Policulturalism

Jean and John Comaroff offer what they recognize is “a rather stark inventory” of the symptoms of what they call “policulturalism” (Theory from the South), which they describe as “politicization of diversity that expresses itself in demands not merely for recognition, but also for a measure of sovereignty against the state and against the idea of the universal citizen, now less a citizen of the polity than a citizen in it—and likely to be possessed of multiple identities.”

The symptoms are:

(i) the displacement from public life of ideology, the -ology of the Idea, by ID-ology, the -ology of Identity, itself part of an escalating assertiveness, and will to sovereignty, of communities of faith and culture; (ii) a tendency for partisan national politics to hinge less on differences of belief or conscience than on the pursuit, on one hand, of the material interests of party elites and, on the other, on populist mobilization founded on the promissory rhetoric of a better life for all, of less intrusive government, of greater technical efficiency and service delivery, of tighter control of borders and closer protection of the commonweal through the mechanisms of the market; (iii) the fetishism of the law and the judicialization of politics, in which class actions become a common species of collective deployment and in which the constitutionally rooted language of rights provides the universal argot of social and economic life; (iv) the metamorphosis of the state into a mega-corporation—part franchising authority, part holding company, part venture capitalist business—accompanied by the outsourcing of many of its operations, like the regulation of violence, the conduct of warfare, the exploitation of natural resources, and the management of the fiscus; and, consequently, (v) the fracture and parsing of its sovereignty through a series of displacements of its authority.

These symptoms suggest that the modern nation-state is undergoing massive renovation. They conclude: “Taken together, these features of the nation-state form—plainly visible in the postcolonies of the south but becoming more so in the global north—suggest that we have entered a post-Weberian moment in the longue durée of modernity, one in which the ‘imagined community’ of the 19th and 20th centuries demands re-imagination.”