Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
analysis of multiculturalism as a liberalist, State-led initiative is provided, with a focus on the Australian context since the 1990s. The section works to illustrate how shifts in multiculturalism are often reflected in shifts in artistic pursuits and how notions of ‘the everyday’ and ‘cultural diversity’ become entangled in both domains in the twenty-first century. I undertake a broad analysis of everyday multiculturalism scholarship and its relationship to questions of whiteness and materiality, as well as an overview of the history of digital storytelling and its technical and methodological components. Chapter 2 provides definitions for the two types of digital stories used in this book: individual digital stories (those stories produced in a workshop environment but by a single author), and collaborative digital stories (digital stories co-authored in community-based-arts settings). Finally, the section introduces a new theoretical framework for analysing digital stories and everyday digital media as it pertains to cultural difference, merging a three-tiered optic:
1.Michel Foucault’s apparatus of security (State level of analysis)
2.Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (‘everyday’ level of analysis)
3.Affective economies (the body/author-viewer level of analysis)
DIFFERENCE RETURNS TO THE EVERYDAY: MULTICULTURALISM, THE ARTS AND ‘RACE’
Multiculturalism is both too much and too little. For some it discourages integration, and for the ‘unintegrated’ it precludes it.
– Pardy and Lee (2011, p. 309)
The diversity worker has a job precisely because diversity and equality are not already given. When your task is to remove the necessity of your existence, then your existence is necessary for the task.
– Ahmed (2012a, p. 8)
Since the 1970s, multiculturalism has been the framework adopted by Western liberal governments to recognise and service the needs of different migrant and cultural groups. Duncan Ivison’s (2010) survey of multiculturalism suggests there are three different multicultural logics: protective or communitarian multiculturalism, where recognition of ethnocultural groups is paramount; liberal multiculturalism, the most popular form in which the pursuit of universalism rather than protectionism is the core goal; and, finally, imperial multiculturalism, a critique of the former two, which places power at the centre of its analyses and seeks to unpack the conditions of the other logics. In this book, I am ultimately concerned with all three logics, arguing that they all emerge, in some form, from the second – liberal multiculturalism – and it is this logic that infiltrates the multicultural narratives of former Anglo-settler colonies of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. As Levey (2010, p. 19) describes, liberal multiculturalism emerged not only in liberal democracies but from liberal democracies and is therefore underpinned by the broader goal of enacting Western liberalist principles. How this structure manifests in each place is, of course, highly context specific, so that ‘although we can pick out certain broad elements that most forms of (liberal) multiculturalism share, there will also always be important differences’ (Ivison 2010, p. 2). For this reason, I focus on Australian multiculturalism, but frequently zoom out to broadly contextualise its relationship to multiculturalism in comparable nation-states.
Vertovec and Wessendorf (2010, p. 3) outline that multiculturalism has typically involved policies and practices that affect the domains of public recognition, education, social services, public materials, law, religion, food, and media and broadcasting. Changes to these domains have worked to minimise discrimination, promote equal opportunity, increase participation and representation, deliver better access to services and foster cross-cultural understanding and acceptance (p. 4). Like many other surveys of multiculturalism, ‘the arts’ is not listed as a separate domain of impact. Interestingly, surveys of multiculturalism rarely mention the role of the arts, even though the latter has most certainly influenced the former. Indeed, the relationship between multiculturalism and the arts has been vital in the development of ideas pertaining to cultural difference, and the main phases of multiculturalism have tended to be mirrored in, if not intrinsic to, changing modes of artistic practice. In this chapter, I trace the shifting stages of Australian multiculturalism and consider how these shifts are implicated in changing understandings and modes of artistic practice.
Although initiated with positive intentions, multiculturalism has suffered increasing criticism. These criticisms have always been present, as Will Kymlicka’s (2012) survey of multicultural policies in Western democracies emphasises, but they have become louder in the past 20 years. Multiculturalism has not just been losing ground (Robinson 2011, p. 11) but has frequently been posited as a past societal mode, declared inadequate, failed or simply dead. These reactions have circulated in both public rhetoric and scholarly endeavours, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between the shifts in multiculturalism and artistic discourses respectively.
Multiculturalism and the arts
While there are certainly detailed differences and complexities in the historical development of multiculturalism, its trajectory can be broadly characterised into three main phases or models: minority rights-based, cultural pluralist and universalist/cosmopolitan (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011). Unsurprisingly, the characteristics of these phases are reflected in the position and role of cultural difference in the Western arts industry, as mapped out by Anthony Appignanesi in the report delivered in the United Kingdom in 2010 on arts and cultural diversity.
In a comprehensive study of Australian multiculturalism titled From White Australia to Woomera, James Jupp (2007a, p. 82) explains that the formation of Australian multiculturalism was instigated by the large and vocal contingents of Eastern- and Southern-European immigrants. The post-war migration schemes had greatly diversified the cultural constitution of Australia, shoring up questions of cultural access, maintenance and equity, questions answered mostly by the State governments at this time. In the 1970s, the Australian government took its cue from Canada, a fellow member of the Commonwealth that was also experiencing pressure from minority cultures. Minority Canadian cultures were arguing that its Federal government needed to better cater to the specific needs of ethnic communities and better acknowledge the plurality of the nation as a whole. The 1970 Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism analysed Anglophone and Francophone heritage in Canada, but also gave considerable attention to Canadians whose heritage was neither British nor French. It was this study that led to the conception of multiculturalism, a management strategy soon adopted by Australia (p. 80).
Under the guidance of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party, the government acknowledged that new migrants had different needs and required greater attention in immigration policy. The beginning of formalised Australian multiculturalism in the 1970s was thus based on a ‘minority rights model’ which recognised that socio-economic inequalities existed centred on ethnic difference (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, p. 145). This formally shifted the view of cultural difference as something needing to be assimilated into white Australia, as had previously been the dominant management strategy. The Federal government began to be advised on strategies of cultural adaptation, and in 1973 the Minister for Immigration Al Grassby referred to Australia as ‘multicultural’ for the first time (Koleth 2010, p. 4).
This move to multiculturalism is reflective of the shift in European art institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the inclusion of African and Asian artists, albeit a relatively minimal shift within what remained a stringent white-colonial framework of art history (Appignanesi 2010a). Such a shift was instigated by what Appignanesi (2010b, p. 7) terms the ‘first wave’ of institutional critique in the arts. This wave was greatly influenced by the work of London-based Rasheed Araeen, who pioneered minimalism in the 1960s. Araeen went on to found Third Text, a journal dedicated to representing ethnic artists and politicising the need to rewrite colonial art history to include cultural difference (p. 10).1 These critical movements were slighter in Australia; non-Anglo Australian artists remained largely invisible