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Insofar as the postcolonial project is one of the elaboration of “the plurality of modernity, and the agency multiplying its forms”, my project is a contribution to this larger one in the form of a postcolonial theory of multiculturalism (Ashcroft, 2009, p. 85). Drawing from minority standpoints, arguments, and narratives, I focus on the lives and perspectives of a few broad groups in particular: indigenous peoples in Canada, Muslim women, and East Asian “immigrant” minorities. I take up a critical theory approach to framing multicultural theory and the questions it asks from the standpoints of minorities themselves, foregrounding the challenges and perspectives of racialized groups for whom their ethno-culture is morally salient and central to their own understanding of their identities and aims. This framework draws on the insights of feminist theorists of deliberative democracy but also departs from them in the crucial respect of affirming a conception of culture and identity that accepts some basic “communitarian” ideas of morality and culture, while conceiving these within a postcolonial project of cultural reclamation rather than a republican framework of the public sphere. My project is organized into two parts: The first section systematically critiques the dominant liberal multiculturalist model based on Canadian multicultural policy and theorized by Kymlicka, which is oriented by the liberal state’s perspective in its aims of integrating minorities. In the first chapter, I reject his universalist principle of liberal neutrality as the standard for justice in favour of a pluralist democratic standard that accommodates “thin” theories of the good. In the second and third chapters, I reformulate Kymlicka’s categories of “national minorities” and “polyethnic minorities” respectively in order to take account of postcolonial indigenous sovereignty and the transnational scope of ethnic identity. The second section develops a pluralist account of agency in its descriptive (Chapter 4), normative (Chapter 5), and prescriptive (Chapter 6) aspects (Deveaux 2006 p. 179). This is developed as a constructive critique of liberal standards of autonomy, particularly feminist proposals for a standard of procedural autonomy, as unable to adequately describe and assess heteronomous agency.

The aim of this study is to investigate three English as a second language (ESL) textbooks used for English 6 in Swedish upper secondary school from a postcolonial perspective, answering the following research question: Who is the implied reader, based on assumptions of the expected experiences and culture, and what and who is constructed as deviant or Other? To examine these questions, the study employs critical discourse analysis and implements strategies from multimodal analysis. The analysis is concerned with matters such as what is constructed as familiar or unfamiliar to the student, what images are chosen, and what those images convey. The study shows that the implied reader is expected to align with Western culture and experiences in two of the textbooks. In the third, the implied reader has no ethnic markers at all. Further findings show several cases where non-Western cultures are depicted as deviant, both in texts and images. Therefore, I emphasize that it is important that teachers are aware of how different cultures are depicted in the materials they choose to use in their classroom to be able to prevent reproduction of harmful stereotypes and portrayals of non- Western cultures that do not align with the fundamental values of the Swedish school.