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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/45636 |
| Date | 17 November 2023 |
| Creators | Lee, Pamela Yong-Tien |
| Contributors | Sikka, Sonia |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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