ABSTRACT
This chapter foregrounds the close affinities between the multicultural, intercultural and transcultural although they differ in their intellectual positioning from the sociological and anthropological to the philosophical, hermeneutical and metaphysical accounts. The focus of this chapter is less on how these terms have or can be been translated into government policies on 'managing' diversity in multi-ethnic states and more on providing some conceptual clarity. The multicultural here captures both the instances of interweaving between one culture and another and acknowledges that, through contact between the host self and minority other, cultures, both dominant and 'minority', become retranslated and reconstructed. The emergence of the multicultural subject, therefore, renders boundaries and borders unstable and porous. Similar to the radical version of the multicultural, the intercultural subject is critical of cultural boundaries and proposes an alternative social epistemology which transcends and criticises the ideology of dualism and essentialism.
