Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
scholars attempt to exemplify its dynamic texture and value. However, by focusing on the everyday, these studies tend to overlook the entangled context or ‘background’ of the crisis they attempt to understand, and which of course extends beyond ordinary or everyday encounters. Similarly, by proclaiming ‘ordinariness’ in the telling of cultural difference, digital storytelling runs the risk of reinstating the fictive but forceful boundaries of racialisation even as it attempts to deconstruct them. After all, cultural difference that operates in and through State formulations can quickly fall into long-standing hierarchies of racialised subjects. Without proper attention to this entangled context, multiculturalism studies not only struggles to deal with the paradoxical element of multiculturalism but can perpetuate it into a binary lock-hold. As such, paradox becomes not only intrinsic to multiculturalism studies but symptomatic of it, foreclosing the capacity to productively deconstruct racialised discourses. Given the oft-repeated belief that ‘history is repeating itself’ when it comes to issues of race and social justice – and the growing global relevance of ‘the migrant’ – it is timely to take stock of the scholarly terrain of digital storytelling and consider how capable the medium is of breaking long-standing racialised structures. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in contemporary societies? Can digital storytelling remediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?
In this book, I attempt instead to use the paradox productively. I consider what digital storytelling can reveal about everyday multiculturalism as well as what everyday multiculturalism (and related studies) conceals about the lived experiences of cultural difference. Is the everyday really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? What comes to matter when multiculturalism is studied as an everyday phenomenon? Finally, I ask: how can the contradictions embedded in multicultural life be used to re-matter the bodies it addresses?
These questions underlie the analyses presented throughout in an attempt to ensure the background or context of everyday multiculturalism is foregrounded. This foregrounding has led the research to unfold in a particular manner, and the structure of the book attempts to do justice to the sequence of this unfolding. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each of which works to consolidate both the theoretical and empirical arms of the research.
In Part One, ‘Convergences’, the key phenomena being studied – multiculturalism, digital storytelling and the everyday – are chartered within a historical context. A theoretical framework emerges which enables the analyses thereafter. This framework involves three theoretical tools – Michel Foucault’s apparatus of security, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and aspects of affect theory. A combination of these theories is useful for addressing the complexities of cultural difference in neocolonial contexts such as Australia, helping to illustrate how the formation of multicultural subjects is bound up with formations of a white nation. The use of the theories set up a tiered system that allows the analysis of subject formation to move from a macro perspective (in the form of apparatus of security) to a micro perspective (through the application of affect). In other words, the structure allows for an analysis of how multicultural subjects are constructed in relation to the macro, or public discourses of multiculturalism, as well as the more nuanced and seemingly private or micro interactions that occur at the level of the body. It must be noted that this process is defined as highly interrelated, so that the subject’s encounters at a micro level are always implicated in the relationships of power at a macro level. This three-tiered optic is utilised in the hope of ensuring this study does not collapse into another attempt to ‘fill the gap’ between everyday and institutionalised encounters and formations of multiculturalism. Instead, it works to consider what sets of relations exist within this so-called gap and how these relations can be channelled for different material effects in a highly mobile world.
Part Two, ‘Multicultural Bodies’, begins to flesh out digital stories using the theoretical framework mapped out in the previous section. The analysis defines two kinds of digital stories – individual and collaborative. Individual digital stories are produced in a workshop environment by a single author and are the product of the most conventional method of digital storytelling creation. Collaborative digital stories are co-authored in community-based arts settings, often across longer periods of time. Across the five chapters of this section, individual digital stories typical of the genre are compared with a collaborative digital story to elucidate the similarities and differences of each. The analysis utilises the theory of performativity to study how digital stories pertaining to ethnic diversity manifest according to norms of whiteness, comparing the narrative structure, aesthetic techniques and audio components of the case studies. The comparison allows for new insights about how everyday multiculturalism normatively structures both the individual body and the body of the nation. I situate materiality at the forefront of the case study analysis, because, as Burgess (2006, p. 211) argues, digital storytelling is ‘a means of “becoming real” to others, on the basis of shared experience and affective resonances. Many of the stories are, quite literally, touching’ (original italics). Exploring the ways in which materiality is endlessly reconstituted through the mode of digital storytelling can reveal both limits and possibilities for the everyday ‘multicultural Australian’ in this country.
These case studies are revisited in the third and final section, ‘Future Digital Multiculturalisms’, but this time in conversation with some new case studies that are atypical of the digital storytelling genre. Doing so reveals instances in which digital storytelling produces counter-normative moments. This section extrapolates on these instances to propose a new form of digital work that would enable a critical conceptualisation of everyday multiculturalism. The final chapter proposes the use of a troubling performativity, via the notion of diasporic intimacy, as a way to unhinge multiculturalism studies from the contradictory bind faced in contemporary multiculturalism and in work on race/culture more broadly. At the very least, it seeks to use the paradox as a performative hinge through which new and de-racialised forms of cultural meaning can be evinced.
1.For example, Reclaim Australia is a coalition of people who, according to the official website, have formed because they have ‘had enough of minorities not fitting in and trying to change our Australian cultural identity’ (2015, online, 10 April). The organisation petitions for such things as the banning of Muslim headdress and halal certification and promotes Australian unity in the form of such things as ‘pride in the Australian flag and Anthem at all levels of schooling’. Other similar groups include: Rise Up Australia, the Australian Defence League, the United Patriots Front, True Blue Crew and Antipodean Resistance. The anti-migrant and anti-multiculturalism principles of these groups are mirrored to varying extents in official political parties such as Aussie Battler Party, One Nation, Family First and Australian Conservatives.
2.See Ien Ang and Jon Stratton (1998), Greg Noble (2005, p. 108; 2009) and Paul Gilroy (2006, p. 65).
3.See, for example, Gunew and Rizvi (1994); Papastergiadis et al. (2015).
4.Richard Appignanesi (2010b, p. 7).
5.Colour Code (2018) focus groups with non-white Australians found that the preferred term for their demographic was ‘migrant’, even though, as co-founder Roj Amedi (2018, personal communication, 27 November) notes, ‘migrant’ can also include other European migrants who are not necessarily part of Colour Code’s community, that is, European migrants who formerly were considered non-white but have since been accepted as honorary white Australians.
This section comprises three chapters which establish the foundations and parameters of the cultural phenomena I am exploring in this book: multiculturalism,