Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
Mediating Multiculturalism: Digital Storytelling and the Everyday Ethnic, which offers a groundbreaking and innovative intervention into the notion of multiculturalism as ‘mediation’. This mediation takes place not just through different media and fields of media expertise but also though the articulations of different forms of everyday cosmopolitanism, where negotiations of identities, belonging and citizenship are the focal point within a wider national and transnational understanding.
This book provides an invaluable read for anyone wanting to know more about the international dynamics of multicultural theory, policy and culture, understood through the bottom-up perspective of migrants’ creative practices. Digital storytelling offers an engaging entry into the possibility for self-expression, self-representation and self-creation, mediated through the tools and practices of different media affordances and infrastructures. It is analysed as a genre that confirms or deviates from normative notions of whiteness and ethnicity, offering new creative insights into the multiplicities of everyday life for migrants and ‘strangers’ as subjects in Australia.
The book is particularly successful in bringing theoretical sources and creative material into dialogue to see whether the ‘subaltern’ subject can speak, even if this is within the narrative framework provided by institutionalised forms of digital storytelling. As this is a medium that enhances the voice of the other, it is particularly critical to dissect and analyse the genre in its potential, contradictions and reinforcing normativity. But the author takes this a step further by writing: ‘This analysis leads the book to consider how digital stories can allow for extensions of performativity and affect as political forces of change: capable of disrupting and resisting norms of whiteness to create alternative realities of everyday multiculturalism detached from racialisation’ (p. x). Digital storytelling is studied as enabling media practices for migrant groups, where the possibility of self-expression takes centre stage, showing how ethnicity can be produced and manipulated for positive affirmative actions and offering a useful intersection between cultural diversity and the arts. Everyday multiculturalism emerges as indicative of a broader shift in cultural studies, where the local, mundane and unofficial aspect of cultural difference is magnified: ‘Paying attention to what bodies are saying, or doing, placed the emphasis of this analysis on the mundane but material effects of culturally diverse storytelling for subjects of multiculturalism’ (p. x). Migrants shape a multimodal narrative of their own that allows them to combine the past and the present by using photographs, films, sounds and narration to achieve particular effects. Interestingly, this apparently empowering new tool, which allows strangers, migrants and others to find their own voice, is connected to the notion of multiculturalism and how ethnicity and integration get coded to normalise cultural diversity instead of opening up new venues for forms of belonging and participation.
The author’s focus on individual and collective storytelling manages to capture a complex reality of migrants living in Australia and dealing with different degrees of rejection and integration. Some of the stories are built as a collective tool to create tolerance and acceptance among different ethnic and religious groups, reinforcing normative ideas of happiness, love and success; others are ironic and unsettling.
Theoretically sophisticated and empirically original, this book weaves together multiculturalism, performance studies, affect theories, media studies, postcolonial studies and ethnic studies in a marvellous way, producing new ground for rethinking living together with difference.
First and foremost, I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I was privileged to carry out the majority of this research and writing, namely, the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nations and the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations of the Coast Salish peoples. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, and acknowledge that their lands remain unceded. My book deals with multiculturalism and racialisation in relation to migrant cultures located in Anglo-settler colonies, but the wounded heart of these issues is undoubtedly the initial violence of colonial invasion and its continued denial and re-perpetration. All migrants in these settings are uninvited guests on Indigenous lands.
I acknowledge Emerita Professor Sneja Gunew, a scholar whose profound intellectual legacy has inspired much of this book. Thank you for your time and care as a supervisor of this initial body of work and for your considered and astute readings and feedback. Thank you for being not simply one of the best thinkers I know but one of the best people; I feel truly fortunate to have you in my life. Thank you to the numerous people who critically engaged with this work when it was in dissertation form: Chris Healy, Rimi Khan, Greg Noble, Sandra Ponzanesi, Nikos Papastergiadis and Fazal Rizvi.
Sincere gratitude to the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI) at Deakin University, in particular its director, Fethi Mansouri, for giving me the opportunity and support to develop this book during my postdoctoral fellowship. Special thanks to Melinda Hinkson for her assistance and advice during my fellowship. Your graciousness, insight and intuition as both an academic and a feminist ally have been very anchoring for me.
I am indebted to all of the people who created and shared their digital stories online – a brave and beautiful thing to do – and those who gave me the permissions to reproduce elements of them herein. I hope you read the analyses of the stories in the spirit in which they were undertaken: with respect and genuine hope for greater inclusivity for us all. My thanks to the artists, filmmakers, digital storytelling participants and art practitioners who offered their time and insights via interviews with me. A special thank you to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Big hART and Curious Works, and art practitioners Michelle Kotevski and Helen Simondson for their assistance with my project and their commitment to the production of community-based art.
Thank you to my brilliant academic friends and peers Dr Elena Benthaus, Tia di Biase, Dr Noni May, Dr Emma Maguire and Paula Muraca for always holding space for me. In fact, to all the amazing women and femme academics I am surrounded by at ADI and beyond, who make what can be a treacherous environment to work in rewarding and worthwhile.
I wish to acknowledge the organisers and participants of the Transregional Academies ‘Histories of Migrant Knowledges’, UC Berkeley, May–June 2019, where I workshopped the final chapter of this book. To Drs Safdar Ahmed and Michel O’Brien: collaborating with you this past year has been a breath of fresh air and allowed me to think through some of the finer points of this book.
My immense gratitude to the team of Melbourne-/Naarm-* and Vancouver-based doctors and health specialists who have helped me manage a chronic illness since 2011, especially Dr Nelum Devi-Soysa, Dr Hong Xu, Ms Esen Uygen, Dr Juan Mulder, Prof. Kate Stern, Ms Alex Caldwell and Ms Marta Karela. I could not do my work, or anything much at all, without your expertise and care.
I live so much of my life online that it would be remiss of me not to thank those of you who tune in and engage with me on social media – my ‘intimate public’ as Lauren Berlant would call you! I have shared with you the ups and downs of this book-writing journey, and you have provided me with solace, encouragement and a very helpful dose of humour when I needed it. I hope you know that I see you and am grateful for the online community we carve out together.
Finally, the people who make everything I do possible: my family and dear friends. I especially thank my brothers Matthew, Domenic and Tony, and their beautiful partners and equally beautiful kids, for their unconditional support. Thank you to my mum, Sheila Trimboli, and her partner, John Remfry, for being in my corner and helping me get this book over the line. Thank you to my amazing sister from another mister, Zarah Hage, for everything you have done and continue to do for me, to Robyn Clasohm and Craig Mumford, and to all the Wilson Street crew for your boundless love and friendship. It really does take a village and mine is breathtaking.
The below acknowledgement is for the women on the Trimboli side of my family, generously translated into Platìotì dialect by Luci Callipari-Marcuzzo, her mother Anna Callipari and cousins Giuseppina Romeo and Pina Pangallo.
Vogdio canusciure una persona importante chi fici umbra di chista ricerca e pure tutta a mia