The Bristol school of multiculturalism

Tariq Modood, Bhikhu Parekh, Nasar Meer and Varun Uberoi are well known for their defence of multiculturalism in Britain and beyond. The article contends that the collective oeuvre of these and other scholars associated with the University of Bristol’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship represents a distinctive and important school of multicultural political thought, a ‘Bristol school of multiculturalism’. The school challenges the liberal biases of much of the corpus of multicultural political thinking and the nostrums of British and other western democracies regarding the status of the majority culture as well as of cultural minorities. It is an identarian and assertive multiculturalism that, above all, seeks inclusion and a sense of belonging in the national community. The article situates the Bristol school in the British context in which it arose, outlines its distinctive approach and principles and critically assesses its positions on liberalism and national identity. It also raises the question of the political acceptability of the Bristol school’s ‘muscular multiculturalism’