ABSTRACT
The prospect of delineating the scope of such interventions becomes all the more daunting given multiculturalism's ever-increasing elasticity. Liberal versions of multiculturalism rely on pluralism to mystify the economic and political inequities that are in large part related to racial/gender/sexual difference. Multiculturalism's emphasis on difference has been helped by postmodern critiques of Enlightenment notions of rationality, progress, and universal truth, as a result of which the idea of a singular and universal reason undergirding and encompassing all human activity has yielded to relativist accounts of alterity, variety, and change. Multiculturalism exerts pressure on existing disciplinary configurations and their various legitimating narratives as newly authorized knowledges challenge the content as well as the methodologies of disciplinary enquiry. As it raises these and other challenges, it fuels the growth of a language of possibility that avoids invoking the Absolute Spirit, even implicitly. Multiculturalism may very well end up posing an alternative to the humanities.
