Identity-based recognition politics can be absorbed into neoliberal markets, displacing redistribution

Evidence

We might almost say that another kind of multiculturalism has come into being, bypassing the socially liberal political and experiential varieties—a multiculturalism that can be reconciled to the market orientation of the modern liberal nation. Zygmunt Bauman has suggested that in the contemporary era of global capitalism, long-standing social bonds are now sacrificed to the preeminence of the market and mandatory individuality in a process he refers to as “liquid modernity.” One might expect this process to sound the death knell of multiculturalism, which is by definition predicated on collectivism. However, as we saw earlier, another school of thought calls out multiculturalism for an obsessive focus on cultural identity and practices that overlook possibly more important sources of discrimination, such as socioeconomic inequality. This is a kind of multiculturalism, it is said, that has no problem accommodating neoliberal demands and in which race—along with other identitarian categories such as gender and sexual orientation—has taken the place of redistribution in a kind of marketplace of recognition. In addition, with the continued exotic predilection for marketable ethnic products, cultural difference itself takes on an increased value, and the best kind of multicultural subject is then one who can enter this market as a free and full participant. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 184

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s project: the tension between a market-friendly ‘multicultural subject’ and Hamid’s Changez, whose American belonging is precisely a market transaction that fails. — connects to: Neoliberalism succeeded by seducing workers out of class identification. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1649
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman) and the reframing of multiculturalism as a recognition market rather than redistribution politics.