Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Writing particularly in response to North American settler colonialism, they argue that the politics of recognition has functioned, not to ameliorate colonialism's negative effects, but to reproduce them. We seek here to respond to the important provocation posed by Simpson and Coulthard's scholarship, and to extend their critiques into new geographic and empirical terrains. Specifically, we draw on the notion of coloniality to establish a comparative frame that can bring both settler and non-settler postcolonial contexts into dialogue. Doing so highlights a multiplicity of forms of recognition relationships, as well as of sites and structures of power beyond the settler state. It also illuminates a complex, unstable middle ground that can exist between recognition and its absence, which provides a productive ground from which to engage with the possibilities of being against, or beyond, recognition.
The emergence of 'social cohesion' as a policy concept in various Western states has been widely understood as part of a backlash against multiculturalism. This article applies an anthropological lens to the implementation of an Australian project to engage young people in order to 'strengthen social cohesion' in outer metropolitan Melbourne. Ethnographic analysis of the project lends empirical support to key critiques of the social cohesion paradigm, including the deployment of 'community' as a technology of cultural governance, the obscuring of socioeconomic conditions and issues of social justice, and the foreclosing of any understanding of conflict as a potential social good. Some of the tensions evident in the project, however, are reflective not of recent shifts but rather of long-running dynamics in the governance of cultural difference. Thus, the article argues, narratives of a 'multiculturalism backlash' capture significant changes but also risk obscuring critical continuities in the exercise of governmentality.
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