Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
and, likewise, to note the frequent use of cultural difference as a theme explored in digital storytelling, usually via narratives of migration and ethnic identity. At least half of the Australian digital stories housed at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) are on these themes. Similarly, a significant portion of stories housed at StoryCenter (formerly the Center for Digital Storytelling) in the United States is dedicated to these themes. Indeed, the StoryCenter’s current website forefronts its imbrication in questions of ethnic and racial identity by stating on its ‘About’ page: ‘StoryCenter is committed to challenging white supremacy and supporting social justice, in every aspect of our work.’
Digital storytelling and whiteness
I deliberately target digital storytelling in this book because it palpably illustrates how the notion of the everyday can get deployed for less-than-everyday means in work pertaining to cultural difference – a problem I see in the scholarship of everyday multiculturalism. Digital storytelling practitioners commend the ordinariness of the genre because it allows representations of the minutia of everyday life, for example, family interactions, to surface. This element, together with the relative accessibility of the genre, allows it to present itself as part of everyday life, further assisted by the fact that the genre often takes place in spaces considered to be a part of everyday life, for example, the classroom. More recently, digital media scholars such as Alicia Blum-Ross (2015) and Lauren S. Berliner (2018) have done important work on the notion of digital participation, illustrating how the democratic claims of community digital projects are not so much the site of individual agency as they are the site of institutional aims (see also Literat et al. 2018). My intention in this book is similar; however, I home in on the relationship digital storytelling has with everyday multiculturalism and cultural difference in particular.
I therefore take StoryCenter’s claim that it challenges white supremacy to task by asking: how does the mode of digital storytelling construct, mobilise and/or limit the ‘ethnically diverse’ or non-white person? Specifically, what are the ways in which digital storytelling projects engage with concepts of cultural diversity and everyday multiculturalism to create material and affective possibilities for the racialised subject? Do digital storytelling projects generate new subjectivities or do they reproduce traditional stereotypes? After all, the stories in the thematic collections I analyse often formulate a response to the following implied questions: who is the ‘ethnically diverse person’ and what are their ‘real’ daily experiences? In addressing these questions, I embark on a deconstruction of the ethnic/racialised body as it comes to be constituted through digital storytelling.
As such, the book positions digital storytelling as an iterative performance that is produced and directed in certain ways and, as Belinda Smaill (2010, p. 138) writes in relation to the documentary form, ‘establishes the presence of the performing subject by directing our attention to that subject’. This presence is bound up with certain fantasies of the self and the Other in Western multicultural nations and ultimately impacts the ways in which the various bodies involved in the performance are articulated. Taking further cues from Sneja Gunew (2004, 2017) and Elizabeth Povinelli (2002), I consider how, via the practice of digital storytelling, multicultural subjects become embedded in relations of power that both constrain and mobilise performances according to particular notions of whiteness. Further, I analyse how performative slippages may present themselves in digital storytelling to reveal alternative aspects of lived cultural difference and subsequently destabilise the normative discourse of whiteness in Australia and similar multicultural locations.
This line of questioning adopts the approach to whiteness and critical multiculturalism introduced by anthropologist Ghassan Hage in the book White Nation (1998). Here, Hage argues that although the ‘celebrate diversity’ banner waved by Australia appears to embrace cultural pluralism, in fact, it re-establishes a white national fantasy. Following Hage, I consider how digital storytelling projects interact with the broader notion of multiculturalism and examine whether such projects work to destabilise or reinstate the forceful fiction of whiteness. I target the ways in which the focus on cultural difference in digital storytelling projects can subtly reinstate the rigid boundaries of racial homogeneity that the projects attempt to deconstruct.
The book thus analyses the ‘how’ and ‘what’ aspects of digital storytelling projects, rather than categories of aesthetic or new media quality. The analysis is always focused on what the genre does – how it constructs and impacts ethnicity and race. I use a Foucauldian framework that concerns itself not with where power originates, or why it operates, but how it is always productively exercised. (In short: what do these digital storytelling projects in Australia do?) The examination of ‘doing’ could just as importantly be carried out via a lens of gender, sexuality, queerness or class; and I remain alert to the ways in which manifold norms are bound up in any digital storytelling project and analysis. However, I have chosen to concentrate on the normative discourse of whiteness, in particular, the ways in which ethnicity and race become ‘essentially’ linked in the digital storytelling process.
A note here on my use of ‘whiteness’, a term as slippery as it is powerful. It is crucial, first, to recognise how whiteness travels globally, but also lands in particular places in particular ways. Sneja Gunew does an excellent job in her book Post-multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitanism Mediators (2017) to map the chameleon-like way that whiteness, especially in the Australian context, links itself to Europeanness and, even more specifically, to Anglo-Celticness. This linking is clearly evidenced in the Australian context, where Southern and Eastern Europeans were for a long time relegated as ‘black’ (Gunew 1994), but it is also seen, as Gunew (2017, pp. 25–27) traces, in North America and in Anglophone postcolonial theory more broadly. Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos (2010, p. 32) describe the construction of Australian whiteness as a particular (and absurd) ‘ontological condition’ that simultaneously positions ‘Indigenous peoples as non-Australian, and designated migrant groups as […] “perpetual foreigners within the Australian state”’, extending that ‘dominant white Australia seems to render indispensable a perpetual position and re-positioning of the foreigner-within as white-non-white or as white-but-not-white enough. This repositioning is an effect of the impact that the ongoing violent dispossession of the Indigenous peoples has on the nature of white Australian ways of being’. In the Australian context, Southern Europeans become ‘sufficiently like, while remaining suitably unlike, the dominant white Australian subject position’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2010, p. 45; emphasis in the original), where the point of comparison for ‘likeness’ is Britishness. Although it is crucial to recognise the situatedness of whiteness, this ontological structure chimes with that seen in other former Anglo-settler colonies; for example, Himani Bannerji (2000, p. 108) illustrates that hegemonic whiteness is similarly encoded in North America through a national narrative premised on ‘European/English’ settler colonialism, which functions as ‘the ideology of a nation-state’. ‘Whiteness/Europeanness’ serves as a ‘key bonding element’ that allows other European bodies, despite their distance from idealised Anglo-Englishness, to ‘form a part of their community of “whiteness” as distinct from nonwhite “others”’, though a distance from full inclusion always remains (ibid.). Likewise, in the United Kingdom, ‘Englishness is predicated on whiteness’ (Nayak 2017, p. 295).
In what follows, I explore how some subjects of digital storytelling projects come to be seen as migrants or ethnics, distinct from Anglo-Celtic Australians, even though the latter are, of course, also migrants and ethnics. Indeed, many of these non-Anglo-Celtics self-identify as ethnic or migrants5 – an identification that in and of itself points to the entrenched discursive force linking Anglo-Celtic with white, non-ethnic and, significantly, at home. It is because of this self-identification with the term ‘migrant’ that I use the term ‘migrant digital storytelling’ to describe digital stories authored by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, while recognising the problems this undoubtedly entails.
What work is done in the name of the everyday? Foregrounding the background as methodology
The field of everyday multiculturalism is a worthy attempt to deal with the paradoxical dynamics of mobility in the twenty-first century.