Reviews 109 Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics

ference is a welcome treatise that deals provocatively with some of the major limitations of “cultural studies ” as it is currently configured within the North American academy. Although the field of cultural studies is far from monolithic, San Juan Jr. identifies major theoretical trends that, in his view, have sufficiently diluted the radical intentions of its ear-liest progenitors. Innovatively building on his previous work (cf. San Juan Jr., 1998, 2000), the text is at once a theoretical and political indictment of what he calls “orthodox ” cultural studies. The author, however, does not seek to dismiss the enterprise of cultural studies entirely; rather he takes issue with the political pusillanimity of some strands of cultural studies that have engaged in a wholesale and uncritical adoption of postmodernist and post-structuralist “doctrines. ” In the author’s view, the rhetorical excesses of “post-al” approaches that valorize notions of “indeterminability ” and “discursivity ” and which lend themselves to an exorbitant “culturalism ” have contributed to a “metaphysical turn in cul-tural studies ” (p. 223). Over the span of eight chapters that address issues as varied as racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual politics, postcolonial studies, and academic culture wars, San Juan Jr. provides a wide-ranging critique of these “post-al ” tendencies