Abstract
At the beginning of this century, Stuart Hall posed the “multicultural question”: how can we co-create a shared social world in so diverse postcolonial situation? Regardless of the rise and fall of the political ideology of “multiculturalism”, this question remains even more significant in the time when “multiculturality” as a politico-cultural situation expands and deepens. Over the past two decades, important lines of studies have responded to the multicultural question from the perspective that focuses on everydayness. These studies have distanced themselves from the hustle and bustle of the debates around multiculturalism and instead explored how exactly diverse people feel and negotiate their differences in their everyday lives. In this presentation, firstly I overview these studies and explain their main perspective and importance by summing up them as everyday multicultural studies. Studies that focus on everyday multicultural situation have developed mainly in human geography in England and sociology in Australia, but these two lines of literature have not been clearly interlinked while they share their main perspective. Therefore, by synthesizing them, I present a clearer overview of the studies. Based on this work, secondly, I point significant limitation of them. That is, focusing on everydayness leads them to collectively forget the coloniality of it while everyday “multicultural” situations are at the same time undoubtedly “postcolonial”. This pointing out is not mainly for criticizing the studies, but for opening it up again and questioning together how we can think of everyday multiculturality and historical (but present) coloniality together.
Presenters
Takeo SuzukiPost-Doctoral Researcher, Faculty of Social Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Multicultural Studies, Everydayness, Coloniality
