ABSTRACT

The concept of “neoliberal multiculturalism” has been in circulation for two decades, and the phenomenon it describes for perhaps a decade more. In my reckoning, Slavok Zizek can be credited with the first iteration in print (1997), followed by Speed and Collier (2000), though neither used that precise wording. By the mid-2000s, a number of scholars, myself included, were using the term, in many cases influenced by one another, although possibly also through independent invention (Hale, 2002; Hale, 2005; Hale and Millaman, 2006); Melamed, 2006; Overmyer-Velázquez, 2010; Postero, 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2004; Speed, 2005). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the first circulation in academic circles marks the time when people developed the concept – a point that Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) has made forcefully with regard to related ideas of “decolonial” theory. In my experience, for example, the concept took shape in dialogue with Maya intellectuals in Guatemala in the late-1990s, as we puzzled over why the state, which had inflicted massive genocidal violence on the Maya a few years earlier, would be so readily responsive to Maya demands for cultural rights. Over the next two decades, the central message – that rights grounded in cultural difference and neoliberal economic policies are mutually enabling rather than opposed – was at first received with scepticism and critique (e.g. Van Cott, 2006), especially among those who had been theorizing liberalism’s communitarian turn with most enthusiasm (e.g. Kymlicka, 1995; Kymlicka and Banting, 2006). As of this writing, critique has given way to widespread use of the term, with debate focusing instead on the extent to which the bearers of multicultural rights have generally suffered from neoliberal polices, or made them work toward broader goals of empowerment and self-determination (for an example of the latter position, see: Kymlicka, 2013). Ironically, terminological consensus has emerged just as the phenomenon itself has begun to recede, displaced by a new, even more menacing, mode of governance. 1