Pathak, Pathik (2005) Breaking majority rules: the politics of communities and citizens in Britain and India. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

In this interdisciplinary thesis I will be arguing that new configurations of state discrimination have outrun the vocabularies of liberal multiculturalism and secularism. These `majoritarianisms' are parasitic on the creeping foreclosure of secular spaces and identities from which emergent antiracist and antifascist struggles can be mounted. State multiculturalism in Britain and India has been instrumental in fertilising the sectarian soil in which the secular has decomposed. They have patronised cultural separateness only to make capital from the isolation of ethnic blocs from mainstream society by expressing exasperation at the reluctance of minorities to `integrate'. The faith and ethnic communities consolidated under the multiculturalist `management' of diversity have grown bereft of a political culture with which to interrogate the racist state. The privileging of cultural consciousness has been at the expense of political consciousness and an understanding of how discrimination cuts across cultural lines. The crisis of the secular is therefore simultaneously also a crisis of citizenship. The thesis opens with chapters that draw on sociological research and political commentary to assess the differing forms of majoritarianism and crises of citizenship in Britain and India respectively. In the third chapter I approach these issues through the prism of postcolonial theory using Gayatri Spivak's rehabilitation of responsibility as a collective right (2003) to arrive at a contemporary expression of political education. In the final two chapters I apply these principles to bring the multicultural and the secular into `productive crisis' in Indian and British contexts by circumventing the orthodox divisions that characterise intellectual approaches to anti-racism and antifascism. I argue that there is a role for a modified understanding of multiculturalism in the recovery of the secular. I conclude therefore that renewing secular culture is predicated on the Left's ability to reaffirm the reciprocity between political consciousness, citizenship and struggles for racial, ethnic and religious equality.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races D History General and Old World > DS Asia D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Multiculturalism -- Great Britain, Multiculturalism -- India, Postcolonialism -- Great Britain, Postcolonialism -- India, Communities -- Political aspects, Great Britain -- Social conditions, India -- Social conditions
Date:	October 2005
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Dabydeen, David ; Lazarus, Neil, 1953-
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	310 leaves
Language:	eng
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1192

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