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Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press, 2000. 182 pp. $19.95 sc.
Himani Bannerji offers a feminist, anti-racist, Marxist critique of multiculturalism as a means for the white Canadian elite to oppress non-whites, immigrants, women, and other minorities. She notes how the elite use constructions like "culture" and "community" to oppress while hiding behind the liberal-democratic connotations of multiculturalism. Bannerji urges non-white Canadians to reject multiculturalism and articulate their own cultural politics. Within Bannerji's critique of multiculturalism there is also a critique of the tendency of orthodox Marxism to overlook personal experience and subjectivity that she addresses by writing from personal experience.
In the first essay, "The Paradox of Diversity," Bannerji notes how the language of multiculturalism (i.e., visible minority, women of colour) constrains non-white persons. The problem is not that such identifiers exist but that they signal a need to control and manage non-white Canadians. Emphasizing the visible minority, she argues, reduces the non-white woman to an essentialised symbol of culture and as such limits her potential to claim political and subjective agency. The paradox is that multicultural language serves the goal of Whites to track race and ethnicity rather than the interest of visible minorities.