Description
Book SynopsisFor those interested in continuing the struggle for decolonization, the word “multiculturalism” can seem like a sad joke. After all, institutionalized multiculturalism today is a muck of buzzwords, branding strategies, and virtue signaling that has nothing to do with real struggles against racism and colonialism. But Decolonize Multiculturalism unearths a buried history.
The book focuses on the student and youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by global movements for decolonization and anti-racism, which aimed to fundamentally transform their society, as well as the fierce repression of these movements by the state, corporations, and university administrations. Part of the response has been sheer violence—campus policing, for example, only began in the ’70s, paving the way for the militarized campuses of today—with institutionalized multiculturalism acting like the velvet glove around the iron fist of state violence.
And yet today’s multiculturalism also contains residues of the original radical demands of the student and youth movements that it aims to repress: to open up the university, to wrench it from its settler colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal capitalist origins, and to transform it into a place of radical democratic possibility.
Trade Review“This book boldly calls for a multiculturalism that is deep and committed rather than one that is superficial and institutionally driven. Alessandrini shows how we can produce a radical multiculturalism if we build from the ongoing legacies of decolonization. May we all heed its rallying cry.”
—Roderick A. Ferguson, author of We Demand: The University and Student Protests
“Written with wit and imagination . . . it also provides us with a timely reminder as to how the study of multiculturalism can resist the platitudes of pundits who pontificate about political correctness, critical race theory, wokeism, or some other moral panic.”
—Daniel McNeil, author of Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation
Decolonize Multiculturalism seeks to steal the project of multiculturalism from the clutches of opportunistic elites aboard “armed lifeboats” and put it back into the hands of young rebels—past, present, and future—for the sake of destroying the world to build it anew. In prose, so playful and fun, that makes decolonization irresistible, Tony Alessandrini weaves together a history of the present to chart out a future worth fighting for.
—Noura Erakat, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice, Rutgers University
