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. XXXV . 4 . 1223-1232- 2011.

UDK 316.356.4:316.022.4(71) 316.722(71)

Himani Bannerji: 24. 8. 2011. York University

Department of SociologyToronto, Canada

NAMECALLING:MULTICULTURALISM AS THE IDEOLOGICAL (RULING)

APPARATUS OF THE CANADIAN STATE

Summary

The discourse of multiculturalism supplies a brilliant conceptual and culturaltechnology for converting the fundamental social relations of inequality and power

into categories of cultural difference and diversity. This article explores, critically, the

composite discourse of multiculturalism and diversity from a feminist anti-racist per-spective. It intends a critique of Canadian multiculturalism as a naming and control-ling device for political violence and security establishment. Some basic issues are

considered: 1) the discourse and practices of multiculturalism as state ideology, and

connected to that the idea of national identity and citizenship and related governingpractices; 2) the formation of a state apparatus consisting of administrative categoriesconnected to groups designated as ethnic, i.e., non-Europeans, and their emergence

as minorities; 3) the fact that current multicultural discourse of the state and popu-larized among Canadians both mutates into and solidifies the equation between anorientalist and racialized idea of culture/ethnicity and of religion.

Key Words: multiculturalism, state ideology, namecalling, racialization, hijab question

Although there are claims to project multiculturalism as a phe-

nomenon of popular expression and representation, we cannot take theseclaims at their face value. As I pointed out in The Dark Side of the Na-

tion: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Racism (2000), weneed to distinguish between spontaneous popular cultures and a state ini-

himanib@yorku.caTalk presented at From multicultural rhetoric to anti-racist action, A critical

symposium. Munk centre, University of Toronto, October 2008.

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tiated cultural enterprise. If we at all wish to use the term multicultural-ism, the first type could be called multiculturalism from below, and the

other multiculturalism from above.Much scholarly and activist work has attended to the official nature

and location of multiculturalism, its service for the project of Canadiannation building. A particularly interesting recent example of this has beenSunera ThobanisExalted subjects: studies in the making of race and na-tion in Canada(2007), and an earlier book by Eva Mackey, The House ofDifference:Cultural politics and national identity in Canada(2002). Weknow that there are entire state bureaucracies dedicated to policies andpractices of multiculturalism, to the extent of appointing a secretary ofstate for multiculturalism and Canadian identity. Canadian citizenship is-

sues are also associated with it. The growth of multicultural discourse andadministration have been incremental since the 1970s. We have seen animportant role played by multiculturalism in the provincial and federalelections, where appeals to ethnicity are frequent. The continuing debatesin Quebec both at the levels of the state and civil society also shouldleave no one in doubt about multiculturalism as a powerful ideologicalcategory in political agreement or disagreement between the differentclaimants to nationhood. The position papers, points of departure, forvarious conferences on this topic provide us further proof of the officialnature and status of multiculturalism. Since September 11, 2001 they di-rectly point to multiculturalism as a naming and controlling device forpolitical violence and security establishment. Sherene Razacks Casting

Out:The eviction of Muslims from western law and politics (2008) showsus how ideological assumptions regarding non-christian, especially is-

lamic, religious belief play a vital role in the functioning of the Canadianstate in the name of national security or in managing immigrant societies.Racialized ethnic naming of non-European cultural/ethnic groups con-stantly produces the multicultural agenda.

Some basic issues need our consideration immediately: 1) the dis-course and practices of multiculturalism as state ideology, and connectedto that the idea of national identity and citizenship and related governingpractices; 2) the formation of a state apparatus consisting of administra-tive categories connected to groups designated as ethnic, i.e., non-Euro-peans, and their emergence as minorities; 3) the fact that current multi-cultural discourse of the state and popularized among Canadians both

mutates into and solidifies the equation between an orientalist and racial-ized idea of culture/ethnicity and of religion. In the context of September11, 2001, for example, this has produced a racialized religious categorycalled muslim loaded with moral and cultural connotations and con-demnations. This ethno-religious subject-object is a target category de-veloped on the terrain of previous developments in official multicultural-ism. It aids a defining, surveillance device connected to punitive state ac-tions.

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Consideration of topics outlined above has created investigationsinto the recent turn to questioning and doctoring multiculturalism, andthis signifies a crisis of national identity, governing practices of the Ca-nadian state and society. Various studies of the Canadian state, laws, la-bour and citizenship have been put forward by many scholars and critics,such as Sherene Razack, Nandita Sharma, Sedef Koc and Sunera Tho-bani, among others. They identified (and my research supports) that offi-cial multiculturalism from its very inception functions as a device of so-cial management and a device both for creating and sustaining a hierarchyin Canadian citizenship. This hierarchy was obviously not a new devel-opment, nor the ethnic component in it and the new multicultural projec-tion built on old legal and social practices. Multiculturalism offered a

conscious and unconscious way of holding on to the status quo. The com-plex and contradictory political space of a white settler colony changing(for many reasons) into a liberal democracy, with a demographic depend-ence on already racialized old and new immigrants from former colonies,along with an in-built anglo-french national rivalry, created an intenselyvolatile situation for contestations and conflicts. Under these circum-stances, liberal democratic claims of the state seemed unconvincing. Forhistorical reasons the state could neither provide a universal citizenshipfor all subjects nor seemed willing to do so. In this situation the idea ofmulticulturalism, not invented to deal with the immigrant question origi-nally, emerged as a solution - to create hierarchies in citizenship as wellas put a cultural spin to Quebecs national claims. At all levels political,

economic and cultural multiculturalism highlighted various forms ofdifference and justified such differences inflected by ethnicity/race andnationality as grounds for differential entitlements. The discourse of mul-ticulturalism wove a border of otherness around the core of Canadiannational identity. Eva Mackeys House of Difference, Thobanis othersof the exalted subject, and Razacks outcastes of the state all signal to thisphenomenon in different ways.

But our criticism of multiculturalism and the Canadian state shouldnot stay just at the level of the particular, the unique phenomenon whichappeared in Canada. We can detect in Canadas situation a foundationalaspect of the contradiction of the liberal/bourgeois state, and the specificproblems of legacies of colonialism and slavery. To begin with, all bour-geois states or liberal democracies have had to separate the polity from

the economy. They had to create a separate sphere of polity, a sphere offormal equality between their subjects as individuals, because the actual-ity of social relations of power and property informing the state and thesociety has to be left unaddressed. These unequal relations of a complexlyconstructed class society and state, however, contain the states integralsupport for capital both nationally and globally. These imperatives con-stantly influence the definitions and prerogatives of citizenship. State andcivil society relations thus, as Antonio Gramsci (1972) noted long ago in

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his comments in The Prison Notebooks, are ones of constant contestationand adjustments. Marx (1985) in The Communist Manifestospoke of thisphenomenon in terms of open and hidden struggles of class. In the caseof Canada multiculturalism is a hidden form of class struggle in favourof the bourgeois state and its national ideology.

If the state does not at all times control the definition and extent ofcitizenship, and the power of conferring political subjectivity and agencyare absent in or denied to it, it ceases to be the state by definition. Thestate is, therefore, a structural/institutional and constantly reproducingformation and set of ruling relations which manage and hold in place theunstable space of the civil society threatening-to-tear apart. Failing to doso overwhelms the dominant status of bourgeois rule. In this state of af-

fairs the discourse of multiculturalism supplies a brilliant conceptual andcultural technology for converting the fundamental social relations ofinequality and power into categories of cultural difference and diversity.It provides a non-coercive,consensual device for creating categories ofdifferentiated subjects-citizens on the conveniently nebulous ground ofculture. The very diversity and amorphousness of culture both in terms ofconcepts and practices provides the necessary elasticity to create periph-eral political spaces which extend and buttress, in the case of Canada, thestatus-quo of a racialized and patriarchal political subject and agent andof the capitalist state.

Official multiculturalism thus provides an extended hegemonic ap-paratus of the state beyond the conventional definition of the political.

This hegemonic sphere and its organic intellectuals include rightwingthink tanks, interested academics, community groups and agencies, aswell as civil servants and community leaders who can all be drawn uponto confer on the state the prerogative of defining and naming its subjectsand citizens. This name by which the subject is called has great interpel-lating and activating value. It is through this namecalling that subjectsof a state become agents or players in the established political field. Theright to name is thus a rare and great power one need only rememberthat god in the bible was the primary, original name giver. This expressedhis sovereignty in relation to the first man and woman. This parable ofnaming as power also confronts us with the fact that those who name canalso change the name. Jewish citizenship in Germany underwent thischange with terrible consequences, and the same point is also illustrated

in literature. Shakespeares The Tempestdisplays Prosperos power overthe natives as he names them and also discovers the flora and the faunaof the new world. Anti-imperialist writers, such as Aim Cesaire ofMartinique, note how Prospero, the European colonizer, can magicallyactivate the beings of his economic new world subjects, Caliban, the re-bellious slave, and Ariel, the complicit one. To challenge this right andrelation of naming, Cesaire wrote A Tempest: adaptation for a Blacktheatre in the context of African liberation whose hero is Caliban.

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This literary analogy is meant to reveal the same process still inaction from the time of colonial capitalism to now the era of liberal de-mocracy. The content of this naming and thus calling into active beingthe states hierarchy of subjects, annexing individuals and groups to theproject of ruling, creating others and selves, itself has a political name what Gramsci termed hegemony. Since in the context of our modernstates the hegemon/the sovereign is not a single subject but a ramifiedruling apparatus, multiculturalism can further elaborate that ramification.In other contexts there are other devices, nor are they or even multicultur-alism a matter of conspiracy. Since all bourgeois democratic states asruling apparatuses need legitimacy and a dimension of consensus, as wellas content for assigning inclusion and exclusion within the nations po-

litical space, multiculturalism provides that ground. It builds legitimacyby appealing to non-partisanship on the part of the state. And this legiti-macy can only happen by annexing, drawing into the states formation therealm of the living grounds of civil society. It is only through the pene-tration and re-arrangement of civil society, the realm of our everydaynorms and forms, influencing it morally and ideologically - that the stategains its democratic as opposed to coercive hegemony.

Louis Althussers astute reading of the state as an ideological appa-ratus rooted in repression also provides us a way to expand on under-standing Gramscis concept of hegemony in concrete details. The core ofthe state for Althusser rests on ideology, which expresses itself as a de-vice for naming it involves a calling into being through being named

by the ideological apparatus of the state. This is the process that he callsinterpellation. One is called by a certain name by the state, he says, oneresponds, and is interpellated. The citizen, as such, is always already asubject citizen of the state. It is obvious that multiculturalism is an im-portant innovation in this direction of naming and hailing. Thus, creatingofficial, standardized interpretations and categories of culture, and im-planting them within the state is a brilliant ruling strategy. If the non-Europeans, the minorities or ethnics are to have an agency in thestates space at all, it must be through multiculturalisms ideologicalnaming or categorical constellation its incorporative function. Thus wecan understand why multiculturalism may appear to many, who are notcritical or oppositional to bourgeois democracy, as a positive phenome-non which confers on socially subordinated groups an expressive, active

agentic moment.This interpellative subject-agent formation, as the reproductive

mechanism of the state, is paralleled by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayerin The Great Arch (1985), where they speak of the state as a culturalrevolution. The liberal state, they say, reconstructs popular culture into anofficial one, and out of this process forms a cultural ruling device whichserves as a moral regulator for the society at large. Thus a bourgeoisEuro-christian racist and patriarchal discourse elaborating the state may

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ethnicize and communalize peoples of colour, and a woman of muslimbackground is conferred through this device her agentic difference assubordination to both her male counterpart and the state. As a naming andpractical ruling device multiculturalism serves to measure difference asdifference from the core national identity which is christian-European,and under the guise of liberality, or plurality, provides the bourgeois statewith both hegemony and a mask that disguises the inherent inequality.

The multicultural citizen will deny her designated status at the perilof having no mainstream, established political space. Funded communityagencies experience and display this in their survival and participatorytactics. If some social groups are othered or marked as ethnic minorities,and ethnicity/culture has come to be equated with religion, such citizen-

subjects often project and abide by religious identities as their basic iden-tities. It is not a surprise that mainstream newspaper op ed pages or tele-vision interviews and talk shows are full of such docile, islamized apolo-gists they are quickly selected by non-ethnicized Canadians as repre-sentative of others. This telos of religion is also spatialized in mosques,temples, gurudwaras, and community practices of controlling eth-nicized/religiocized gendered bodies, especially of women. Needless tosay, the multicultural discourse which puts religion at the centre hasstrengthened the position of self-styled community leaders and patriarchalfamilies who are empowered as real representatives and guardians ofwomen and children. Dominating within religiocized communities, and inthe narrow space of the family, these multicultural leaders and male fam-

ily heads supply what the ideological apparatus of the state expects ofthem the performance of religion from Samuel Huntingtons dictionaryof civilization. This behavior then further marginalizes them and drivesthem out of the pale of regular modes of citizenship.

THE GREAT HIJAB QUESTION

In the middle ages Europeans pondered over how many angelscould stand on the head of a pin. Of late many Western polities seem to

be hanging by a piece of cloth on a womans head. What could create

such a potent symbology out of a fairly mundane and generally ongoingpractice? Why are new head/face coverings emerging steadily and why

are western governments wasting parliamentary time by engaging in a

behaviour of castigation not seen since the demise of the crusades and theinquisition? Hijab is the social question in French schools, London

buses and Quebec and Swiss elections. White middle class, middle agedmale TV personalities feel threatened by these faceless figures. Fear,

anxiety, contempt and even hatred thicken the social atmosphere the mo-ment the issue is mentioned or a street is seen with covered women. Thesame French colonial urgency that Frantz Fanon (1967) spoke of in Un-

veiling Algeria has violently resurfaced since September 11, 2001. What

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could have diminished the liberal delight in promoting diversity, thestates vaunted citizens rights to freedom of expression, etc., now dis-

cussed as a burden for restraining ethnic/religious others? J.S. Mill in his

essay on Civil Liberty told us that freedom of expression, speech andassociation are promised rights of citizens unless they harm ourneighbours. Whom does the hijab harm?

This question cannot be answered without a short historical over-

view of what led to a crisis of democracy such as the present one, in

which the Charter of Rights and Freedoms can be trumped by executiveacts of the state which suspend all rights provisions for all members of the

society, but are in practice targeted at those considered dangerous for-

eigners invading the nations space.As pointed out by legal scholars, such as Constance Backhouse

(1999) and Sherene Razack (2002, 2008), the formation of the Canadianstate relied heavily on racialized difference and social legislation encod-

ing this. The initial stage of the state formation was an openly segregative

one, later to be followed by a call for assimilation. This assimilation wasrestricted among Europeans and then extended to others since the 1970s.

But the racialized relations, the existing racist culture and commonsense,along with a poorly urbanized and an intensely provincial society, madeassimilation an elusive goal for non-Europeans. The fact that assimilation

cannot be mandated or foreshortened or even formed without long his-torical coexistence outside of spheres of domination, such as colonialism,

slavery and menialized migrant labour. seemed to have escaped notice of

the propagators and promoters of official multiculturalism. What shouldhave been a two-way street involving settlers and others was by definition

one-way and a dead end.Yet for Canada immigration was necessary, for labour and other

demographic imperatives, for the two nation national question to be

culturalized, to prevent separation and for the first nations to be deniedcontrol in land and self-governing. In this political and historical juncture

the presence of non-European others led to the discourse of ethnic plural-ity and cultural diversity as no common ground for national unity could

be found. But any cultural discourse, especially of the state, was always

already racialized in this semi-colonial semi-bourgeois state and society.So an official multiculturalism could not be developed as anything other

than a hegemonic strategy. It was never meant to yield, in fact could not,an equal co-existence of cultures and peoples. Difference continued tobe threatening, at best tolerated with much self-congratulatory fanfare

on the part of the exalted subjects when posed by non-European others.The media often spoke and speaks of too much diversity and the indi-

gestible, inassimilable nature of the immigrant cultures, leaving the onusof assimilation to them. Though multiculturalism saved Canadas face in-ternationally and in the United Nations and even became its national selling

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point, those marked as multicultural citizens, as defined away from Cana-dians, continued as negatively racialized subject-citizens.

This troubled state of affairs has hit a rock bottom in this era of

terror and security. Now the multicultural citizen-subjects inspire notonly fears of population explosion and lowering of educational standards(wholly erroneously), but have become walking human bombs thehome grown terrorists. This comprises both men and women. Now in the

twenty-first century multiculturalism has become a liability, and all over

the West it has become politically correct not to be multicultural, and of-ten to regret the moment it was used earlier as a hegemonic device. Now

elections can be won by posters showing one black sheep being kicked

out by three white ones, as in Switzerland recently, or by ultra-right par-ties, such as the British National Party, to represent Britain in the Euro-

pean Commission. Instrumentalization of terror and security has bentmulticulturalism into modes of racial profiling, surveillance, trips to

Guantanamo and threats of deportation. The muslim as a category of

terror is a mutated version of the dangerous alien of earlier times. Con-centration camps, internments, barracks of old, no-fly lists, all provide the

institutional and ideological underpinnings for the current culture of sur-veillance and functioning of the state. Already existing, though partiallysuppressed, constellations of hatreds and anxieties dating from paranoia

of colonial and slavery days and perhaps even of the days of the crusadesare now reawakened with vengeance by the state and the mainstream me-

dia. These are the old white lies and the nations others have to take

cover. Airports have become abysses which swallow the marked others,border controls are at the borders of society, not just at the 49

thparallel.

This background may help us to see why a piece of cloth on awomans head and face can strike fear in the hearts of adult white men incivil service or talk-show hosts. These are the female counterparts of the

male terrorists. What are they hiding in the folds of their burkhas? Whoseface is hiding under the black cover? But such is the nature of multicul-

tural/racist discourse that it always holds in a single cultural constellationcontradictory stereotypes. The womans same veil symbolizes not just

islamic terror, but also islams barbarism towards women. It inspires both

security, atrocities and frenzies of white or civilizational rescue Bush wages a feminist war against the Taliban with Cheri Blair and

Condoleeza Rice at his side. The so-called American victory is signalledby the image of a single Afghan woman surrounded only by men in astreet in Kandahar lifting up a blue veil at the command of western

media. The sign of freedom come.But we must conclude our observations by shifting our gaze in-

ward from them to us the ethnic subjects of the states ideologi-cal interpellation, to our own commitment to capitalism, to upward mo-bility by any means necessary. In varying ways the subject-citizens share

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class, gender and racialized world views of the real citizen. They havelearnt them before in the former colonies, and have further internalized

them upon landing here. The othering definitions have been internalized

and sought by the ethnic subject to be put to profit. The case in point isthe current window of opportunity seized by so-called community figuresto put religion at the service of male domination, and accruing of politicalpower of a second hand sort. Furthermore, peoples terrorized under the

name muslim, as in the case of jews after the holocaust, have responded

by embracing the name as a gesture of resistance. The multicultural sub-ject-citizen is not exempt from being a party to social relations of prop-

erty, patriarchal morality and other power relations. In this they are not

just victims, but also complicit to the subjections of others in their ownworld. As such they are neither inferior nor superior to the exalted sub-

ject, the citizen-citizen who represents the national identity.

CONCLUSION

Multiculturalism is but a moment in the long process of segrega-tion, isolation, political and social disenfranchisement, dating from the

foundation of this white settler colony at the behest of the world market.

To be racially culturalized, essentially religiocized to attain a distortedand limited agency, may seem like a gain. But now this agency has turned

on its head. This has led to a totalizing religious identity for some of themulticultural social groups which impels their aggression inward into

mini-nationalist fundamentalism. Destructive gestures, in this context,may be glorified it is immaterial whether they are coerced or volun-teered. Women born into muslim communities face poor choices. They

can wear a veil as a gesture of defiance, with all its patriarchal connota-

tions, they may be made to wear one, or refuse at the risk of beingbranded as disloyal, even as traitors to a persecuted people, or lauded

by the state of terror and security as being truly progressive and used, forexample as Irshad Manji

1, as their poster girl.

But such women have to understand that there are other forms ofresistance, which are more extensively political, and rest on the ground ofsocial justice. This justice calls for an overall social transformation, goes

from the paradigm of the community to that of social subjectivity. The

veil is a distraction with or without it, the point is to organize a struggleagainst the fascistic tendencies of neoliberal states in their current democ-

ratic crisis. It is immaterial whether one is secular or a believer, this is nota religious war but one against injustice.

1Irshad Manji, a writer and media person, author of The trouble with Islam today, has

supported liberal white feminists in their one-dimensional criticism of islamsoppression of women.

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REFERENCES

Backhouse, Constance. 1999. Colour-coded: A legal history of racism in Canada,1900-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto press.

Bannerji, Himani. 2000. The dark side of the nation: Essays on multiculturalism, na-

tionalism and racism.Toronto: Canadian Scholar's press.Corrigan, P. D. and Sayer. 1985. The great arch: English state formation as cultural

revolution. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967.A dying colonialism. New York: Grove press.Gramsci, Antonio. 1972. Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.

Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. NewYork: International publishers.

Mackey, Eva. 2002. The house of difference: Cultural politics and national identity inCanada.Toronto: University of Toronto press.

Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1985. The manifesto of the communist party. AuthorizedEnglish translation edited and annotated by Frederick Engels. New York: In-

ternational publishers.Razack, Sherene. 2002.Race, space, and the law: Unmapping a white settler society.

Toronto: Between the lines.____. 2008. Casting out: The eviction of Muslims from western law and politics. To-

ronto: University of Toronto press.Thobani, Sunera. 2007.Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in

Canada.Toronto: University of Toronto press.

Himani Bannerji, Toronto, Canada

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