This paper considers the role that Judith Butler’s conception of the term “performativity” might play in the provision of a multicultural education in pluralist Western societies. The first section of the paper will outline what Butler means by performativity. Her thinking on this matter derives from Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s “Before The Law”. This involves recognition of the connection between foundationalist approaches to knowledge and legality: “the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits”. Butler argues that the anticipation of the law (knowledge) as “an authoratative disclosure of meaning” conjures its object. She reads this approach in relation to gender which is treated as an interior essence to be disclosed, a treatment which produces that essence. Butler also recognises that this should not be thought of as a singular act but considered as a form of linguistic repetition and ritual. She sees the “invocation” of performativity as very much an ethical matter. For Butler, language performs us; various discourses designate who and what we are. This understanding of performativity has an ethical dimension because it works against essentialistic or biologistic performative discourses. It clearly applies to issues of race and ethnicity as well as gender. The second section of the paper will focus on the performative discourse that postcolonial theorist Edward Said (Said does not use the term “performativity”) describes as Orientalism. Said shows how the Western distinction between Orient and Occident constructs differences from afar – there is no attempt to understand other cultures, but rather a tendency to read them in terms of characteristics considered undesirable by the colonial power. For example, Enlightenment humanism constructs a notion of the inhuman unenlightened culture. In the final part of this section, we will consider how documents such as the National Curriculum for English, though motivated by liberal aspirations, reinforce this performative discourse in the infantilising distinctions between a national literary heritage and writing from other cultures. The third section of the paper considers how schooling might, in some fairly general sense, respond to Butler’s approach to performativity. What this requires is more than a simple recognition of difference, but an understanding of how difference is linguistically performed. The argument presented here goes beyond what is taught in the classroom. We will also consider the significance that being introduced to a performative understanding of gender, ethnicity and culture might have for teachers. Such an introduction may help teachers to question their own attitudes, attitudes that may reiterate essentialist approaches in their general dealings with students. This would require an approach to teacher “training” that emphasised a committed treatment of philosophical ideas that could not be easily conceived of in terms of “training”. The final section of this paper warns against legalistic approaches to ethnicity within education. Butler, drawing on Derrida, refers to the iterability of language in which words, though they carry their old meanings and resonance with them, find themselves in new contexts in which they may do damage or act creatively; consider the reappropriation of the word “queer” within the gay community. Understanding language in terms of fixity will not help to establish a more sophisticated form of multicultural education. Rather, it is the iterability of language that opens the way for new linguistic performances and original ways of conceiving of and teaching “difference”.

Conclusion The paper concludes by focusing on the importance that must be given to linguistic concerns in the provision of education in a pluralist society. The paper argues that the recognition, if not acceptance of the performativity of race and gender, has curricular implications for the teaching of academic subjects. However, its significance is clearly interdisciplinary and relevant to considerations pertaining to language within the classroom and the school. Ultimately the paper notes that the sensitivity shown by Butler to the creative force of language and its capacity to “do” or “do us in” draws attention to the inadequacies of liberal values pertaining to rights and tolerance.