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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION: MULTICULTURALISM as A CRISIS OF CONTRADICTION
The twenty-first century has been a time of unprecedented migration and intensified global mobility, two compounding phenomena enabling cultural plurality to become a commonplace feature of contemporary societies. Jarringly, the dominant and previously most-utilised governmental framework for managing culturally diverse communities, namely, multiculturalism, has suffered a serious decline in popularity. As Andrew M. Robinson (2011, p. 29) succinctly noted on the topic of multiculturalism in 2011: ‘The last decade hasn’t been kind to multiculturalism.’ Indeed, since the turn of the century, multiculturalism has not just been ‘losing ground’ (p. 11) but has frequently been posited as a past societal mode – declared ‘inadequate’, ‘failed’ or simply ‘dead’. These reactions have circulated in both the domains of public rhetoric and scholarly endeavours, most frequently in locations long-attached to multiculturalism, notably Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and other Western European countries (see Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010).
In this book, I argue that the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever, albeit in a mode of crisis. It is not so much that multiculturalism has become irrelevant; rather that the framework through which its relevance has been conventionally understood is not malleable enough to capture the shifting and increasingly contradictory nature of contemporary cultural difference. Since the inception of multiculturalism in Canada in the 1970s, and its subsequent adoption in other countries such as Australia, the ways in which people move and engage with one another have become increasingly hybrid. At the same time, issues that multiculturalism promised to solve/tensions it hoped to alleviate continue to recirculate – racism, inter- and intra-community conflicts, institutionalised discrimination, to list a few. One need only glance at race riots in Cronulla, Australia, the Black Lives Matter movements in the United States and the rise of white nationalist parties in the United Kingdom and Western Europe for cursory evidence.
The sense that multiculturalism has failed has been attributed to many factors. For some, the identity focus of theoretical multiculturalism has been inadequate to address the complexity of lived cultural difference, while the political aspects (programmes and policies) have failed to service this complexity adequately. As Australia and comparable colonial nations enter an era of ‘evolving hyper-diversity’, whereby diversity itself is diversifying (Ang et al. 2002; Noble 2009, p. 47), these inadequacies become increasingly evident.
Certainly, the messiness of the term ‘multiculturalism’ has not helped matters. As Sneja Gunew (2012, p. 1450) outlines, scholarly discussions about multiculturalism often generate confusion because so many elements are designated ‘multicultural’. Multiculturalism is approached as both a philosophy and a political theory, alongside the simultaneous impetus to ‘unpack the term “culture” itself’. Gunew explains: ‘As a political theory with policy dimensions, multiculturalism has often been described as marking a shift from previous stages where differences remained unrecognized and were simply subsumed into dominant groups and institutions […] Multiculturalism as philosophy is linked with preserving universal rights for both individuals and distinctive groups, although there are often tensions between the two’ (ibid.). Both the philosophical and the political domains have difficulty conceptualising multiculturalism into neat frameworks, ultimately because it is impossible to compartmentalise culture (p. 1451).
Previously (though this is far from a thorough survey), scholars have carried out meticulous analyses of multiculturalism by examining its relationship to migratory patterns (Castles 1992; Vertovec 1996), nationalism and citizenship (Castles 1992; Jakubowicz 1994, 2011; Stratton 1998, 2011; Modood 2007; Levey 2008), concepts of ethnicity and race (Gilroy 1987, 1990, 2000; Gunew and Mahyuddin 1988; Jakubowicz 1994, 1998; Hall 2000; Gunew 2004; Modood 2005) and the idea of universal recognition (Taylor 1994; Kymlicka 2007, 2012). In an Australian context, multiculturalism is often studied from a social sciences or political theory perspective and includes the work of Lois Foster and David Stockley (1984), Stephen Castles et al. (1988), Andrew Jakubowicz (1994, 1998, 2011), James Jupp (1984, 2007a), Geoffrey Brahm Levey (2008), Mark Lopez (2000) and, most recently, Andrew Jakubowicz and Christina Ho (2013). Cultural studies perspectives on Australian multiculturalism gained traction in the 1990s, especially through the work of Ien Ang (in Stratton and Ang 1994; Ang 1996, 1999) and Jon Stratton (in Stratton and Ang 1994; Stratton 1998), and it is within this cultural studies tradition that I situate this book.
Multiculturalism takes different forms in different locations, but its basic impetus and structure has been informed by human rights ideals emerging in Western, liberal democracies following the Second World War (Kymlicka 2010, pp. 35–38). This book is concerned with the role of multiculturalism in former British settler colonies, specifically Australia, but notes resonances with multicultural narratives in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. These geographical contexts are ripe for cross-comparison not only because of the way their respective multiculturalisms have emerged, but also because digital storytelling, the genre I use to unpack multiculturalism in this book, started in the United States and then moved quickly to Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
When it comes to the contemporary terrain of multiculturalism within these locations, lived, studied or otherwise, it is clear that contradiction is a prominent feature. Mobility, cultural hybridity and interconnectedness are as heightened as ever, at the same time that aggressive nationalist practices are exaggerated and borders are tightened. In Australia, the highly fragmented and diverse cultural landscape of the twenty-first century has exacerbated the instability of its multiculturalism, which continues to struggle against a prevailing Anglo-Celtic ‘battler’ mythology. Thus, the tension between the multifarious and mobile aspects of the Australian population and the nationalistic, security-conscious aspects has surfaced in ways that are both familiar and strange. Hybrid cultural products and encounters develop in a continuous and seemingly mundane manner. Yet, the nation is also experiencing the reprisal of white, racist resistance in the form of independent political parties and vocal community groups.1 This paradoxical condition has wedged itself within practical and theoretical work on multiculturalism, stalling its critical development and leading to what scholars have termed the ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism.2 The task for contemporary studies in multiculturalism must therefore be to unpack the paradoxical conjuncture of cultural plurality and formulate ways to navigate its contradictions.
The everyday turn
In the past decade, there have been two approaches employed to address the so-called crisis. The first retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second, which can broadly be described as critical multiculturalism, problematises the field by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its everyday manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept 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 of digital storytelling in community-based arts projects that seek to equitably represent ‘culturally diverse’ community stories and, likewise, to note the frequent use of cultural difference as a theme explored in digital storytelling, usually via narratives of migration and ethnic identity. At least half of the Australian digital stories housed at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) are on these themes. Similarly, a significant portion of stories housed at StoryCenter (formerly the Center for Digital Storytelling) in the United States is dedicated to these themes. Indeed, the StoryCenter’s current website forefronts its imbrication in questions of ethnic and racial identity by stating on its ‘About’ page: ‘StoryCenter is committed to challenging white supremacy and supporting social justice, in every aspect of our work.’
Digital storytelling and whiteness
I deliberately target digital storytelling in this book because it palpably illustrates how the notion of the everyday can get deployed for less-than-everyday means in work pertaining to cultural difference – a problem I see in the scholarship of everyday multiculturalism. Digital storytelling practitioners commend the ordinariness of the genre because it allows representations of the minutia of everyday life, for example, family interactions, to surface. This element, together with the relative accessibility of the genre, allows it to present itself as part of everyday life, further assisted by the fact that the genre often takes place in spaces considered to be a part of everyday life, for example, the classroom. More recently, digital media scholars such as Alicia Blum-Ross (2015) and Lauren S. Berliner (2018) have done important work on the notion of digital participation, illustrating how the democratic claims of community digital projects are not so much the site of individual agency as they are the site of institutional aims (see also Literat et al. 2018). My intention in this book is similar; however, I home in on the relationship digital storytelling has with everyday multiculturalism and cultural difference in particular.
I therefore take StoryCenter’s claim that it challenges white supremacy to task by asking: how does the mode of digital storytelling construct, mobilise and/or limit the ‘ethnically diverse’ or non-white person? Specifically, what are the ways in which digital storytelling projects engage with concepts of cultural diversity and everyday multiculturalism to create material and affective possibilities for the racialised subject? Do digital storytelling projects generate new subjectivities or do they reproduce traditional stereotypes? After all, the stories in the thematic collections I analyse often formulate a response to the following implied questions: who is the ‘ethnically diverse person’ and what are their ‘real’ daily experiences? In addressing these questions, I embark on a deconstruction of the ethnic/racialised body as it comes to be constituted through digital storytelling.
As such, the book positions digital storytelling as an iterative performance that is produced and directed in certain ways and, as Belinda Smaill (2010, p. 138) writes in relation to the documentary form, ‘establishes the presence of the performing subject by directing our attention to that subject’. This presence is bound up with certain fantasies of the self and the Other in Western multicultural nations and ultimately impacts the ways in which the various bodies involved in the performance are articulated. Taking further cues from Sneja Gunew (2004, 2017) and Elizabeth Povinelli (2002), I consider how, via the practice of digital storytelling, multicultural subjects become embedded in relations of power that both constrain and mobilise performances according to particular notions of whiteness. Further, I analyse how performative slippages may present themselves in digital storytelling to reveal alternative aspects of lived cultural difference and subsequently destabilise the normative discourse of whiteness in Australia and similar multicultural locations.
This line of questioning adopts the approach to whiteness and critical multiculturalism introduced by anthropologist Ghassan Hage in the book White Nation (1998). Here, Hage argues that although the ‘celebrate diversity’ banner waved by Australia appears to embrace cultural pluralism, in fact, it re-establishes a white national fantasy. Following Hage, I consider how digital storytelling projects interact with the broader notion of multiculturalism and examine whether such projects work to destabilise or reinstate the forceful fiction of whiteness. I target the ways in which the focus on cultural difference in digital storytelling projects can subtly reinstate the rigid boundaries of racial homogeneity that the projects attempt to deconstruct.
The book thus analyses the ‘how’ and ‘what’ aspects of digital storytelling projects, rather than categories of aesthetic or new media quality. The analysis is always focused on what the genre does – how it constructs and impacts ethnicity and race. I use a Foucauldian framework that concerns itself not with where power originates, or why it operates, but how it is always productively exercised. (In short: what do these digital storytelling projects in Australia do?) The examination of ‘doing’ could just as importantly be carried out via a lens of gender, sexuality, queerness or class; and I remain alert to the ways in which manifold norms are bound up in any digital storytelling project and analysis. However, I have chosen to concentrate on the normative discourse of whiteness, in particular, the ways in which ethnicity and race become ‘essentially’ linked in the digital storytelling process.
A note here on my use of ‘whiteness’, a term as slippery as it is powerful. It is crucial, first, to recognise how whiteness travels globally, but also lands in particular places in particular ways. Sneja Gunew does an excellent job in her book Post-multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitanism Mediators (2017) to map the chameleon-like way that whiteness, especially in the Australian context, links itself to Europeanness and, even more specifically, to Anglo-Celticness. This linking is clearly evidenced in the Australian context, where Southern and Eastern Europeans were for a long time relegated as ‘black’ (Gunew 1994), but it is also seen, as Gunew (2017, pp. 25–27) traces, in North America and in Anglophone postcolonial theory more broadly. Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos (2010, p. 32) describe the construction of Australian whiteness as a particular (and absurd) ‘ontological condition’ that simultaneously positions ‘Indigenous peoples as non-Australian, and designated migrant groups as […] “perpetual foreigners within the Australian state”’, extending that ‘dominant white Australia seems to render indispensable a perpetual position and re-positioning of the foreigner-within as white-non-white or as white-but-not-white enough. This repositioning is an effect of the impact that the ongoing violent dispossession of the Indigenous peoples has on the nature of white Australian ways of being’. In the Australian context, Southern Europeans become ‘sufficiently like, while remaining suitably unlike, the dominant white Australian subject position’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2010, p. 45; emphasis in the original), where the point of comparison for ‘likeness’ is Britishness. Although it is crucial to recognise the situatedness of whiteness, this ontological structure chimes with that seen in other former Anglo-settler colonies; for example, Himani Bannerji (2000, p. 108) illustrates that hegemonic whiteness is similarly encoded in North America through a national narrative premised on ‘European/English’ settler colonialism, which functions as ‘the ideology of a nation-state’. ‘Whiteness/Europeanness’ serves as a ‘key bonding element’ that allows other European bodies, despite their distance from idealised Anglo-Englishness, to ‘form a part of their community of “whiteness” as distinct from nonwhite “others”’, though a distance from full inclusion always remains (ibid.). Likewise, in the United Kingdom, ‘Englishness is predicated on whiteness’ (Nayak 2017, p. 295).
In what follows, I explore how some subjects of digital storytelling projects come to be seen as migrants or ethnics, distinct from Anglo-Celtic Australians, even though the latter are, of course, also migrants and ethnics. Indeed, many of these non-Anglo-Celtics self-identify as ethnic or migrants5 – an identification that in and of itself points to the entrenched discursive force linking Anglo-Celtic with white, non-ethnic and, significantly, at home. It is because of this self-identification with the term ‘migrant’ that I use the term ‘migrant digital storytelling’ to describe digital stories authored by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, while recognising the problems this undoubtedly entails.
What work is done in the name of the everyday? Foregrounding the background as methodology
The field of everyday multiculturalism is a worthy attempt to deal with the paradoxical dynamics of mobility in the twenty-first century. Recognising a despondency in multiculturalism rhetoric, everyday multiculturalism scholars attempt to exemplify its dynamic texture and value. However, by focusing on the everyday, these studies tend to overlook the entangled context or ‘background’ of the crisis they attempt to understand, and which of course extends beyond ordinary or everyday encounters. Similarly, by proclaiming ‘ordinariness’ in the telling of cultural difference, digital storytelling runs the risk of reinstating the fictive but forceful boundaries of racialisation even as it attempts to deconstruct them. After all, cultural difference that operates in and through State formulations can quickly fall into long-standing hierarchies of racialised subjects. Without proper attention to this entangled context, multiculturalism studies not only struggles to deal with the paradoxical element of multiculturalism but can perpetuate it into a binary lock-hold. As such, paradox becomes not only intrinsic to multiculturalism studies but symptomatic of it, foreclosing the capacity to productively deconstruct racialised discourses. Given the oft-repeated belief that ‘history is repeating itself’ when it comes to issues of race and social justice – and the growing global relevance of ‘the migrant’ – it is timely to take stock of the scholarly terrain of digital storytelling and consider how capable the medium is of breaking long-standing racialised structures. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in contemporary societies? Can digital storytelling remediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?
In this book, I attempt instead to use the paradox productively. I consider what digital storytelling can reveal about everyday multiculturalism as well as what everyday multiculturalism (and related studies) conceals about the lived experiences of cultural difference. Is the everyday really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? What comes to matter when multiculturalism is studied as an everyday phenomenon? Finally, I ask: how can the contradictions embedded in multicultural life be used to re-matter the bodies it addresses?
These questions underlie the analyses presented throughout in an attempt to ensure the background or context of everyday multiculturalism is foregrounded. This foregrounding has led the research to unfold in a particular manner, and the structure of the book attempts to do justice to the sequence of this unfolding. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each of which works to consolidate both the theoretical and empirical arms of the research.
In Part One, ‘Convergences’, the key phenomena being studied – multiculturalism, digital storytelling and the everyday – are chartered within a historical context. A theoretical framework emerges which enables the analyses thereafter. This framework involves three theoretical tools – Michel Foucault’s apparatus of security, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and aspects of affect theory. A combination of these theories is useful for addressing the complexities of cultural difference in neocolonial contexts such as Australia, helping to illustrate how the formation of multicultural subjects is bound up with formations of a white nation. The use of the theories set up a tiered system that allows the analysis of subject formation to move from a macro perspective (in the form of apparatus of security) to a micro perspective (through the application of affect). In other words, the structure allows for an analysis of how multicultural subjects are constructed in relation to the macro, or public discourses of multiculturalism, as well as the more nuanced and seemingly private or micro interactions that occur at the level of the body. It must be noted that this process is defined as highly interrelated, so that the subject’s encounters at a micro level are always implicated in the relationships of power at a macro level. This three-tiered optic is utilised in the hope of ensuring this study does not collapse into another attempt to ‘fill the gap’ between everyday and institutionalised encounters and formations of multiculturalism. Instead, it works to consider what sets of relations exist within this so-called gap and how these relations can be channelled for different material effects in a highly mobile world.
Part Two, ‘Multicultural Bodies’, begins to flesh out digital stories using the theoretical framework mapped out in the previous section. The analysis defines two kinds of digital stories – individual and collaborative. Individual digital stories are produced in a workshop environment by a single author and are the product of the most conventional method of digital storytelling creation. Collaborative digital stories are co-authored in community-based arts settings, often across longer periods of time. Across the five chapters of this section, individual digital stories typical of the genre are compared with a collaborative digital story to elucidate the similarities and differences of each. The analysis utilises the theory of performativity to study how digital stories pertaining to ethnic diversity manifest according to norms of whiteness, comparing the narrative structure, aesthetic techniques and audio components of the case studies. The comparison allows for new insights about how everyday multiculturalism normatively structures both the individual body and the body of the nation. I situate materiality at the forefront of the case study analysis, because, as Burgess (2006, p. 211) argues, digital storytelling is ‘a means of “becoming real” to others, on the basis of shared experience and affective resonances. Many of the stories are, quite literally, touching’ (original italics). Exploring the ways in which materiality is endlessly reconstituted through the mode of digital storytelling can reveal both limits and possibilities for the everyday ‘multicultural Australian’ in this country.
These case studies are revisited in the third and final section, ‘Future Digital Multiculturalisms’, but this time in conversation with some new case studies that are atypical of the digital storytelling genre. Doing so reveals instances in which digital storytelling produces counter-normative moments. This section extrapolates on these instances to propose a new form of digital work that would enable a critical conceptualisation of everyday multiculturalism. The final chapter proposes the use of a troubling performativity, via the notion of diasporic intimacy, as a way to unhinge multiculturalism studies from the contradictory bind faced in contemporary multiculturalism and in work on race/culture more broadly. At the very least, it seeks to use the paradox as a performative hinge through which new and de-racialised forms of cultural meaning can be evinced.
1.For example, Reclaim Australia is a coalition of people who, according to the official website, have formed because they have ‘had enough of minorities not fitting in and trying to change our Australian cultural identity’ (2015, online, 10 April). The organisation petitions for such things as the banning of Muslim headdress and halal certification and promotes Australian unity in the form of such things as ‘pride in the Australian flag and Anthem at all levels of schooling’. Other similar groups include: Rise Up Australia, the Australian Defence League, the United Patriots Front, True Blue Crew and Antipodean Resistance. The anti-migrant and anti-multiculturalism principles of these groups are mirrored to varying extents in official political parties such as Aussie Battler Party, One Nation, Family First and Australian Conservatives.
2.See Ien Ang and Jon Stratton (1998), Greg Noble (2005, p. 108; 2009) and Paul Gilroy (2006, p. 65).
3.See, for example, Gunew and Rizvi (1994); Papastergiadis et al. (2015).
4.Richard Appignanesi (2010b, p. 7).
5.Colour Code (2018) focus groups with non-white Australians found that the preferred term for their demographic was ‘migrant’, even though, as co-founder Roj Amedi (2018, personal communication, 27 November) notes, ‘migrant’ can also include other European migrants who are not necessarily part of Colour Code’s community, that is, European migrants who formerly were considered non-white but have since been accepted as honorary white Australians.
