Multicultural exorcisms: Cultural pluralism and the remains of race

This dissertation examines the politics of race and American national identity within liberal debates over multiculturalism during the 1990's. Through concepts like cultural pluralism and the possibility of group rights, these discourses seemed to promise a renewed interest in addressing the injustices surrounding cultural difference. However, such efforts quickly mired in the vexed challenges that this posed for addressing racial injustice in the American context. By exploring the writings of its key interlocutors and the understandings of racial injustice they invoke, I argue that the concept of race served a key role in defining the boundaries and limits of cultural pluralism. Yet far from transcending the racially hegemonic and exclusionary roots of American liberal ideals of freedom and autonomy, this discourse increasingly redeployed the concept of race, particularly of racial identification, as a disavowed presence in the service of reconstituting an exclusionary American national identity. By tracing the constitutive role of race within these debates, I thereby examine the difficult challenges involved in addressing the racialized past of American political culture confronting any discourse, multicultural or otherwise, that would imagine a more promising future.