Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
of multiculturalism altogether, echoing the public sentiment by positioning it as a past phenomenon. Vijay Mishra’s monograph What Was Multiculturalism? (2012) is a notable example. In this book, I argue that multiculturalism remains a highly productive force worthy of attention, while also acknowledging that methodologies for governing, theorising and living cultural diversity need to move beyond what have become, by way of some understandings of multiculturalism, routine, even empty tropes and gestures. In the spirit of Vijay Mishra, and in much the same manner that Stuart Hall (2003) has utilised the word ‘creolisation’, I am less concerned with the term this new kind of critique assumes than I am with the particular kind of work the critique does and enables. Like Mishra (2012, p. 18), I am interested in tracing the various assemblages that have created this particular historical moment of multiculturalism.
The starting point of this retracing is the ‘everyday’, a node common to the two main approaches. The turn to the everyday mirrors trends in cultural studies and artistic domains, which have both consulted on-the-ground experiences in an attempt to redefine cultural difference. I take particular interest in the burgeoning field of everyday multiculturalism, which explores cultural difference from a grass-roots or ‘street’ perspective. The field aims to address a perceived gap between the ways in which multiculturalism is understood at a governmental and theoretical level and how it is experienced in day-to-day life.
The use of the everyday has a distinct philosophical history in Marxist scholarship, notably through the work of Henri Lefebvre (1991 [1947]), who argued that socialism should be less about productive revolution and more about revolution in the realm of everyday life (cited in Goonewardena 2008, p. 24). Although Lefebvre repeatedly emphasised contradiction and entanglement in his conceptualisation of the everyday, it carried an idealist tendency, in which the everyday meant, or at least came perilously close to mean, an authentic, utopic space free from structural powers. There is no doubt that the use of the everyday in everyday multiculturalism and digital storytelling is influenced by the Lefebvrian tradition and its idealist tendency in particular; however, I do not attempt to follow this influence as a line of inquiry in this book (I will leave that to the Lefebvrian scholars!). My intention is, rather, to demonstrate how ‘everyday practices’ of cultural difference and related digital media are often taken to mean authentic and autonomous from the State, when in actuality they can represent and reinforce State-based norms of race. If there are crossovers to the Lefebvrian conceptualisation of everyday life in my analysis, it is with Lefebvre’s argument that the everyday is always on its way, but never articulated (see Blanchot and Hanson 1987). To me, this element of Lefebvre’s everyday represents the most compelling, and resonates with how I use affect theory in my analysis herein.
While I recognise that the interdisciplinary analyses of everyday multiculturalism have enabled the tensions and nuances of cultural difference to be explored in interesting ways, I argue for a critical readjustment to the way the field is contextualised. In particular, I wish to move away from the idea of everyday multiculturalism as that which ‘fills in’ a gap, or that which ‘just is’ in everyday life. Multicultural life and the plethora of terms associated with it – cultural diversity, cultural difference, ethnicity and so on – are terms that act in highly political ways and create material consequences. Rather than attempting to locate an ‘authentic’ space of everyday cultural exchange, I seek to examine how these so-called everyday exchanges are entangled with State discourses and materialise racialised corporealities. I argue that only by discerning how ‘everyday’ multicultural bodies are produced and implicated (favourably or otherwise) in relation to the nation can multiculturalism studies, and related policies and programmes, begin to move beyond the racialised binaries it is plagued by.
Multiculturalism media: Artistic practice and digital storytelling
Research for this book began in the arts realm, an area that has been intrinsic to the fashioning of multiculturalism but largely overlooked by everyday multiculturalism. This oversight can perhaps be attributed to ongoing tendencies to separate art from the everyday – in its most restrictive definition, art is a sanctioned space reserved for certain types and classes of people. Yet, the arts provide fertile soil for formulations and discussions of cultural diversity. Indeed, the arts have historically played an influential role in the conceptualisation of multiculturalism in Australia and similar colonial nations, propagating cultural exchange and translation.3 It is not surprising, then, that the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ is somewhat paralleled within the Australian arts industry, along with the Western arts realm more broadly, when it comes to questions of cultural diversity.
Signalling this predicament was the UK report Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity: A ‘Third Text’ Report. Edited by Richard Appignanesi (2010a), the report expresses a growing disharmony between the arts and the notion of diversity. In the Western arts industry, the quest to recognise difference began during the 1960s/1970s, a period labelled the ‘first-wave’ of institutional critique.4 The second-wave of institutional critique emerged during the 1980s/1990s, a time when postmodern thought was gaining momentum. These two waves of critique drew on difference in a politically active way, provoking questions about ethnic subjects and the nations they were located within (Papastergiadis 2005, 2012a). Appignanesi (2010b, p. 5) argues that in this decade, artists, critics and scholars are on the crest of a third-wave of critique, attempting to deal with the ways in which difference has come to mean something simultaneously empty and forceful. Appignanesi summarises: ‘Let us be clear. Cultural diversity is a meaningless tautological expression. It tells us nothing but that cultures differ. Something other is hidden behind this mere description. The empty formulation disguises a prescriptive conduct’ (ibid.). In an attempt to deal with the oxymoronic nature of diversity in the arts industries, many artistic projects have become invested in the domain of the everyday, in the hope that it will reveal more articulate and authentic cultural experiences. It has long been recognised that community-arts organisations tend to employ an ‘everyday’ focus (see Hawkins 1993; Grostal and Harrison 1994); however, recent examination of professional/contemporary visual art projects can also be seen to be walking the line between everyday life and contemporary art. Complementary to this trend in twenty-first century art practices is the incorporation of new media forms. With the increased capacity and accessibility of media technologies, together with what Ien Ang et al. (2011, p. 4) describe as a move away from the gallery or museum as the ‘place’ of art, the digital and the everyday have intertwined to become a prominent feature of contemporary art practice (see also Papastergiadis and Trimboli 2019).
Digital storytelling in particular stands out as a popular way of artistically exploring cultural diversity, especially in the past decade. It began in the United States in the 1990s, as part of movements to make new media more accessible and democratic. Joe Lambert pioneered the digital storytelling genre as a form of media-making that would allow ordinary people to tell and share their stories. The genre’s claim to ordinary and authentic experiences has seen it become popular for artists and arts organisations wishing to engage with difference – where the need to create genuine connection is deemed crucial (Burgess 2006, p. 9).
Digital storytelling has a number of definitions, but all generally refer to ‘combining the art of telling stories with a variety of digital multimedia’ and almost all digital stories combine a mixture of digital graphics, photographs, text, audio narration, video and music to present a particular idea or theme (Robin 2006, p. 1; Lovvorn 2011, p. 98). Usually, the films are three- to five-minutes long, based on individual experiences and narrated in the first person, and they almost always involve the use of personal photographs or home-movie footage. Digital storytelling thus places an emphasis on the implied freedom and subjective neutrality often carried by discourses of creativity or artistic expression more generally. There is a common assumption that there is less external manipulation of digital stories, that they are more transparent than other forms of screen media. As such, the genre tends to be considered a truer or ‘more real’ representation of daily life. In these ways, a number of parallels can be drawn between the impetus of digital storytelling and everyday multiculturalism alike.
It is not surprising, then, to see the proliferation