Multicultural Society Must Be Defended?

Abstract

This chapter investigates how orientalist citizenship is reinvented through attempts to define and defend multicultural society in Britain. I begin by describing how the normalizing function of 'state racism' charted in Michel Foucault's Society Must Be Defended has been partially recast through the 'postracial', 'multiculturalist', and 'multiculture' conceptions of multicultural society. In doing so, this chapter helps us to identify the parameters through which new expressions of orientalist citizenship emerge to sustain contemporary state racism. This is exemplified in the figures of citizenship that manifest through an ethnic minority wing of the United Kingdom Independence Party, calls in the British media for intercultural dialogue, and the Stop the War Coalition's response to the War on Terror in the 2000s. Each captures how attempts at subverting identitarian life scripts, dichotomous subject positions, and essentialist identities become a means of reinventing orientalist citizenship. I conclude that the co-option of anti-essentialist challenges to orientalist citizenship facilitates a new imperative to state racism: 'multicultural society must be defended'.