ABSTRACT
Fanon alerts us to a dialectical relationship between the universal and the particular in recognition struggles, and this chapter articulates this relationship in more specific terms. Universality has come to accrue something of a bad name in much postcolonial theorising, coming to stand in for exclusion, assimilation and violence. I draw on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘contingent universality’ in order to highlight that there is no way of drawing a firm line between the universal and the particular. Butler’s reflections are important because they show how what is considered universal at any given time is always subject to revision and contestation. They also demonstrate how claims ostensibly concerned with the particular may in fact be ‘competing universalisms’ – an insight I ground with an exploration of postcolonial feminist demands for recognition within feminism. The chapter ends with a consideration of how nation may function as a contingent universal in multicultural struggles for recognition. Building on Ghassan Hage’s idea of the nation as a field of power, I suggest that struggles for the affirmation of difference can similarly be seen as challenging the false universality of hegemonic visions of nation, in turn positing their own competing conceptions of the national ‘we’.
