>Hi folks
>
>Can anyone refer me to an accessible online sources - a good Left/Marxist
>critique and/or appraisal - on multiculturalism, please. I have no access
>to academic resources at home, so accessible sources will be useful.
>
>Cheers
>
>Ismail
I will do what I can to help you get access to these resources wherever possible. Can you not use interlibrary loan? I totally use that around here -- even though I could use the local state college libraries. It's just easier to order and pick up at the library a block away.
Online, and perhaps not the most direct approaches to the topic, but helpful, and the footnotes might lead down intersting paths:
http://www.alcoff.com/content/afraidid.html
Who's Afraid of Identity Politics?
http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html The Political Critique of Identity
I just read her book, <http://www.alcoff.com/books.html>Visible Identities: Race, Gender, And The Self, and it wasn't bad.
It's not a flaming marxist type of book, though, and is pretty sedate considering it is heavy on philosophical critique.
I haven't read <http://www.palgrave-usa.com/Catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403964467>Identity Politics Reconsidered but it might be interesting.
If you have any inclination at all, I wouldn't even hesitate to write and talk with her directly. She is a fantastic person, and back when I was a peon, she was happy to talk and help.
I should probably slink away and hide after posting this link, but a flavor of a more militant approach is from the Red Orange: http://www.etext.org/Politics/AlternativeOrange/2/v2n1_lccc.html
If you can get through that without wanting to gouge your own eyes out with a rusty jacknife, let me know. I will send you a bottle of scotch or something as a prize. :)
The Trouble With Diversity. It's not exactly Marxist, and I wasn't clear on the authors credentials in that regard, but it metes out arguments that certainly can be deployed -- and strengthened and enhanced by Marxists. I've said here before that his general target is probably liberal/progressive academics, since his artuments have already been articulated by radical leftists and marxists. I don't have access to my files, but there was a pile of criticisms of multiculturalism when it became really popular in the late 80s and 90s. Every major journal devoted articles to it, sometimes entire issues if I'm recalling correctly. (If I can find this, I could send you a copy. Or maybe there's a way to get you access to something online?
If it helps, there was an article by someone in Dissent, I think, the title was something about CREG -- Class, Race, Ethnicity, Gender -- which was how the acronym went early on, but somehow got dropped for CRG. I wish I could remember the author's name, but I'm pretty sure Dissent. I've had luck writing journals and asking if they can help locate it, then using interlibrary loan to get copies of the article shipped to me. These days, you could purchase, though as I recall, you're not exactly flush with moola, right? (Are you abroad now? Is that why access it difficult?)
Wendy Brown's two latest, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity. The first isn't addressed to multiculturalism specifically, but to a victim-based identity politics where identity is defined on _injury_. Here, she makes excellent arguments as to why "race, ethnicity, gender" have been emphasized with little thought to class.
The critiques popular in the early 90s were about the way multiculturalism was co-opted by corporations to become handy ways of pacifying oppressed groups, in the u.s. and abroad. In short: hire people of color, women, etc. into positions of management, gives workers something to hold out for.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)