Mediating Multiculturalism
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Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing. There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated? As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.
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Mediating Multiculturalism
Digital Storytelling and the Everyday Ethnic
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Perhaps more useful for mapping today’s migrant communities is the emergent field of everyday multiculturalism, a contemporary form of critical multiculturalism that responds to the renewed demystification with multiculturalism that has surfaced in the past decade. Although the field is gaining traction across the world, it is primarily located in Western contexts, in which a perceived gap exists between how multiculturalism is managed and conceptualised and how it is actually experienced in daily life. Australian scholars, most notably, Melissa Butcher, Anita Harris, Greg Noble, Scott Poynting and Amanda Wise, are pioneering everyday multiculturalism, giving the trajectory of the field a particularly Australian orientation. However, the framework of everyday multiculturalism is being rapidly adopted in the transpacific and beyond, applied to a range of ethnographies where interculturalism, cultural diversity and social cohesion are explored. A quick glance at the preeminent book Everyday Multiculturalism by Wise and Velayutham (2009b) attests to this global adaptation: contributing authors draw on case studies from Brooklyn, London, Sydney/Eora,6 Singapore, Malaysia and Southern Italy, among others.7
The field is interested in exploring how practices of everyday life shape and reshape identities, and how this relates to the broader terrain of multiculturalism (Wise and Velayutham 2009a, p. 3). The article titled ‘Pedestrian Crossings: Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism’ in the 2010 special edition of the Journal of Intercultural Studies succinctly summarises the field as having a focus on ‘(1) everyday practices of intercultural encounter and exchange (the “doing” of multiculturalism); and (2) sites and spaces where tensions and possibilities around multicultural community and nation building occur (the places where multiculturalism is done)’ (Butcher and Harris 2010, p. 450). The need to specifically examine the everyday practices and sites of multiculturalism is linked to a feeling of disconnection between official discourse and on-the-ground experience.8 Jon Stratton (2011) illustrates how the dominant culture interprets this feeling of disconnection as a residue of migrant culture, feeling that Australian life has been undermined or overrun by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians. This sense of disconnection is also evident in the fact that racism is perpetually experienced in present-day Australia, despite Australian multiculturalism being celebrated as a national accomplishment. Recent empirical research on young people and everyday multiculturalism demonstrates this polarity. The research shows that incidents of racialised tension put a daily stress on ethnic youth, either because of mistranslations of language, fear of being harassed for dressing or looking a particular way and/or the social expulsion of ethnic youth from public areas (see Butcher and Harris 2010; Frisina 2010; Harris 2010; Noble and Poynting 2010; Rathzel 2010).
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