to reckon with the damage done to democracy by genocide, by segregation,
and by importing the mentalities and techniques of colonial administration
from the periphery into the metropolitan centre. This third form of multi-
culturalist discourse encompasses several historical cases. It acquired a global
reach when, for example, the political legacies of the Third Reich, of the
overthrow of Jim Crow, and of the formal destruction of Apartheid were
deemed to have more than merely local signiWcance.
Of course, any single political formation may include elements drawn from
each and perhaps all of these approaches. They have overlapped and
inXuenced each other, creating conceptual and ethical exchanges with the
theories produced by movements aimed at decolonization. These histories of
theoretical reXection and political conXict need now to be disentangled.
The desire to conceive of diVerence innocently, that is, without having to
reckon with the hierarchy and conXict that distinguish imperial and colonial
power, reappears periodically. However, faced with those revisionist impulses,
there are speciWc gains involved in steering discussion back towards the
histories of race-thinking and European colonial rule. A worthwhile under-
standing of modern government can be extracted from those timely investi-
gations. It has implications not only for theories of law, state, and the
administration of power but also, as post-colonial theory insists, for the
concept of culture itself, for the embattled idea of multiculture, and thus
for the politics and the ethics of multiculturalism.
References
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its Realities, trans. S. and S. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Ahmad,E. 2000 .Confronting Empire. Cambridge: South End Press.
Ballhatchet,K. 1980 .Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and
Policies and their Critics, 1793 – 1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
BuckMorss,S. 2000. Hegel and Haiti.Critical Inquiry, 26 ( 4 ): 821 – 65.
CØsaire,A. 1972 .Discourse on Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
DuBois,W.E.B. 1973. 1938 .Black Reconstruction in America: an essay toward a
history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in
America, 1860 – 1880. New York: Atheneum.
Dussel,E. 1995 .The Invention of The Americas, trans. M. D. Barber. New York:
Continuum.
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