ABSTRACT
Opposition to multiculturalism has engendered some curious and spurious identifications by its conservative critics around the issues of authority, authenticity and history. The history of multiculturalism is displaced through the appeal to a mutually accessible future; a future not contaminated by the past and present historical moment of multiculturalism. Debate in Australia around multicultural writing has tellingly shown how the other’s body, specifically that of the migrant theoretician/critic, is discursively inscribed as in/authentic through just such liberal fears and fantasies about ‘ethnic identity’ and power reversal. Promoting writing precisely because of the cultural differences, for example, which inform its production threatens the supposed neutrality of purveyors of quality, but it also upsets some migrant writers who, like M. Lewitt, understandably want to resist what they see as the stereotyping and ghettoizing of their work as examples of the ‘migrant experience’.
