ABSTRACT
Over the years, we have come to see multiculturalism-as a set of propositions about identity, knowledge, power, and change in education-as a kind of normal science-as a form of disciplinarity of difference in which the matter of alterity has been effectively displaced as a supplement. On the terms of its present trajectory, multiculturalism can be properly diagnosed as a discourse of power that attempts to manage the extraordinary tensions and contradictions existing in modern life that have invaded social institutions, including the university and the school. At the heart of its achievement, multiculturalism has succeeded in freezing to the point of petrification its central object: “culture.” Within the managerial language of the university, culture has become a useful discourse of containment, a narrow discourse of ascriptive property in which particular groups are granted their nationalist histories, their knowledges, and, alas, their experts. Cultural competence then becomes powerfully deployed to blunt the pain of resource scarcity and to inoculate the hegemonic knowledge paradigms in the university from the daylight of subjugated knowledges and practices.
