Just a quick note on multiculturalism. First I haven't read Wendy Brown's book and review the few quotes shag posted and the review somebody else posted.
What has to be remembered in the various put downs of multicultural concepts is that these did not arrive ex nihilo, out of nothing. These discourses were the direct consequence of the legislation that created affirmative action policies that attempted to correct historical economic and social wrongs.
The cultural emphasis on `identity' was tied to gender, race, and ethnicity legal requirements. It then became a problem of conceptualizing what `African-American' was.
In turn the white male power majority, then became obcessed with its own identity, because its power was certainly threatened by all these events.
So the point is that multiculturalism may have become a degraded discourse into trivia, but it sure didn't stare that way. It was a pivotal stage in the civil rights battles...
CG