Post-Colonial Ruptures and Democratic Possibilities: Multiculturalism as Anti-Racist Pedagogy

W ithin the last decade, conservatives such as Allan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, Diane Ravitch, Pat Buchanan, and Senator Jesse Helms have placed the issue of culture and difference at the center of the debate about education and democracy. They have asserted the primacy of the political in invoking the language of culture and in doing so have let it be known that culture is a terrain of political and ideological struggle. The ideological and political parameters of this struggle have been made manifest on a number of cultural fronts, including the schools, the arts, and the more blatant attacks aimed at rolling back the benefits of civil rights and social welfare reforms constructed over the last three decades. What is being valorized in the dominant language of the conservative offensive is an undemocratic approach to social authority and a politically regressive move to reconstruct American life within the script of Eurocentrism, racism, and patriarchy. Similarly, within these discourses, the call to define civilization as synonymous with selected aspects of Western tradition is being