Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
diversity’ provides a space for ethnic Australians to explore and express their differences in a contemporary setting, it continues to ignore that ‘culture within itself is already an assemblage of differences, diverse tendencies and unresolved tensions’ (Appignanesi 2010a, p. 5).
The creation of the culturally diverse space also risks preventing genuine movement towards an integrated and inclusive arts and cultural ecology. While the multicultural subject is now present in the arts, it may remain transparent, that is, it might be ‘seen’ but not necessarily engaged with (Mercer 1999; Papastergiadis 2005). Such an argument is depicted by the continued failure of ethnic artists, including those of Asian, African-Caribbean and African origins, to be recognised as contributors to the history of European art itself (Hall 2002a, p. 80; Araeen 2010a, p. 53). Such an issue illustrates the persistent racism of the European arts industry, as well as the duplicitous work done by the discourse of cultural diversity. By focusing on the celebration of diversity/difference in art, the discourse diverts attention away from the continued racialisation of its history and systems, inexorably ignoring the influence of ethnic artists (Appignanesi 2010a, p. 10). According to this logic, critics like Appignanesi and Araeen feel that the turn to cultural diversity in artistic practice and curatorship has been deceptive.
The issues raised by the critique of ethnic diversity in Western art circuits can be translated to the cultural diversity turn in Australian multiculturalism. First, it presents the issue in which recognition based on racial/ethnic difference designates a particular, bordered space of the multicultural person and positions this person outside the white, monocultural centre. Cultural diversity has, overall, been charged with a social engineering task, designed to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of ethnic difference in Australia. The idea that cultural difference causes trouble consequently shadows all aspects of cultural diversity policies and initiatives. The concern here is that cultural diversity in contemporary Australia (along with the notions of ‘celebration of difference’ and ‘ethnicity as choice’) is deployed in a way that inevitably perpetuates racist realities for Australians. In the discourse on cultural diversity the culturally diverse person becomes diverse in accordance with ethnic or racialised categories. The critical dialogue and interaction designed to be opened up by cultural diversity subsequently becomes focused on the multicultural person as distinct from the white Australian. Graeme Turner’s (2008; p. 573) analysis of Australian inner-city suburbs supports this, arguing that ‘the accoutrements of cosmopolitanism are ever more self-consciously displayed, [and] cultural diversity has now become a local service, rather than an organic attribute of the local community’. Multicultural studies that do not address this problem risk reinforcing the binary that they intend to critique.
Critical multiculturalism studies address the binary tension more thoroughly and form what this research has identified as the second key approach to studies of cultural difference in Australia. Critical approaches to multiculturalism have been present since the 1970s; however, as mentioned earlier, the 1990s saw the emergence of new critical analyses of cultural difference that were indicative of new postmodern cultural theories. Pioneers of this work in Australia include Gunew (1997), Hage (1998), Papastergiadis (1995, 1997, 1999, 2000) and Ang (2001).
Recently, this foundational critical work has been added to by scholars interested in the ecologies of twenty-first century migrant communities. Unlike migrant communities of the post-war period, which involved larger, diasporic migration, new communities of Australian migrants develop from a fragmented mix of people. The communities exhibit highly diverse demographics, including varying economic and cultural capital and fluctuating attachments to notions of home (Ang 2011; Noble 2011; Yue and Wyatt 2014, p. 224). Some scholars argue that the complexity of contemporary migration has triggered different formations of racism and have thus set about mapping ‘neo-racism’ or the ‘post-racial’ (Yue and Wyatt 2014, pp. 224–25). This work draws on the scholarship of Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) on ‘neo-racism’, which posits that debates about multiculturalism and immigration are impacted by a new form of racism that is formed on the basis of cultural rather than biological differences. Yue and Wyatt (2014, p. 225) argue that new racism surfaced in Australia in the 1970s, following the arrival of multiculturalism, and has been in a constant state of change ever since. Significantly, they claim that ‘the old racism that deemed non-Anglo and Celtic others biologically inferior is replaced by the cultural racism of new racism’ (ibid.). Ethnic minorities are increasingly seen to have cultural differences completely incompatible with the dominant Anglo community and thus pose a threat to the nation (Corlett 2002, cited in ibid.).
In some ways, this argument is not dissimilar to that put forward by Hage (2014a) in his depictions of two main forms of racism: existential racism and numerological racism. Hage (1998) argues that most of the racism experienced in post–Second World War Australia is based on the perceived scale of ‘the Other’. In other words, this racism arises when the presence of the Other seems large enough to engulf white Australia. Existential racism, on the other hand, is a racism of disgust and more like the biological forms of racism categorised as ‘past’ forms of racism by neo-race and post-racial scholars. Existential racism is the type of racism Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) describes in his analysis of anti-Semitism, in which a person is repulsed simply by being in proximity to a person from another race. Hage (2014a) argues that Sartre’s conception of racism was most evident during Australian colonisation, as demonstrated in nineteenth-century representations of Indigenous Australians and Chinese migrants. I argue, rather, that numerological racism has always crossed over with existential or biological racism. Chinese migrants who arrived during the gold rush became abject subjects according to a biological racism which deemed ‘Oriental’ skin to inherently carry malice. But, the intensity of this abjection was also related to the perceived scale of the ‘malice’, that is, the numbers of Chinese migrants arriving were seen to be so high that domestic miners would be undercut or pushed out of the labour market.5
Today, it can appear as if numerological racism is prominent because of the regular condemnations of cultural or religious practices, but the sense of entitlement that drives these racist attacks inevitably leads us back to a perceived biological or existential superiority. While the trigger for racism is perhaps a numerological presence, the foundation of the racism remains the assumptions associated with racialised bodies. As will be demonstrated in Chapters 4–6, it rarely takes long for racialised tropes associated with biology and the physicality of the body to surface. This is perhaps why Hage (2014a, p. 233) sees existential racism as being once again on the rise in Australia, particularly towards recently arrived African and Indian migrants; that is, because existential racism has never not been present, it is just more adept at camouflaging itself in narratives of cultural diversity. Christine Kim (2014, p. 316) supports this argument, suggesting that race and racism continue to operate largely through a visual register, emanating an ‘eerie familiarity’ with older narratives and ultimately encouraging us to ‘conceptualise race as a biological phenomenon clearly inscribed onto the body’. As such, liberal contemporary societies such as Australia are able to purport that racism is now ‘a matter of either personal prejudice or part of a historical moment that we have now transcended’. She extends:
As a means of sketching out a cultural narrative about the overcoming of race in the past century, the move from the hypervisible to the invisible simultaneously expresses the dangers of race (to mark indelibly as well as to be circumvented by those that ‘pass’) as well as operates as the cultural grammar that structures many of the racial discourses in the contemporary moment. In the framework of liberal multiculturalism, the individual becomes the mechanism for overcoming racism with the common-sense belief that if one is colour-blind and incapable of seeing race, he or she cannot be guilty of racism. And yet, even if we want to believe this claim that many are now incapable of ‘seeing’ race, how do we understand their inability to sense race at work in the current moment? And to anticipate the latter part of my argument, how are they also able to ignore the pungent stink of racism? (p. 318)
Kim’s conceptualisation of race in the twenty-first century is an effective interpretation of Balibar’s (1991, p. 21) concept, which argues that it is at ‘first sight’ that neo-racism appears to be removed from old or biological racism. At first sight it can seem as if