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2 Culture, Identity and Rights: Challenging Contemporary Discourses of Belonging*

By Gurminder K. Bhambra
Within contemporary debates on globalisation, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, questions of rights are increasingly framed in terms of culture and identity.1 These debates address historical processes of inclusion and exclusion in the formulation of narratives of belonging (e.g. narratives of nationhood, ethnicity, or other community) and locate associated privileges (such as rights) accordingly. In this chapter, I shall criticise this cultural turn in the understanding of rights and, in the course of doing so, question the dominant theoretical interpretations of culture and identity that underpin these debates. An integral aspect of this endeavour is examining the politics of knowledge production in particular, the Wests self-definition as the producer of universal rights for, it is only by doing so that there can be an adequate critique of the contemporary framing of the politics of rights in terms of culture and belonging. For many, what appears to be excluded from the universalistic discourse of rights is the particularity of different others. Difference, however, then comes to be seen simply in cultural terms and rights are associated with the right to be different and to have that difference recognised and respected. Contesting this cultural turn in the politics of rights is, in itself, not sufficient; once deconstructed, what then? The chapter will end with an examination of possible alternatives to the cultural politics of identity and belonging and discuss how the other could be integrated into what are widely regarded as universalising discourses without losing its particularity as other and as subject. This integration, I shall argue, would not be complete with a simple adding to, but is one that requires a reconsideration of the theoretical framework that established the binaries of the self and the other in its first instance. Culture, Identity and Social Theory Culture is frequently framed in terms of the totality of social systems and their related practices of signification, representation and symbolism (for a discussion see Benhabib 2002). In this formulation, identities are seen as cognitive boundaries based on an exclusive sense of belonging in which one either belongs or does not belong (Van Ham 2001). Identities, then, correspond to particular cultures and it is through the processes of defining and maintaining the boundaries of the groups to which individuals belong that cultural identities are

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constructed. This idea of cultural identity being based on an understanding of a stable internal identity coupled with a desire to maintain difference against the other is also strongly articulated by theorists such as Stuart Hall. Hall (1990: 223, 225) argues that there are at least two ways of thinking about cultural identity: one is in terms of a shared culture which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common; and the other is in terms of difference, which may include a future becoming as well as a past- based being. In both understandings, however, there is deemed to be something internal which binds people together in terms of a shared identity and then something external against which a sense of that internal identity is strengthened. Even where culture/identity is seen in terms of difference it is a difference posited against an already constituted entity, itself based on an understanding of past similarities. Both forms, then, presume cultures to be bounded entities with an integrity internal to their existence thus denying the possibility of escape or change from the ascribed identity even where identity is argued to include some aspect of becoming. This is a problem that defines both standard social theory and its recently articulated postmodern alternatives. Whilst standard social theory has struggled with the diversity of traditions and identities in its attempt to subject them to conformity and uniformity it could be argued that postmodern social theory has simply inverted the parameters of the debate (for a discussion see Holmwood 1996). It has done this by arguing for a relativity of cultures and identities where communication would be facilitated between groups by interpreters who would, in the words of Bauman (1987: 5), translate statements made within one communally based tradition so that they can be understood within the system of knowledge based on another tradition. Modernism traditionally dealt with issues of difference by subjecting all variations to its universal schema and urged them to be more like us through its varieties of modernisation theory and theories of development. Although postmodernism claims to deconstruct the (meta) framework of modernism, it continues to deal with difference within a similar framework by accepting those differences as given and believing that they are other and that they should remain as other. While postmodernism can be seen as attempting to understand the other, or at the very least to give it space, it does so in the context of a thematic field that continues to perpetuate the self/other binary of modernism thereby failing to do any more than simply saying that elsewhere things are different (to here). In both understandings, then, differences are either to be assimilated into a pre-existing framework (modernism), or located according to the premises of that framework (postmodernism). In neither understanding is there space for the other to be anything other than the other, that is, to contribute to the identity identified as modern (or postmodern). Similar issues arise in discussions of race, ethnicity and culture.2 Where, historically, ideas of race had been used to establish differences between societal groups, the categorisation of human beings now more often goes under the terminology of ethnicity(ies) and culture(s). All these notions presuppose a world of human differences where those differences are conceptualised as a diversity of separate societies and individuated cultural entities that are intrinsically

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discontinuous (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Such entities are frequently taken as internally coherent systems of meanings which are then deemed to require description and analysis as integrated totalities. It has to be recognised, however, that identity-making always involves a construction, rather than merely a discovery, of difference and should be understood not as something owned or possessed by individual or collective actors but rather as a mobile, often unstable relation of difference (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 13 italics added). Ideas of race, ethnicity, and culture have all, at different times, been used to stabilise this mobility and to fix it in space and across time. As Malkki (1997) argues, some of the strongest metaphors within our thinking on identity are those of roots, origins, ancestries and lineage. These, together with our sedentarist assumptions about essential attachments to particular places, naturalise difference and, at the same time, make it an issue to be explained in the context of a past that was pure. Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 7) suggest that it is only by disentangling the spatial and temporal metaphors that root understandings of identity in naturalised conceptions of community that we, as scholars, can proceed without succumbing to a nostalgia for origins. Gilroy (1990), for his part, is similarly opposed to an interpretation of culture as delineated along ethnic lines and argues instead for it to be seen as something which is intrinsically fluid, changing and dynamic. Further, in an attempt to move away from earlier, discredited notions of race and ethnicity founded on biological explanations, Gilroy (1990: 266) delineates culture as a relational field in which social groups encounter one another and live out social, historical relationships. Definitions of culture based on socio-historical understandings of origin do not, however, escape many of the problems attributed to earlier notions of race and ethnicity. Discussions of belonging based on ideas of culture and cultural characteristics, for example, often emphasise the incompatibility of cultural traditions where different communities are said to have different values and ways of life over any recognition of how these values emerged in relation to others. Further, the very ideas of lineage and heritage with which culture is closely associated suggest a natural and eternal fixity to those cultures through the inheritance of characteristics and traditions through time. Thus, as Miles (1993: 66) argues, it is but a short step from the idea of inheritance then to utilise notions such as breeding and blood to sustain a conception of inviolable difference expressed through history. Whilst it is accepted that culture has always played an important part in social life, recent claims for legal recognition of cultural rights and the allocation of resources from the state to be made on such a basis are held to be relatively new phenomena (see Soysal 1994, Benhabib 2002). Prior to the 1990s, questions of ethnicity and culture were deemed by political theorists to be marginal phenomena that would disappear with modernisation. Culture understood in terms of primordial loyalties and particularistic forms of belonging would cede ground to the universalistic understandings of citizenship organised within the nation-state. Recently, however, as Kymlicka (2001) argues, the question of the rights of ethnocultural groups has moved to the forefront of Western political theory.3

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Culture, Identity, and Rights The Politics of Cultural Identity

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With culture being seen as the unique expression of (a) peoples individuality and nation-states becoming increasingly multicultural, Kymlicka (1996) argues that there is a need to rethink questions of politics from this basis. His work on multicultural citizenship is a case in point where he discusses the relationship between protecting the rights of minority cultures whilst at the same time maintaining a cohesive framework of liberal justice and democratic practice. He argues, in a later work, that unless democracies work to accommodate ethnocultural diversity within their nation-building strategies, this diversity will remain a powerful source of conflict and tension, potentially destabilising these very democracies. What is needed, according to Kymlicka (2001), is the public expression and institutionalisation of ethnocultural diversity within the democratic structures of liberal nation-states. Thus, questions of identity and belonging are located within a framework that politicises culture in a way that it had not previously been: and, with the politicisation of culture, the idea of culture itself can be said to have changed. As Benhabib (2002: 3) puts it, contemporary understandings of culture are now seen to be constituted by an odd mixture of the anthropological view of the democratic equality of all cultural forms of expression and the Romantic, Herderian emphasis on each forms irreducible uniqueness. The two sit together uneasily in debates about the political consequences of culture. Soysal (1994), for her part, attempts to draw a distinction between an older idea of culture as essential and group based and a new form of cultural identity seen as individual and politicised. Cultural identity, she argues, can be expressed in the language of rights once it is recognised that its organising and legitimating principles are based on understandings of universal personhood rather than ideas of national belonging. For example, where migrants had previously been thought of in terms of being temporary residents whose primary concerns centred on practical issues such as housing and language training, these issues are now considered secondary to the negotiation of their belonging as individual citizens (Soysal 1994). The rights that accrue to individuals, however, accrue within states and within national polities and the contestation of those rights occurs increasingly within a distinct cultural realm that gives substance to the political entity as a nation(al) state. Further, the calls for cultural rights within the human rights discourse underline the focus on the right to be different and to foster ones own culture thus framing questions of universal rights in terms of particularistic group characteristics that, in turn, are based on ideas of difference and otherness ideas which must then undercut the claim to universality. This would seem to refute the general argument made by Soysal (1994) that the call for minority rights based on universalist definitions of rights is in any way different to the justifications behind modern nationalisms that connect cultures and identities to specific places. With cultural identity not being seen to be simply about the past but also to reside in an understanding of becoming, that is, a politics oriented to the future, the use of the universalist language of rights is more likely to be strategic than to reflect a real shift in conceptualisations of identity and belonging: and where those forms of belonging continue to rest on ideas of culture they continue to be

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problematic in the terms previously attributed to essentialist definitions. One of the key problems in understanding identity formation from the perspective of studying groups with primordial or historical loyalties is that this ossifies those groups and misses the dynamism constitutive of all group formation and reformation. As Benhabib (2002: 60, 65) argues, any human society at any point in time, is composed of multiple material and symbolic practices with a history; not recognising this complexity flattens out the contradictions and antagonisms that surround group experiences. The invocation of culture as the basis for the development of ideas of multiculturalism and the establishment of minority rights ostensibly for the empowerment of cultural communities within the state can also have the effect of restricting possibilities of identity and group construction other than those associated with cultural identities. By privileging a particular identity, that of culture, other identities that could be argued to be as important, such as those based around understandings of gender, sexual orientation and labour relations, are excluded. And with culture often being associated with tradition and history and the way things were, there is the very real danger of instituting and perpetuating a conservative politics through the sedimentation of undemocratic relations internal to the group (see Volpp 1996, Kapur 2005). The problem with most understandings of culture that inform political debates, then, is that they are generally conceived of along absolutist lines and, as such, fix identities and people in space and time. In other words, people are presumed to have particular cultures and not other ones and those cultures are understood to be mutually distinct. Indeed, in discussions of culture within modern politics, culture is generally regarded as an attribute of minorities the dominant group is universalised as the norm and difference is measured in relation to them. This sets up a worry within liberal discourse around the need to recognise minority rights at the same time as producing a concern about a debilitating relativism that requires some degree of universalism to counter it. The dichotomy of the universal versus the particular, or universalism versus essentialism, turns on a failure to recognise the universal as itself being a particular form and a misunderstanding of essentialism as an attribute of other cultures. It is my contention that the universal is nothing other than a particular that has been universalised the false generalisation of the West as Benhabib (2002) states and that it is a particular that has been universalised without taking into account the complex, global dialogue within which it is located. As Pollock and others (2000: 583) have argued, universals are rarely universal at all, but rather interpretations devised for particular historical and conceptual situations. However, the Western experience has predominantly been taken both as the basis for the construction of the default category of the universal and, at the same time, that category is argued to have a validity that transcends the Western experience. This frame casts the Western experience as the norm and everything else is subsumed to its terms. With a particular culture being universalised as the norm, all others then remain locked in a peripheral, marginal existence that, however much it may be understood, is only ever discussed in terms of its distance from the centre and thereby the distinction between us and them is perpetuated.

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If we start from the premise of a world originally constituted by culturally separate and distinct entities and which has become multicultural over time then liberal pluralism with its attempts to manage diversity can be seen as a progressive intervention in the current climate of rapid, unsettling change, mistrust and strangeness. If, however, as Gupta and Ferguson (1992: 17) suggest it is acknowledged that cultural difference is produced and maintained in a world always already spatially interconnected then attempts to manage ethnocultural diversity can be seen for what they really are: one of the main means through which the disempowered are kept that way. Increasingly, cultures have come to be seen not only in terms of the similarity of the individuals that constitute them, or the differences between this group of individuals and that group, but, more precisely, through the processes of establishing similarities and differences. Gupta and Ferguson (1997) argue that notions of community and belonging can no longer be thought of simply in terms of understandings of cultural similarity or social contiguity, and neither can they just be distinguished on the basis of perceived difference. But, rather, notions of community and belonging have to be understood as categorical identities brought into being through the processes of exclusion, inclusion and constructions of otherness. Yet, we see that, in the main, social theory has addressed issues of cultural difference, heterogeneity and otherness by assuming difference to pre-exist the processes by which it is produced. The point now is to re-imagine theory from the perspective of initial interconnection as opposed to separation and as a consequence of the processes of differentiation.

Reconsidering Culture and Identity The world we inhabit (previously no less than today) is the product of historical flows of people, goods and ideas that have always connected the world globally and yet, as Trouillot (2003: 34) argues, the history of the world is rarely told in those terms. Acknowledging these flows requires us also to reconsider the theoretical paradigms that have permitted the extrapolation of universal significance from a partial history. For example, Ahmad (1992: 103) argues that one could start from a radically different premise to that which is commonly held today: namely, the proposition that we live not in three worlds but in one. Further, Ahmad (1992) suggests that we also need to dissolve the understanding that sets up an absolute difference between the First World and the Third whilst at the same time submerging the cultural heterogeneity of each within singular identities. The binary of us and them that is implicit in the self-image of the West is replicated by many forms of Third-World discourse that simply inverts the logic of the West: what needs to be recognised is that there is no singular other to our self and that our self is also the other to other others. As such, the question of cultural difference is not best addressed through attempts to establish relations between societies and cultures but, rather, by problematising the unity of the us and the otherness of the other that produces these differences in an interconnected and interdependent world (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 14). As

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Benhabib (2002: 25) argues, cultural practices and traditions, across the world, have developed out of a complex global dialogue that requires us to recognise the radical hybridity and polyvocality of all cultures. Any overlap between solidarity and ethnocentrism, she continues, is more contingent than necessary, and suggests that true nations, pure linguistic groups, and unsullied ethnicities are truly imagined communities: what is important today, is for us to understand who we consider ourselves to be and how we constitute those imagined communities. Understanding culture in the terms outlined above takes us beyond the reductionist essentialism that is prevalent in the work of many theorists whether modernist or postmodernist and provides a valuable alternative with which to begin thinking through alternative conceptions of belonging. It further allows the space for the recognition of heterogeneity and cross-cutting identities then to work towards the reconstruction of initial understandings of essentialism and purity. The meaning of culture, in Bhabhas (1994) terms, emerges in the inter-, the in-between spaces, of cultures; it exists not in the diversity of cultures but in the articulations of cultures hybridity its always, already existing hybridity. As Bhabha states, hybridity is not a term that resolves the tension between cultures, rather, it allows for the cultural to be seen as the effect of practices of differentiation. In contesting grand narratives and binary oppositions, Bhabha asks us to rethink the terms of cultural contestation and to think culture through the affective experiences of social marginality as opposed to pre-given differences. Consideration of such issues would entail a radical rethinking of the canonisation of particular historical trajectories and would require us to recognise how the foundation of discourses had occurred upon parochial understandings. To this end, the use of global archives, geographies and practices would allow us to see that the theories and ideas in current circulation are not created by cultures diffused from a particular centre but rather that centres are everywhere and circumferences nowhere (Pollock et al., 2000: 588). As Said (1989: 225) argues, to see Others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted would be to erode the exclusivist biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own not least. Deconstructing the modernist culture of inquiry, then, would require seeing others as other and as subjects engaged in dialogue leading to the reconstruction of histories and understandings. Whereas modernist thought is based on conceptual abstractions and ideas of a scientific history that exists outside of particular histories and thus is seen to transcend location, postmodernism projects location as relativism and uses others to deconstruct modernisms categories. In both, however, others are either known in the terms of the discourse (modernism) or, used as tools of deconstruction (post-modernism). In neither is knowledge of the other seen as the basis for the reconstruction of received knowledge and traditions; and it is this that I am arguing for here (for further discussion see Holmwood 1996). At present, the only way into debates around belonging and identity for those others who are not acknowledged as universal is by standing on their traditions or in the new differences they can make from their locations4 their voice is all about adding content, or colour, to what is already known, not about refiguring the parameters of what is known.

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Claims for these others to represent a place or a people is a form of essentialism that has as its corollary, ideas of a discourse which has a centre. In order to avoid essentialising, and thereby marginalising, it is necessary to see all identities as local and to understand the relations between knowledge communities as dialogues in which there is neither external reference point nor essential standpoint. Dialogue, then, can only occur in the absence of a centre, of universals, and thus, through the deconstruction of the centre and the universals that are posited. Focussing on a politics of belonging can never get away from questions of inclusion and exclusion and this will inevitably turn on the binary oppositions of self and other which, as I have discussed, are fundamentally problematic. As Bhabha (1994: 31) argues, however critical critical theory has been, or however well it claims to know other cultures, it continues to locate that knowledge as the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation. The knowledge gained is used either to universalise . . . meaning within its own cultural and academic discourse, or to sharpen its internal critique of the Western logocentric sign; it is always kept within the boundaries of the knowledge systems as they are known and exists as the docile body of difference that reproduces a relation of domination (Bhabha 1994: 31). In other words, knowledge of the other is that which allows us to recognise difference usually, their difference from us it does not require us to think differently about ourselves and even, perhaps, redefine who we consider ourselves to be. Their knowledge always stands in distinction to us and is rarely recognised as constituting any wider us. It is in the construction of others as subjects, then, that postcolonial theory, in particular, has facilitated an intervention in the representation of difference. This has further enabled the articulation of diverse subjects of differentiation where difference is not seen in terms of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits but as sites of negotiation. The premises of discontinuity and radical difference that have sustained the fiction of cultures as discrete phenomena occupying discrete spaces are gradually ceding ground. Questions of difference and identity are beginning to be rethought through understandings of connection and relation. Recognising the complexity of the world in which we live is, I suggest, the first step to thinking politics beyond culture. The accumulation of other voices in fields previously dominated by particular Western or Northern voices can only enhance the theories and policies that we then establish on the basis of this knowledge. In conclusion, then, I argue that the question of the other is not solved by simply adding them to us it has to be recognised that the adding to fundamentally alters the initial paradigm in which there was an us and an other. Cultural contestation, where adding to does not add up, creates the possibility of establishing new forms of meaning and, in doing so, disrupts the implicit generalisation of knowledge and homogenisation of experience that has been shown to be constitutive of both modern and postmodern social theory. If it is already a given that people have cultures and that those cultures are mutually distinct, then reflections on questions of belonging will always take us back to absolutist cultural identities and their associated problems. However, if we were to be archivally cosmopolitan5 and look at the world across time and space and examine how

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people have constructed communities across various identities we would encounter many more possibilities from which to base our politics. This politics could include rights being seen as the means of constructing new communities across current divisions rather than the reification of divisions that can occur when existing communities claim rights based on difference. Notes
* I would like to thank John Holmwood and the editors of this book for their helpful comments on this chapter. I would also like to thank the ESRC for their financial support, through the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, during the period of writing. 1 See, for example, Appadurai (1996), Geddes and Favell (1999), Jodhka (2001) and Croucher (2004). 2 See, for example, the two Readers by Modood and Werbner (1997) and Werbner and Modood (1997). 3 See, for example, Donnelly (1989), Falk (1995), Howard (1995), McDonald 1995 Joppke and Lukes (1999). 4 It is necessary to remain aware that claims to represent the essence of a place/people are little more than the temporary localisation of ideas from many places (Appadurai 1988: 46). 5 This formulation is adapted from Pollock et al. (2000).

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