Postmulticulturalism: Some approaches to the study of contemporary social and cultural processes

Postmulticulturalism is a way to conceptualize social and cultural diversity under the globalization. Unlike multiculturalism that developed as a nation-state project postmulticulturalism considers the tendencies of fluidity, processuality, and overcoming institutional constellations and national boundaries. Postmulticulturalism allows a specific vision of contemporary problems, thus contributing to the understanding of the role and functions of the nation state under the globalization, to the redefining of integration in national and transnational contexts, and to the transition to dialogue forms of maintaining social and political unity within the nation. Thereafter the authors consider a ‘postmulticultural turn’ in social sciences, which is associated with managing cultural diversity and allows the nation state to rethink itself in the postmulticultural perspective. Postmulticulturalism contributes to the development of new conceptual and discursive spaces, and to the practical explications of the changing reality under the recurrent transitions between old and new, the past and the future. Postmulticulturalism is a stage in the development of a multicultural ideology aimed at deessentialization of ethnicity and overcoming cultural discrimination. However, it does not deny multiculturalism as a way to conceptualize new social and cultural realities and migration situation in nation states that are supported by various multicultural policies and provide the postmulticultural approach with the impulses for social and cultural dynamics relevant for the contemporary society.