting has become more sophisticated and the
deficits of such willing dislocation is no less troubling than those of exile, even if victims
vociferously deny categorization in the amphitheatre of exile.
Therefore, it will be disingenuous to pass a clean bill of health on multiculturalism as it is
being mostly practised in the West by some few privileged members from the formerly
colonized spaces of the Third World especially. A verdict of this nature may sound