Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
Reframing everyday multiculturalism
In this book, I adopt the second approach to multiculturalism studies, one that is critical and focused on the complicated manifestations of cultural difference in Australian life and comparable nations. My approach is interested in the texture of everyday multicultural life; however, I seek to qualify my ‘everyday multiculturalism’ approach in a few particular ways. Specifically, I retain a focus on the phenomenological underpinnings of racialisation and the embeddedness of this in multicultural life; I also stress the interconnectedness of State and everyday manifestations of multiculturalism more explicitly. As such, my approach to everyday multiculturalism always views the multicultural person and the multicultural nation as entangled.
Although the work on new racisms offers a range of sound insights, it risks discounting the impact that ‘old’ racialised concepts continue to have on the ‘new’ ethnic body. The appeal of moving beyond biological racism is understandable; after all, science, the discursive regime initially used to ‘prove’ the concept of racial inferiority and superiority, has long since reassessed and disproved this claim (Olson 2004, p. xvii). Furthermore, the shifts from race to ethnicity, and then from ethnicity to cultural diversity, have been taken up relatively quickly and seamlessly in the public imagination of Australia, leaving ‘race’ a less common and certainly less contemporary word. As Stratton (1998, p. 104) argues, multiculturalism tends to be blurred with non-racialism, so that ‘the very statement that Australia is now a “multicultural nation” is often implicitly put forward as evidence that the notion of a “white Australia” is no longer current in the national imaginary, as if the adoption of multiculturalism were by definition an act of anti-racism’. Reflecting this perceived shift, anti-racist and critical race work is frequently carried out at sites deemed to be ‘cultural’, such as language, public engagement or artistic practice, and this further reinstates the belatedness of ‘race’. However, I argue that since racist violence continues in Australia in both physical and conceptual ways, multiculturalism studies cannot yet take the leap away from historical formations of race. In doing so, I adopt Hall’s (2000) and Gunew’s (2004) trepidation about the cultural turn in ethnic and race studies. Both argue that the old mindset of racialised hierarchies continues to haunt the discourse of multiculturalism and its spin-off terms.10
A study conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) in 2003 helps to explain such trepidation. The study, reported in Tabar et al.’s book On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism and the Ethnic Field (2010), illustrates the way historical formations of race continue to vilify Australian bodies in the twenty-first century. It included the results of 186 surveys of Arab and Muslim Australians11 in New South Wales, which asked whether participants had experienced racist abuse or violence since 11 September 2011. If yes, the details of these incidents, including the participants’ reactions and whether or not the incidents were reported, were also requested. Following the survey, 34 respondents participated in face-to-face interviews in which the details of the abuse were extrapolated. The participants covered a range of ages, socio-economic demographics and religious denominations (p. 150). Two-thirds of the survey sample reported having increased experiences of racism, and 93 per cent felt there had been an increase in racist attacks against their ethnic or religious community at large. The cited incidents included: ‘minor incidents of social incivility, discrimination at work and in other institutions, media stereotyping, verbal abuse and harassment, threats of violence and sexual assault, stalking, actual physical assault (such as veil-tearing and stabbing), [and] property damage’ (ibid.).
Significantly, 70 per cent of participants who had experienced racism listed the perpetrators as white, Anglo-Australian citizens, for example, ‘Australian’, ‘Aussies’, ‘Anglo’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘English’ (p. 151). When identifying what they felt to be the main reasons for the attacks, the participants frequently cited a mixture of racial, ethnic and religious factors, including language, phenotype, and cultural presentation and dress. Ultimately, these reasons were ‘collapsed into a general sense of difference that is implicitly an expression of difference to an unstated white, Anglo-Australian-ness’ (ibid.). As Tabar et al. argue, these reasons point to embodied forms of cultural capital that mark these Australians as belonging to a non-white community, visually distinguishable from Anglo-Australians (ibid.). Thus, while racism is certainly associated with cultural or religious practices, it continues to be translated through an embodied or biological prism which marks non-white bodies as less human.
These findings are reaffirmed in many other studies, even though the materiality of whiteness is not necessarily their focus. For example, Noble’s (2005) work on comfort illustrates the visceral impact of Australian racism; Harris’s (2010) and Noble and Poynting’s (2010) studies, respectively, show ways in which the non-white body is racialised and physically surveyed in public life, so too Maree Pardy’s (2011) analysis of the Muslim woman in public space as a figure of cultural difference. The book thus sets itself the task of examining how the work of biological racialisation continues in contemporary Australia, albeit under new practices and guises.
One of these guises may well be the renewed emphasis on cultural diversity. In many ways, the term ‘cultural diversity’ has replaced multiculturalism as the new buzzword for contemporary Australian cultural life, in such a way that multiculturalism has become a more assumed or background component of the nation. However, despite this apparent shift, this book argues that little has changed in the way Australia organises race since the initial inception of multiculturalism in the 1970s. Many critics believe that the prime ministership of John Howard led to the devolution of multiculturalism, but as Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2011, pp. 148–49) argue, Howard’s policies merely exposed the racialised power imbalances embedded within multiculturalism that had until then remained mostly hidden. This book extends their contention into the twenty-first century of multiculturalism politics, arguing that underlying the deployment of cultural diversity there remains a highly restrictive and familiar structure of normative whiteness. Two elements of this structure remain steadfast. First, the assertion of central white Australian values over the values of ‘ethnic others’, as the master of cultural diversity’s success. Second, and not unrelated to the first, there is the ability to gloss over everyday incidents of racism that occur in Australia daily.
The current structure of managerial multiculturalism thus repeats several issues raised in the 1990s by Hage, and taken up again by Povinelli in The Cunning of Recognition (2002). Povinelli’s book critiques Australian multiculturalism, arguing that by operating via the framework of liberalism it concedes the perpetual disavowal of cultural difference. Although her critique of liberal multiculturalism is in relation to the way it ‘emerges in Indigenous societies and subjects’, it provides a useful tool for questioning the inconspicuous deployment of race in contemporary forms of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Povinelli notes that those fighting the cause of liberal multiculturalism are genuinely interested in the ‘good’ of the ethnic subject, in a similar way that support for multicultural programmes are most often propelled by genuinely good intentions. However, her critique draws our attention to the way limits of tolerance are implicated in the pursuit of this ‘good’, a point that Hage (1998) also takes up persuasively. Povinelli (2002, p. 52) writes: ‘The nation truly celebrates this actually good, whole, intact, and somewhat terrifying something lying just beyond the torn flesh of present social life. And it is toward this good object that they stretch their hands […] What is the object of their devotion?’ (emphasis in the original).12 In the following chapters, the book illustrates that the ‘object of their devotion’ is a material body, in particular, the nation’s ability to demarcate and vivify the white body as distinct from the non-white body. This claim extends both Povinelli’s and Hage’s arguments that the object of devotion is the maintenance of dominant whiteness.
In his seminal project on Australian multiculturalism, Hage (1998) argues that the needs-based model of multiculturalism was replaced by a white middle-class cosmopolitanism that positioned cultural