Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions (review)

Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. Edited by Barnor Hesse. (London: Zed Books, 2000. x + 262 pp., preface, bibliography, index.)

A new and useful contribution to cultural studies and a powerful critique of liberal democracy, Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, is an anthology of ten essays on the meanings and impacts of western multiculturalism in Britain and, to a lesser extent, America. Before reviewing the book it is essential to establish what is meant by these three ideas offered by the title. According to Barnor Hesse, diaspora formations are "transnational processes" that "deeply unsettle the idea of self contained, culturally inward looking nationalist identities" (2). Cultural entanglements are commonplace and "represent a profound challenge to the idea that national and social forms are logically coherent, unitary or tidy," while transruptions are "an attempt to provide an account of why the dynamic of the multicultural is a recurrent unsettling feature of modern western societies" (2). With these definitions in mind we can see why multiculturalisms, plural, are not settled. The general context for this book may surprise some: a new translation of postcolonialism, a relatively new school of literary criticism, advocated by sociologists.

The anthology follows the intellectual method of listening to the din for collectivities and of fingering representative voices of postmodern theoreticians. What I find attractive in these essays is locating new ways of constructing the world as afforded by a number of different postmodern readings. The book is set in two sections. The introduction, un/settled multiculturalisms, by University of East London sociologist Hesse, fixes the theoretical language of the book. The first section is a collection of four essays that examine diaspora formations. The first contributor, University of Salford sociologist S. Sayyid, looks at the Muslim Umma in the context of a waning Westphalia and argues that this diaspora, like others, will necessarily be situated at the nexus of decentering. Sayyid follows Hesse's lead to suggest that diaspora is an incomplete project. Sociologist Brett St. Louis (University of Bristol) advances C. L. R. James's question of what culture is to ask: "What exactly is sport?" St. Louis theorizes that the extent of black resistance can be interrogated for a possible aesthetics/poetics of black sports, so that we may "draw insights into the expressive as well as the oppressive aspects of sports" (52). University of Birmingham sociologist David Parker explodes Chinese cultural signifiers in Britain, in particular the Chinese takeaway as "diaspora-space." By using Bourdieu's notion of habitus, Parker questions power/race differences to reveal the "spatial-temporal reconfiguration of the everyday and the transruption of the contemporary ethnoscape by new forms of diasporic habitus" (94). The final essay returns full circle with Hesse and an essay on black Britain's postcolonial formations. Hesse's essay brings us to the heart of diasporicity, representation and identity: to be black and British, as if the two were somehow exclusive of each other (a nationalist and liberal political argument thoroughly rejected by the essays); and to know the rationale for the British Black Studies project in Britain.

Part two, Cultural Entanglements, begins with an article from South Bank University sociologist Claire Alexander that examines the "Asian Gang." By unpacking this representation, Alexander is able to transrupt popular discourse and norms to inventory ethnic, gender, age, class, and neighborhood markers. In the second essay, Denis Noble interrogates Ragga music to discuss both the celebratory and the derogatory of black sexuality and particularly black female sexuality. Noble's exposition on "dance-hall culture," and the response from her contemporaries, reveals both the ambivalence and the incomplete nature of socially constituted categories. Roiyah Saltus-Blackwood examines the "constitutional anatomy of Bermuda's body politic" to show how localized colonial power continues to exist (171). Saltus-Blackwood notes "it is only by examining how such avoidance and marginalization become politically encoded as cultural practice and social dictate that we can cease to be perplexed by a country like Bermuda that apparently...