ABSTRACT
The word culture suffuses the discourse on multiculturalism. Much multicultural pedagogy and theory uncritically fetishizes the field of culture, thus partaking in what Steve Fuller has characterized as hyperculturism. Yet even within the multiculturalism literature that eschews these facile positions, culture, a critical category itself, often remains uninterrogated. The “dominant culture,” “hegemonic culture,” “subalternated cultures,” “critical culture,” these are just a few of the terms invoked within this literature to examine the historical construction of privilege and difference, the maintenance of power and prejudice, or the quest for resistance and critique. As a crucial term embedded within the rubric under analysis in this volume, culture begs a similar rigorous consideration. Perhaps this lack of attention is due to the seeming self-evidence of culture; we all think we know what we are talking about when we use or read the word. However, culture is not simply an empirical phenomenon, and the commonsense approach to it as though it were obscures its relation to value, epistemological pursuits, and subject formation, all significant concerns for multiculturalism. The implications of this misapprehension of the very term at stake within multiculturalism is my concern in this essay.
