Culture and Crisis in the Age of Tolerance

ABSTRACT This article investigates the concept of culture as it has functioned in the discourse of crisis across the social sciences and humanities. As part and parcel of contemporary globality’s restructuring, culture as an ontological and ideational entity continues to structure the syntax of worldly antagonism even as its precise definition is ever expansive and elusive and without geographical centre. By canvassing the varying work of theorists from Matthew Arnold and W.E.B. Du Bois to Raymond Williams and Homi Bhabha, this discussion attempts to bridge several appropriations of culture in order to submit a rereading of culture’s textuality at the intersection of interdisciplinarity and the lineaments of conflict. It then traces this genealogy up to today’s deployment of culture, which rests on a discourse of tolerance that, as Wendy Brown has shown, allows for power and violence to materialise within a framework of liberal democratic pluralism.