Postmodernism and James A. Banks' Multiculturalism: The Limits of Intellectual History

Investigates the influence of intellectual and political concerns in James Banks' account of multiculturalism, examining his embrace of and hesitations regarding postmodernism, and suggesting that the reasons for this hesitation lie in the tensions between his civic and moral commitments and the radical and skeptical implications of postmodernist theory. The paper examines Banks' earlier attempts to marry multiculturalism and the modern empiricist paradigm of social science. (SM)