The increasingly multicultural fabric of modern societies has given rise to many new issues and conflicts, as ethnic and national minorities demand recognition and support for their cultural identity. This book presents a new conception of the rights and status of minority cultures. It argues that certain sorts of 'collective rights' for minority cultures are consistent with liberal democratic principles, and that standard liberal objections to recognizing such rights on grounds of individual freedom, social justice, and national unity, can be answered. However, Professor Kymlicka emphasises that no single formula can be applied to all groups and that the needs and aspirations of immigrants are very different from those of indigenous peoples and national minorities. The book discusses issues such as language rights, group representation, religious education, federalism, and secession - issues which are central to understanding multicultural politics, but which have been surprisingly neglected in contemporary liberal theory.

Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights

I for any first-person narrative, that the narrator is a real person. Take Jane Eyre as an example, advertised on the title page as “an autobiography.” Jane has lived an adventurous life and now strives to record it. She tells the story of her past in order to project a certain self-image, and she may thus reveal at least as much about her present self as she does about her past self. In the telling her childhood is revised and altered—perhaps even distorted to the point that some of the recollections would not be corroborated by others. We can recognize the artifice in her retrospective telling, since she records childhood conversations with the presumption of word-forword memory. But there are also changes that she would be less aware of. Her memories of childhood, like anyone’s memories, have drifted imperceptibly in accordance with interests, values, and preoccupations developed later in her life. We can say, more generally, that Jane does not see the lens through which she sees her own reality, and her past is part of that reality. Readers might decide that they can identify her biases in ways that she cannot, and, in an effort to see the past as it really was, take what Jane reveals about her values as a mature narrator and then subtract the elements that seem to be later revisions. Of course,

Michael Barry

Papers

"To forget your place": Translation and Irretrievability in Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky