المستخلص: |
This article investigates the history of the various strategies of assimilation that the contemporary British governments used in dealing with its ethnic minorities. It is suggested that the ideological and procedural “arsenal” of the 1950’, 1960’ and 1970’s politics of assimilationism was strategically substituted with a more comprehensive assimilatory approach of the 1980’s and 1990’ called “integrationist multiculturalism”. Culture/language planning played a paramount role in such “piecemeal social engineering project” (to use Karl Popper phrase). Yet, arguably, what seemed to be an official progressive recognition of the British ethnic minorities and their rights, through the celebration of their cultural differences and diversities, is in many respects, a firm process of cultural fossilization and stigmatization. Thus, the politics of multiculturalism is best understood as a strategy of socio-economic and political containment of the increasing ethnic militancy of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The article critically appraises the role of cultural and linguistic planning in shaping the ethnic cultural identities of the various British ethnic minorities with a particular focus on integration-related political and cultural discourses. It also argues that the politics of language planning are based on an erroneous conception of cultural identity as a fixed essentialized subject position throughout the various models of accommodating ethnic and cultural difference.
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