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ОглавлениеDIFFERENCE RETURNS TO THE EVERYDAY: MULTICULTURALISM, THE ARTS AND ‘RACE’
Multiculturalism is both too much and too little. For some it discourages integration, and for the ‘unintegrated’ it precludes it.
– Pardy and Lee (2011, p. 309)
The diversity worker has a job precisely because diversity and equality are not already given. When your task is to remove the necessity of your existence, then your existence is necessary for the task.
– Ahmed (2012a, p. 8)
Since the 1970s, multiculturalism has been the framework adopted by Western liberal governments to recognise and service the needs of different migrant and cultural groups. Duncan Ivison’s (2010) survey of multiculturalism suggests there are three different multicultural logics: protective or communitarian multiculturalism, where recognition of ethnocultural groups is paramount; liberal multiculturalism, the most popular form in which the pursuit of universalism rather than protectionism is the core goal; and, finally, imperial multiculturalism, a critique of the former two, which places power at the centre of its analyses and seeks to unpack the conditions of the other logics. In this book, I am ultimately concerned with all three logics, arguing that they all emerge, in some form, from the second – liberal multiculturalism – and it is this logic that infiltrates the multicultural narratives of former Anglo-settler colonies of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. As Levey (2010, p. 19) describes, liberal multiculturalism emerged not only in liberal democracies but from liberal democracies and is therefore underpinned by the broader goal of enacting Western liberalist principles. How this structure manifests in each place is, of course, highly context specific, so that ‘although we can pick out certain broad elements that most forms of (liberal) multiculturalism share, there will also always be important differences’ (Ivison 2010, p. 2). For this reason, I focus on Australian multiculturalism, but frequently zoom out to broadly contextualise its relationship to multiculturalism in comparable nation-states.
Vertovec and Wessendorf (2010, p. 3) outline that multiculturalism has typically involved policies and practices that affect the domains of public recognition, education, social services, public materials, law, religion, food, and media and broadcasting. Changes to these domains have worked to minimise discrimination, promote equal opportunity, increase participation and representation, deliver better access to services and foster cross-cultural understanding and acceptance (p. 4). Like many other surveys of multiculturalism, ‘the arts’ is not listed as a separate domain of impact. Interestingly, surveys of multiculturalism rarely mention the role of the arts, even though the latter has most certainly influenced the former. Indeed, the relationship between multiculturalism and the arts has been vital in the development of ideas pertaining to cultural difference, and the main phases of multiculturalism have tended to be mirrored in, if not intrinsic to, changing modes of artistic practice. In this chapter, I trace the shifting stages of Australian multiculturalism and consider how these shifts are implicated in changing understandings and modes of artistic practice.
Although initiated with positive intentions, multiculturalism has suffered increasing criticism. These criticisms have always been present, as Will Kymlicka’s (2012) survey of multicultural policies in Western democracies emphasises, but they have become louder in the past 20 years. Multiculturalism has not just been losing ground (Robinson 2011, p. 11) but has frequently been posited as a past societal mode, declared inadequate, failed or simply dead. These reactions have circulated in both public rhetoric and scholarly endeavours, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between the shifts in multiculturalism and artistic discourses respectively.
Multiculturalism and the arts
While there are certainly detailed differences and complexities in the historical development of multiculturalism, its trajectory can be broadly characterised into three main phases or models: minority rights-based, cultural pluralist and universalist/cosmopolitan (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011). Unsurprisingly, the characteristics of these phases are reflected in the position and role of cultural difference in the Western arts industry, as mapped out by Anthony Appignanesi in the report delivered in the United Kingdom in 2010 on arts and cultural diversity.
In a comprehensive study of Australian multiculturalism titled From White Australia to Woomera, James Jupp (2007a, p. 82) explains that the formation of Australian multiculturalism was instigated by the large and vocal contingents of Eastern- and Southern-European immigrants. The post-war migration schemes had greatly diversified the cultural constitution of Australia, shoring up questions of cultural access, maintenance and equity, questions answered mostly by the State governments at this time. In the 1970s, the Australian government took its cue from Canada, a fellow member of the Commonwealth that was also experiencing pressure from minority cultures. Minority Canadian cultures were arguing that its Federal government needed to better cater to the specific needs of ethnic communities and better acknowledge the plurality of the nation as a whole. The 1970 Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism analysed Anglophone and Francophone heritage in Canada, but also gave considerable attention to Canadians whose heritage was neither British nor French. It was this study that led to the conception of multiculturalism, a management strategy soon adopted by Australia (p. 80).
Under the guidance of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party, the government acknowledged that new migrants had different needs and required greater attention in immigration policy. The beginning of formalised Australian multiculturalism in the 1970s was thus based on a ‘minority rights model’ which recognised that socio-economic inequalities existed centred on ethnic difference (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, p. 145). This formally shifted the view of cultural difference as something needing to be assimilated into white Australia, as had previously been the dominant management strategy. The Federal government began to be advised on strategies of cultural adaptation, and in 1973 the Minister for Immigration Al Grassby referred to Australia as ‘multicultural’ for the first time (Koleth 2010, p. 4).
This move to multiculturalism is reflective of the shift in European art institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the inclusion of African and Asian artists, albeit a relatively minimal shift within what remained a stringent white-colonial framework of art history (Appignanesi 2010a). Such a shift was instigated by what Appignanesi (2010b, p. 7) terms the ‘first wave’ of institutional critique in the arts. This wave was greatly influenced by the work of London-based Rasheed Araeen, who pioneered minimalism in the 1960s. Araeen went on to found Third Text, a journal dedicated to representing ethnic artists and politicising the need to rewrite colonial art history to include cultural difference (p. 10).1 These critical movements were slighter in Australia; non-Anglo Australian artists remained largely invisible during this period, and screens, galleries and radio stations remained mostly white (Ang et al. 2008, p. 8). The Australia Council was formed in 1973 to oversee the implementation of arts policies and express an ‘Australian identity’, but the presence of migrant communities within this expression was missing (Blonski 1992, p. 3).
A positive move occurred in 1975 when Grassby initiated SBS – the world’s first station to develop multicultural public service broadcasting (Ang et al. 2008, p. 4). SBS was designed to provide important government information to migrants in their own languages (pp. 9–10). Nevertheless, the artistic work of migrant communities remained cut-off from institutionalised art practice and policy. By the end of the 1970s, the Australia Council was under attack for the lack of support it offered ethnic artists (Blonski 1992, pp. 2–3). These artists were ‘challenging the notion of a universal aesthetic and demanding a renegotiation of what constituted “Australian” art, “ethnic art” or indeed, the very use of the designation “ethnic”’ (p. 3). The council thus began to adjust and the 1980s saw what Ang et al. (2008, p. 19) describe as an ethno-multiculturalism in the arts: a focus on ‘catering to the special needs and interests of migrants and ethnic communities’.
This ethno-multicultural mode of arts management and practice was mirrored in national policy at large, as Australia moved into a model of multiculturalism that Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2011, p. 150) term the ‘cultural pluralist model’. The Fraser Liberal government of 1975–82 continued the work started by Labor in the early 1970s and in 1977 institutionalised multiculturalism as an official national policy. It commissioned two reports in 1977 – the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council’s (AEAC) Australia as a Multicultural Society and the Galbally Report. Based on the reports’ recommendations, the Fraser government extended the notion of multiculturalism from a minority-needs basis to a more overt recognition that cultural diversity was both implicit in and valuable to Australian culture. The AEAC report concluded rather ambitiously that ‘Australia should be working towards […] not a oneness, but a unity, not a similarity, but a composite, not a melting pot but a voluntary bond of dissimilar people sharing a common political and institutional structure’ (1977, cited in Jupp 2007a, p. 83). This period thus saw greater institutional recognition of ethnic rights and representation, so that cultural diversity was not simply acknowledged as existing in Australia, but as being valuable and in need of integration into systems and organisations (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, p. 150).
Working towards such an ambition was, however, slow going, with relatively few programmes implemented to specifically address the report’s principles of plural composition (Jupp 2007a; Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, pp. 150–51). In the first instance, funding was siphoned off to ethnic advisory organisations who could help provide resources and assistance to specific ethnic groups. Ultimately, the management of multiculturalism continued to be structured by a centralised white Anglo-Celtic value system. Ethnic boards were appointed but always reported to the white managerial centre, rather than being actively involved within it (Jupp 2007a, p. 43; Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, pp. 150–51). Moreover, it was argued that this model of multiculturalism neither practically managed the various differences it aimed to consolidate nor allowed for an accommodation of those differences that people wanted to maintain as distinct. Indeed, arguments abounded about the entrenched racism of the policy, with some claiming that multiculturalism was a neocolonialist system, the contemporary version of Australia’s assimilation or White Australia Policy (Armitage 1995; Ashcroft et al. 1998, p. 163). Multiculturalism was seen to welcome difference so long as such difference was prepared to change, or ‘melt in’ to, the dominant, white culture. In other words, if said difference was prepared to be less different.
These debates were on the priority list of Paul Keating’s agenda when he was elected as the new Labor prime minister in 1990. This election foresaw a new era in Australian politics and a new deployment of ‘cultural diversity’ (Ang 2001, p. 153). Renewed policies and initiatives were established that encouraged the celebration of difference as opposed to the maintenance of a unified identity.
Once again, the use of cultural difference in this manner was evidenced clearly in the arts, a long-time contributor to renegotiations of race, ethnicity and the white-European canon of modernity. The Australia Council Multicultural Advisory Committee – initiated and chaired by cultural theorist Sneja Gunew – attempted to move away from an arts movement that had remained in the 1989 Arts for a Multicultural Australia Policy about ‘social harmony’ and ‘unity’ towards an openness to diversity and fragmentation (Blonski 1992, p. 10). Such work greatly contributed to research and policy directives that critically engaged multiculturalism and the arts. At the end of the 1980s, the notion that Australians should celebrate cultural diversity and work from models of pluralism rather than commonality became popular and prevailed into the 1990s (Ang et al. 2008, p. 20). This period is thus described by Ien Ang et al. as one of ‘cosmopolitan multiculturalism’ – a time which encouraged Australians of all backgrounds to embrace a ‘global cultural diversity’ (ibid.).
Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2011, p. 151) define this third model of Australian multiculturalism as the ‘universal rights model’, in which the historic linking of ethnicity with citizenship becomes systemically abandoned. The Labor Party’s National Agenda of the 1980s reframed ethnicity as one of several choices for Australian citizens, thereby generalising service delivery to all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. Simultaneously, ethnic community organisations and boards were co-opted into amorphous State services, leading to their depoliticisation (Jupp 2002 and Castels 2000, cited in Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, p. 151). A range of arts programmes and initiatives were (and continue to be) implemented under the banner of cultural diversity. At a governmental level, however, the cosmopolitan period of multiculturalism was short-lived.
The election of the conservative Howard Liberal government in 1996 foresaw a renewed assimilationist discourse and an overall retraction of multiculturalism from the national narrative. For Prime Minister John Howard, multiculturalism was less important than ‘One Australia’. This conception of Australia acknowledged that Australians came from various parts of the world, but required a fervent loyalty to Australian ‘institutions […] values and […] traditions’, in a way that transcended ‘loyalty to any other set of values’ (Howard 1999, cited in Jupp 2007a, p. 106). Multicultural policies established during this period focused on security, border control and ‘appropriate levels’ of immigration; proposals based on diverse rights and pluralist values were often not endorsed (Koleth 2010, p. 13).
The common public sentiment of this time was that Australia had been too lax and too embracing and was now ‘paying the price’ in the form of a loss of Australian values. Indeed, for those Australians Hage (1998, p. 189) labels as ‘Hansonites’ – supporters of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party2 – there wasn’t so much a fear that Australians were losing control of their nation to ‘foreigners’ as there was a fear that they had already lost control. This concern was exacerbated in the early years of the twenty-first century. During this time, terrorist attacks in the United States, London, Bali and Spain and an increase in asylum-seeker arrivals and crimes by so-called ethnic gangs provided props for validating the government’s position, namely, to proceed with caution with regard to Australia’s ethnic constitution (see Poynting et al. 2004). These mainstream reactions were mirrored in the United Kingdom and other Western European countries (see Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Nayak 2017), evincing a type of ‘emotional geopolitics’ (Pain 2009, cited in Nayak 2017, p. 297) that defied national borders.
The return of Labor to power in 2007 brought about the possibility of change in this area. However, under the leadership of Kevin Rudd (2007–10), Julia Gillard (2010–13) and Rudd once more (June 2013–September 2013), multiculturalism was politically managed in more or less the same way as the previous Liberal government. The Gillard Labor government reinstated multiculturalism in its immigration policy portfolio in 2011 and expressed a much greater affiliation with ‘multicultural Australia’ than Howard. But while this government’s approach to multiculturalism softened in some ways, it remained aggressive in many others and tended to mirror the discursive tone of Howard. In particular, it echoed Howard’s suspicion of non-white Australians, and his nationalistic emphasis on a united, patriotic nation, as symbolised by the name change of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.3 Gillard also readopted many of the policies installed by the former government to manage asylum seekers and refugees.
The hostility of this anti-asylum-seeker discourse intensified following the successful leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd in the weeks before the 2013 Federal election. Moving to the opposition’s agenda of tighter border control and heightened nationalism, Rudd introduced the most severe asylum-seeker and refugee policies ever seen in Australia. These policies included navy interception of all boats, offshore processing and no chance of Australian settlement for any refugee arriving by boat. Shortly after, in September 2013, the Abbott Liberal party was elected to govern. It claimed that Labor had failed to keep Australia’s borders secure and, as such, began implementing severe policies that narrowed the scope of multiculturalism further still. A colonial narrative is evident in Abbott’s pre-election speech, which asked the Australian public to decide who was ‘more fair dinkum’, and declared:
The functions of government are to deliver a stronger economy, to provide national security, and to build a stronger and more cohesive society […] One thing that’s been most dismaying about the current government is their attempts to turn Australian against Australian […] it’s extraordinary that a government which has failed to stop people coming illegally to Australia by boat has tried consistently to demonise people coming to Australia legally and working and paying taxes from day one. You’ll never find this kind of divisiveness from me. I am proud of Australia as an immigrant society, I am proud of the fact that people from all over the world have come here not to change us but to join us […] [it] will increase under a Coalition government. (Abbott 2013; italics added)
Unsurprisingly, policies towards immigration and cultural diversity subsequently became more severe than critics of other conservative Australian governments could have anticipated (Grewcock 2014). Implicit in the border security rhetoric is a debasement of multiculturalism, which has only been further reaffirmed in the successive re-election of the Liberal government in the Federal elections of 2016 and 2019.
Cultural diversity and its critics: Two key approaches to the crisis of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century
Given the many forms of government changes and multicultural resistance and criticism, it is not surprising that multiculturalism is currently experiencing an existential crisis in Australia. This is evident beyond Australia, particularly in Anglo-settler colonies, but also in other parts of Europe, as Vertovec and Wessendorf (2010) meticulously demonstrate. Changes to the way identity was understood theoretically towards the end of the twentieth century made way for a reimagining of multiculturalism and ethnic rights, but whether this has helped or hindered the so-called multiculturalism crisis is debatable. In particular, the interpretation and deployment of identity categories such as ‘ethnicity’ became much more fragmented in the 1990s. Influenced by postmodern philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, cultural critiques began to move from investigations of identity to an elevation of difference (Ang and St Louis 2005, p. 292). Attending to ‘ethnic needs’ at large was increasingly considered inadequate for negotiating the differences between ethnic communities in Western countries, its inadequacy exacerbated by the increasing mobility of people and information across the globe. These theoretical debates translated to new approaches to studies of multiculturalism.
The first approach to multiculturalism studies in the twenty-first century retains the celebratory component of liberal multiculturalism though the terminology shifts somewhat from notions of equality and ethnic needs to one of cultural diversity. The celebratory approach is common in education literature and is associated in many ways with Charles Taylor’s (1994) liberal multiculturalism and politics of recognition. Initially, the acknowledgement of diversity was an exciting shift in art and cultural politics, welcomed by those who felt rigid identity categories failed to acknowledge the variances and tensions within and across identities. However, the meaning and use of cultural diversity has more recently come under scrutiny. While there are useful dimensions to this approach, I argue that its vehement promotion of cultural difference can enable racialisation to continue, albeit in discreet ways. I thus join a range of cultural studies academics, cultural theorists, artists and art critics who see themselves at a critical cross-road, or on the crest of a third wave of critique regarding cultural diversity (Ang 2003; Cooper 2004; Ang and St Louis 2005; Beng-Huat 2005; Lowe 2005; Ang et al. 2008; Appignanesi 2010a; Fisher 2010; Ahmed 2012a,b; Idriss 2016).
The term ‘cultural diversity’ carries with it a range of definitions and interpretations, although it has, across these variances, some similarities. First, as Jean Fisher (2010, p. 61) notes, the term is always related to notions of social justice, acting as a site of debate in nations which have a legacy of ‘injustice, inequality and discrimination against minority groups’. This dynamic is certainly the case in Australia and the greater West, where the effects of imperialism and colonialism are redistributed through its institutions and systems of knowledge. Second, it carries with it a relation to agency, or the degree to which individuals are ‘free’ to act as ‘political and legal subjects’ in any given society (ibid.). Finally, the term ‘almost always implies a majority monoculture against which all else is “diverse”, predicated on an hypostatisation of cultural and ethnic (or other) differences’ (ibid.). This latter point is crucial because while diversity certainly has and can refer to a range of identity markers, its development in the West has been in reference to racial or ethnic markers of difference. It has, in this context, emerged in societies defined as being ethnically plural, or ‘multicultural’, in constituency. Fisher’s discussion is in relation to the UK context; however, it translates usefully to Australia. Ang and St Louis (2005, p. 296) explain how ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences become officially sanctioned by the Australian State through multiculturalism: ‘The celebration of cultural diversity […] is an article of faith in self-identified multicultural societies.’
To substantiate this concern, it is useful to explore how cultural diversity is represented in the arts environment, a significant contributor to the formation of multiculturalism in Australia and beyond. According to Aaron Seeto (2011, p. 28), cultural difference in Australian contemporary art has tended to be either overly determined or entirely absent. In many cases, cultural difference continues to be unrepresented, or if it is present, misrepresented, taken up according to certain rules, which are governed by the normativity of whiteness. This point is confirmed by the major report by Diversity Arts Australia (2019, p. 4) into cultural diversity, which concluded that ‘there is a significant under-representation of CALD [Culturally and Linguistically Diverse] people in leadership and decision-making roles in every area of the creative sector’. So, even though Australia is a diverse nation, and culturally diverse artists are high in number, the core of the arts industry is Anglo-Celtic.
Many art critics agree that this issue has emerged because the application of ‘cultural diversity’ in Western society has been of a reactionary nature, that is, a mere ‘tool’ or ‘sector’ of politics aimed to address the changing ethnic constituency of Western countries (Appignanesi 2010b, p. 5; Araeen 2010a, p. 44; Fisher 2010, p. 62). This reactionary application has meant, as Seeto (2011, p. 28) argues, that cultural diversity in Australian curatorship has taken up the somewhat empty multiculturalism rhetoric of needing to ‘“build bridges”, cross cultures and engage new audiences’. Ultimately, such rhetoric serves the dominant culture, which demands that the relevance of culturally diverse art be repeatedly elucidated.
Fisher (2010, p. 63) explains that this has the potential to place the artist in ‘a straightjacket of conformity that, on one hand, risks crippling artistic creativity, and on the other, confines them to a limited range of “thematic” shows and critical discourses’. Araeen takes up a similar argument with regard to liberal multiculturalism in Australia (2003) and the Western context at large (2010a). Although he acknowledges the success of younger generation artists as a result of multiculturalism, Araeen believes it has meant their work has come to represent a ‘cultural specificity’: ‘only meant for those who are considered “others”’. Consequently, this allows for ‘the colonialist separation between people based on racial or cultural difference’ to be ‘openly institutionalised and maintained’4 (Araeen 2010a, p. 43). Thus, although ‘cultural diversity’ provides a space for ethnic Australians to explore and express their differences in a contemporary setting, it continues to ignore that ‘culture within itself is already an assemblage of differences, diverse tendencies and unresolved tensions’ (Appignanesi 2010a, p. 5).
The creation of the culturally diverse space also risks preventing genuine movement towards an integrated and inclusive arts and cultural ecology. While the multicultural subject is now present in the arts, it may remain transparent, that is, it might be ‘seen’ but not necessarily engaged with (Mercer 1999; Papastergiadis 2005). Such an argument is depicted by the continued failure of ethnic artists, including those of Asian, African-Caribbean and African origins, to be recognised as contributors to the history of European art itself (Hall 2002a, p. 80; Araeen 2010a, p. 53). Such an issue illustrates the persistent racism of the European arts industry, as well as the duplicitous work done by the discourse of cultural diversity. By focusing on the celebration of diversity/difference in art, the discourse diverts attention away from the continued racialisation of its history and systems, inexorably ignoring the influence of ethnic artists (Appignanesi 2010a, p. 10). According to this logic, critics like Appignanesi and Araeen feel that the turn to cultural diversity in artistic practice and curatorship has been deceptive.
The issues raised by the critique of ethnic diversity in Western art circuits can be translated to the cultural diversity turn in Australian multiculturalism. First, it presents the issue in which recognition based on racial/ethnic difference designates a particular, bordered space of the multicultural person and positions this person outside the white, monocultural centre. Cultural diversity has, overall, been charged with a social engineering task, designed to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of ethnic difference in Australia. The idea that cultural difference causes trouble consequently shadows all aspects of cultural diversity policies and initiatives. The concern here is that cultural diversity in contemporary Australia (along with the notions of ‘celebration of difference’ and ‘ethnicity as choice’) is deployed in a way that inevitably perpetuates racist realities for Australians. In the discourse on cultural diversity the culturally diverse person becomes diverse in accordance with ethnic or racialised categories. The critical dialogue and interaction designed to be opened up by cultural diversity subsequently becomes focused on the multicultural person as distinct from the white Australian. Graeme Turner’s (2008; p. 573) analysis of Australian inner-city suburbs supports this, arguing that ‘the accoutrements of cosmopolitanism are ever more self-consciously displayed, [and] cultural diversity has now become a local service, rather than an organic attribute of the local community’. Multicultural studies that do not address this problem risk reinforcing the binary that they intend to critique.
Critical multiculturalism studies address the binary tension more thoroughly and form what this research has identified as the second key approach to studies of cultural difference in Australia. Critical approaches to multiculturalism have been present since the 1970s; however, as mentioned earlier, the 1990s saw the emergence of new critical analyses of cultural difference that were indicative of new postmodern cultural theories. Pioneers of this work in Australia include Gunew (1997), Hage (1998), Papastergiadis (1995, 1997, 1999, 2000) and Ang (2001).
Recently, this foundational critical work has been added to by scholars interested in the ecologies of twenty-first century migrant communities. Unlike migrant communities of the post-war period, which involved larger, diasporic migration, new communities of Australian migrants develop from a fragmented mix of people. The communities exhibit highly diverse demographics, including varying economic and cultural capital and fluctuating attachments to notions of home (Ang 2011; Noble 2011; Yue and Wyatt 2014, p. 224). Some scholars argue that the complexity of contemporary migration has triggered different formations of racism and have thus set about mapping ‘neo-racism’ or the ‘post-racial’ (Yue and Wyatt 2014, pp. 224–25). This work draws on the scholarship of Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) on ‘neo-racism’, which posits that debates about multiculturalism and immigration are impacted by a new form of racism that is formed on the basis of cultural rather than biological differences. Yue and Wyatt (2014, p. 225) argue that new racism surfaced in Australia in the 1970s, following the arrival of multiculturalism, and has been in a constant state of change ever since. Significantly, they claim that ‘the old racism that deemed non-Anglo and Celtic others biologically inferior is replaced by the cultural racism of new racism’ (ibid.). Ethnic minorities are increasingly seen to have cultural differences completely incompatible with the dominant Anglo community and thus pose a threat to the nation (Corlett 2002, cited in ibid.).
In some ways, this argument is not dissimilar to that put forward by Hage (2014a) in his depictions of two main forms of racism: existential racism and numerological racism. Hage (1998) argues that most of the racism experienced in post–Second World War Australia is based on the perceived scale of ‘the Other’. In other words, this racism arises when the presence of the Other seems large enough to engulf white Australia. Existential racism, on the other hand, is a racism of disgust and more like the biological forms of racism categorised as ‘past’ forms of racism by neo-race and post-racial scholars. Existential racism is the type of racism Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) describes in his analysis of anti-Semitism, in which a person is repulsed simply by being in proximity to a person from another race. Hage (2014a) argues that Sartre’s conception of racism was most evident during Australian colonisation, as demonstrated in nineteenth-century representations of Indigenous Australians and Chinese migrants. I argue, rather, that numerological racism has always crossed over with existential or biological racism. Chinese migrants who arrived during the gold rush became abject subjects according to a biological racism which deemed ‘Oriental’ skin to inherently carry malice. But, the intensity of this abjection was also related to the perceived scale of the ‘malice’, that is, the numbers of Chinese migrants arriving were seen to be so high that domestic miners would be undercut or pushed out of the labour market.5
Today, it can appear as if numerological racism is prominent because of the regular condemnations of cultural or religious practices, but the sense of entitlement that drives these racist attacks inevitably leads us back to a perceived biological or existential superiority. While the trigger for racism is perhaps a numerological presence, the foundation of the racism remains the assumptions associated with racialised bodies. As will be demonstrated in Chapters 4–6, it rarely takes long for racialised tropes associated with biology and the physicality of the body to surface. This is perhaps why Hage (2014a, p. 233) sees existential racism as being once again on the rise in Australia, particularly towards recently arrived African and Indian migrants; that is, because existential racism has never not been present, it is just more adept at camouflaging itself in narratives of cultural diversity. Christine Kim (2014, p. 316) supports this argument, suggesting that race and racism continue to operate largely through a visual register, emanating an ‘eerie familiarity’ with older narratives and ultimately encouraging us to ‘conceptualise race as a biological phenomenon clearly inscribed onto the body’. As such, liberal contemporary societies such as Australia are able to purport that racism is now ‘a matter of either personal prejudice or part of a historical moment that we have now transcended’. She extends:
As a means of sketching out a cultural narrative about the overcoming of race in the past century, the move from the hypervisible to the invisible simultaneously expresses the dangers of race (to mark indelibly as well as to be circumvented by those that ‘pass’) as well as operates as the cultural grammar that structures many of the racial discourses in the contemporary moment. In the framework of liberal multiculturalism, the individual becomes the mechanism for overcoming racism with the common-sense belief that if one is colour-blind and incapable of seeing race, he or she cannot be guilty of racism. And yet, even if we want to believe this claim that many are now incapable of ‘seeing’ race, how do we understand their inability to sense race at work in the current moment? And to anticipate the latter part of my argument, how are they also able to ignore the pungent stink of racism? (p. 318)
Kim’s conceptualisation of race in the twenty-first century is an effective interpretation of Balibar’s (1991, p. 21) concept, which argues that it is at ‘first sight’ that neo-racism appears to be removed from old or biological racism. At first sight it can seem as if contemporary racism emerges only when an ethnic Other’s cultural or religious practices are deemed intolerable. After all, if ethnic Australians adopt Anglo-Celtic Australian values, they can be awarded what Stratton (2009, p. 16) refers to as ‘honorary whiteness’, or become, in Rosanna Gonsalves’s (2011, in Khorana 2014, p. 258) term, ‘de-wogged’. But, being able to bypass explicit racism via ‘symbolic whiteness’ (Khorana 2014, p. 260) does not demonstrate the eradication of historical forms of racism. Being an honorary white is not the same as being a ‘real’ white – at any moment the acclaim can be, and often is, stripped from the ethnic Australian whose body inevitably renders them inauthentic (see Stratton 1998; Ahmed 2000, p. 97; Ford 2009, pp. 171–73). Ultimately, these new critiques of multiculturalism that argue cultural racism has replaced historical forms of racism are problematic and as such this book does not adopt their methodologies.
Everyday multiculturalism
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).
Countless studies have pointed to this gap and ultimately raise the question: are we doing multiculturalism in our day-to-day lives in a way that is removed from both the political and theoretical ideal of multiculturalism? Indeed, even though the above examples suggest that the disconnection manifests in negative fashions, Anita Harris (2010) illustrates that this is not always the case. There also appears to be some detachment between the governmental idea of multiculturalism as a united Australian identity and the positive interactions that occur on the street in spite of diverse and fragmented identity alliances. As Harris explains, young people create ‘spatial communities’ which often go beyond ‘expected ethnic and gender belongings’ (p. 582). They do so because of ‘everyday debates, disagreements and encounters’ (ibid.). These tensions emerge over cultural differences, but they ultimately create ‘the foundation for productive and ongoing dialogue and engagement with others as equals’ (ibid.). In other words, Australian youths demonstrate positive intercultural exchange not only in spite of difference but because of it. The sense of equality and conviviality that can emerge is not, therefore, based on the managerial claim of a ‘unified’ Australian identity or way of life.
The perceived need for a new field of study is compounded by a perception that a similar gap exists in multiculturalism literature. As Noble (2009, p. 46) claims, theoretical discussions of multiculturalism tend to focus on identity categories that are inadequate to discuss the complexity of ethnicity, and the politics of multiculturalism also struggle to service this complexity. Noble goes on to suggest that this problem is created because intercultural encounters are not recognised as such; they are ‘just done’ (ibid.). Many scholars are attempting to bridge the so-called gap by researching the diversity of multicultural experiences of daily life (see, e.g., Phillips 2001; Gow 2005; Ford 2009; Wise 2009, 2016; Wise and Velayutham 2009a,b, 2019; Butcher and Harris 2010; Frisina 2010; Harris 2010; Rathzel 2010; Ho 2011; Hewitt 2016; Radford 2016; Knijnik 2018).
Although everyday multiculturalism is a relatively new field of study, the attempt to critically examine on-the-ground aspects of multiculturalism certainly is not. Everyday multiculturalism has been used under different guises for over two decades in academic scholarship (Wise and Velayutham 2009a, p. 3). The work of Ang, Essed, Hage and Stratton has explored the dynamic between ordinary citizens and multiculturalism discourse in various ways for several years. For example, Stratton (1999, 2011) explores the dynamic between citizens and multiculturalism, and Philomena Essed’s (1991) notion of ‘everyday racism’ has also been highly influential. Hage’s White Nation (1998) took up a critical analysis of the wider discourses at play in constructing the fantasy of multiculturalism, arguing that although the lives of migrants in Australia may have driven the policy formations of multiculturalism, their lives remain mis- or under-represented. It is also clear that although aspects of theory and policy have not always addressed the on-the-ground tensions at play, subset policies, programmes and organisations have been consistently aware of these issues and attempted to engage them in various ways. In their study of Australia’s multicultural and multilingual broadcasting service SBS,9 Ang et al. (2008, p. 50) note that the broadcaster’s latest platform fed into the popular theory of multiculturalism for everyday life, ‘warts and all’. SBS’s corporate plan for 2004–2006 aimed at ‘a more mundane and everyday multicultural spirit’ (ibid.).
The current work of everyday multiculturalism builds on these foundational studies of everyday cultural life. The first attempt to map the small but growing field was made by Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (2009b) in the edited book Everyday Multiculturalism. The collection includes essays from sociology, cultural studies, literary studies and political science. Common to all approaches is the underlying use of everyday multiculturalism as a way to problematise multiculturalism as both a policy-driven concept and a lived experience. Wise and Velayutham (2009a, pp. 2–3) identify 11 sub-themes of this problematisation as follows: (1) habitus and cultural capital; (2) embodiment, reciprocity, gift exchange and social exchange; (3) affect and the senses; (4) humour; (5) everyday exchanges and transformation; (6) hybridities and the notion of being ‘together in difference’; (7) everyday racism and tensions; (8) notions of civility and incivility; (9) networks; (10) material culture and modes of consumption; and (11) power and interplaying discourses. These sub-themes are certainly not mutually exclusive, and several overlaps exist between each one. Sites of study typically include spaces deemed reflective of everyday life, for example, housing and neighbourhood planning projects, food rituals, ethnic precincts, education, crime and youth participation in public space and life. This research frequently adopts a constructivist approach and almost always incorporates the use of empirical data.
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 diversity as a commodity for elitist consumption. As such, he claims that ‘tolerant Australians’ fighting for ‘good multiculturalism’ may have the best intentions, but in fact there is no such thing as tolerant and intolerant practices: both perpetuate the same racist underpinnings (p. 93). ‘Those who execute [tolerant practices], “good” as they are, share and inhabit along with White “evil” nationalists the same imaginary position of power within a nation imagined as “theirs” […] They enact the same White nation fantasy’ (p. 79). In this sense, those fighting the cause of liberal multiculturalism cannot be easily distinguished from those that Hage terms ‘Hansonites’, or other white Australians with overtly racist attitudes. Hage recognises that Pauline Hanson and many of her supporters really believe they are not racist. Combining an approach of ethical reflexivity and a critique of inconspicuous deployments, Hage not only considers how nationalist practices embed these ideas but, importantly, how they incorporate the ideas of those he finds less racist. Namely, what are the conditions that constitute these supposed ‘more or less’ levels of racism? Similarly, Povinelli (2002, p. 52) suggests that instead of writing Hanson off as racist because her ideas seem repellent, we should, in fact, ponder them seriously.13 Both Hage and Povinelli are here pointing to the importance of what Gunew (2004) calls the ‘shifty work’ of multiculturalism, and our need to be persistently critical of it.
It is important, therefore, to carefully analyse the work that gets done in the name of multiculturalism and/or its counterpart cultural diversity. This is especially the case as multiculturalism and its related domains retain their status in the imagined community of contemporary Australia. A recent study conducted by Nikos Papastergiadis et al. (2015) at the University of Melbourne found that new migrants to Melbourne/Naarm and greater Victoria continue to use the language of multiculturalism, explicating a keen desire to become an active part of Australia’s multicultural society. The research indicates that the personal identities of many new migrants are intrinsically linked to the institutional construction of multiculturalism; how these migrants construct an understanding of their Australian subjectivity moves in and around this discourse. This relationship occurs in spite of multiculturalism’s critics and its waning popularity as a keystone governmental policy. Maree Pardy’s and Julian C. H. Lee’s (2011, p. 300) empirical research further supports this point, noting that Australian immigrants and refugees frequently ‘claim multiculturalism as their space’. Multiculturalism is viewed as the space in which they can attain belonging and identification with the nation, a type of guarantee for their future Australianness (pp. 300–301). I thus maintain the use of the term ‘multiculturalism’, positioning it as a prevalent contemporary phenomenon that cannot be overlooked.
The personal-public relationship involved in forming a multicultural subjectivity gives rise to another key aspect of my approach to the study of everyday multiculturalism, namely, the framing of everyday multiculturalism as interrelated to systematic or governmental realms. Some everyday multiculturalism scholars have a tendency to position everyday cultural encounters as removed from institutionalised frameworks of cultural difference. Paul O’Connor (2010, p. 526), for example, views everyday multiculturalism as ‘miles ahead’ of policy initiatives. This structure also arises in some discussions about the role of community-based or culturally diverse art as a cultural process emancipated from governmentality.14 In his analysis of cultural diversity in Britain, Araeen (2010a,b) argues that the ‘diversity of cultures’ and ‘diversity within’ art should be seen as two separate things, calling for a separation between art and other elements associated with cultural diversity, such as traditions and heritage. While Araeen feels diversity is a ‘fundamental’ rather than an ‘add-on’, he holds the idea of the ‘free-thinker’ close to his chest – believing that art has to be completely separated from culture and its institutions and policies to allow for truly creative and progressive works (Araeen 2010b, p. 18).
Cultural difference and multicultural interactions certainly occur beyond policy; however, this book argues that the distinction between these two realms cannot and should not be made so clearly. Trying to separate the culturally diverse artist or multicultural subject from institutions and/or policy overlooks the set of relations that pre-exist and exceed beyond the artist or multicultural person. Certainly, the checklist approach to cultural diversity creates a series of presuppositions for art practice and its outputs, but gaining an exterior of culture and its critique is, by definition, an impossible task. We can only come to know ‘ourselves’, after all, by giving the ‘I’ over to a set of terms which exist before and beyond us (Butler 1997a, pp. 196–97). A separation of any sort is, as Butler (2009, p. 44) writes, a ‘function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness’. Furthermore, arguing that we need to separate things into distinct fields to find ‘true creativity’, or, as O’Connor (2010) argues, to analyse the ‘real’ realms of multiculturalism, fails to critically consider the productive work that occurs within the institutions of both art and multiculturalism. As Butler (2009, p. 149) outlines, institutions and the State are able to establish ‘ontological givens’ through certain operations of power, which are ‘precisely notions of subject, culture, identity, and religion’, and the versions of these often remain ‘uncontested’. The State and the institutions of multiculturalism should not be at the centre of analysis since power operates in ways and means that ‘precede and exceed’ (p. 146) it; but it is still an element that contributes to the assemblage of the ethnic subject and the wider terrain of cultural diversity. The everyday experiences of racism are not excluded to the realm of the individual or the personal – racist attacks are always validated by the dominant sociality to some degree, ‘either by other citizens or by various institutions, and especially those of the state’ (Tabar et al. 2010, p. 156).
Christopher Bowen’s (2011) speech, The Genius of Australian Multiculturalism, helps to illustrate the public-private entanglements within the discourse of multiculturalism and ultimately the multicultural body that I examine in this book. As the minister for immigration and citizenship under the former Gillard Labor government, Bowen addressed parliament to officially reinstate Australia as a multicultural nation. The speech is noticeably sanguine, exaggerating the successes of Australian multiculturalism and ignoring its problems and ultimately giving it no new vision or reassessment. Echoing John Howard’s 1999 agenda of ‘One Australia’, Bowen proclaims that the success of Australian multiculturalism is attributable to the way it allows other cultures to enjoy their own cultural values, but always ensures ‘respect for traditional Australian values’ is retained at its core. According to Bowen, this has allowed Australia to escape the perils that other multicultural nations, such as Canada, Germany and France, have experienced. Bowen suggests that the complex debate over language in Canada, the ‘parallel lives’ produced in Germany and the race riots in France have been the results of a lack of encouragement for integration and/or an ill-defined multicultural policy. This latter comparison with France is particularly disturbing since it was only recently that violent race riots occurred in the Southern-Sydney suburb of Cronulla.15 As I will argue in Chapter Five, racism was an underlying factor in the Cronulla riots, made explicit by the specific uses of the white male body during the public stand-off. By making a point of the tensions in other countries, but denying those present in Australia, Bowen perpetuates Australia’s long-standing denial of racism and its failure to acknowledge the history and contributions of non-white Australians to the country.
A comparison can be made to Hage’s (2002b, p. 9) argument regarding the lack of ethical consideration for Arab-Australians during the Gulf War. Hage describes how media reports of the war made no gesture towards the Arab-Australian community, an absence he attributes to the fact that the ethnic community was not ‘considered worthy of a pause’ (ibid.). The failure on the part of Bowen to include a pause for the on-the-ground tensions of multiculturalism indicates a repeated performance of an entrenched racism. Namely, he gives the nation a multicultural imaginary while simultaneously denying the everyday reality of the multicultural subjects that the imaginary claims to include. This denial or absence of a pause directly impacts the way ethnic bodies perceive themselves, and ultimately the choices they make from day to day. The empirical research carried out for the aforementioned HREOC (2003) project found, for example, that one of the significant reasons victims of racism do not report racist incidents is due to a belief that racism is accepted by the majority of Australians and the country’s core institutions (Tabar et al. 2010, p. 159). When retelling their experiences of racism, many participants mentioned the lack of intervention and care from onlookers or witnesses. This apathy was felt even though the attacks often took place in public areas, such as roads, transportation, shopping centres or at work (ibid.).
The lack of intervention by individuals and representatives of institutions (police officers, politicians) fulfil ‘the collective nature of mechanisms of conversion’ or the active process through which bodies are marked as human or otherwise (ibid.). Immediately after the Cronulla riots the prime minister of the time, John Howard, denied they were a result of racism – a denial Bowen reaffirms years later in his 2011 multiculturalism speech.
Conclusion
There has been a shifting ecology of liberal multiculturalism in the twenty-first century, including the eruption of the term ‘cultural diversity’ in multicultural discourses. A range of moving factors has culminated in multiculturalism entering a mode of crisis in the twenty-first century, leading to two main approaches to its study. The first approach has been to emphasise the positive aspects of multiculturalism, often with a focus on the richness that cultural diversity adds to society. The second approach is more critical, working to illustrate the complexities and issues of multiculturalism as a societal phenomenon. Often, this latter approach moves discussions of cultural difference beyond the framework of multiculturalism altogether, either in the form of a complete renunciation or as a subtle but evident departure.
There are clearly micro and macro/private and public levels to the normalisation of racism – on the ground in which the racist altercations or tensions take place, and within the broader systems of power and sociality that support (sometimes simply by overlooking) these incidences. Tabar et al. (2010, p. 159) emphasise the importance of this relationship, ‘crucial not just because of the ways in which it structures the fields of significant social power […] but because it also shapes the forms of conversion in everyday life’. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of arguments like that posited by O’Connor and Araeen is their failure to consider the productive work that occurs between the ‘on-the-ground’ cultural differences and the institutions that drive it.
The study of multiculturalism is not ready to be abandoned, but it does need to be reconceptualised in broader terms. A brief overview of governmental and theoretical forms of multiculturalism indicates that questions of white managerialism continue to plague both the conceptualisations and material implications of multicultural life. Materiality must be fore-fronted in analyses of cultural difference if they are to tackle the stubborn residue of biological racism within multiculturalism discourse. Multiculturalism studies should analyse the multitude of forces and relations that constitute the present moment of culturally diverse life, but always with the understanding that this analysis might look different from another angle.
A multiculturalism that is critical and attuned to the complicated cross-overs of private and public discourses must be utilised in order to adequately navigate the conjuncture of cultural difference in the twenty-first century. The following chapter turns its attention to digital storytelling, a genre in which the nation and the ordinary multicultural body overlap.
1.Richard Appignanesi, editor of this Diversity report, later edited Third Text for a decade, from 2004 to 2014.
2.Pauline Hanson began her political career as a councillor for local government in Queensland, Australia. In the mid-1990s she was elected into Federal parliament as an Independent. In 1997 she founded One Nation, a populist, right-wing political party with an anti-Indigenous rights and anti-multiculturalism platform. The party disbanded a few years later but Hanson’s political aspirations and involvement have continued into the present moment. Hanson reformed One Nation in November 2014. The Australian public has also welcomed Hanson as a pseudo-celebrity over the years, exemplified by her participation in the popular competition television series Dancing with the Stars (2004) and The Celebrity Apprentice Australia (2011).
3.The removal of the word ‘multicultural’ from Federal management suggested a lessening of its importance. It was also indicative of a relinking of ethnic difference to a managerial model of Australian citizenship, where citizenship is earned via active participation in white Australian activities and narratives (see Stratton 2011).
4.The threat to creativity is clear. If artists gain entry into the contemporary art circuit because of their ethnic/racial labels – seen as ‘culturally relevant’ in this present context of ‘culturally diverse arts’ – how do those artists detach from this category? This is an issue many contemporary Australian artists face, as illustrated by my interview with Paula do Prado following her feature in ‘Sensorial Loop: Tamworth’s Textile Triennial’ (2011) and her solo exhibition Mellorado (2012a). As do Prado emerges in contemporary art circuits and collectors become increasingly interested in her work, she becomes exponentially aware of (and anxious about) the expectations pertaining to the ‘culturally-diverse aesthetic’ of her work (2012b, interview, 22 March).
5.Australian diggers turned against Chinese workers on the Bendigo goldfields as early as 1854, even though at this point the Australians outnumbered the Chinese fifteen thousand to two thousand; similar incidents were experienced in New South Wales, for example, at Rocky River in 1856, where a group of white miners attacked a newly arrived group of Chinese (Price 1974, pp. 68–69). Anti-Chinese sentiment intensified as more Chinese migrants arrived, a reaction parallel to the growing fear of a mass takeover by the ‘vast numbers’ of the Chinese (Hansard 1881, in Huttenback 1972–73, p. 282). Supporting the miners during this period were circulating newspapers such as Empire, which warned of the threat posed by ‘that swarming hive of the human race’ (Price 1974, p. 79). In 1855, the Victorian governor and Legislative Council accepted the royal commissioners’ recommendation for an entry tax into the goldfields, designed to ‘check and diminish’ the Chinese influx (Report of Commissioners on the Gold Fields [1854–55], cited in Price 1974, p. 69).
6.There are a range of Indigenous place names for parts of Sydney, for example ‘central’ Sydney is located on the unceded land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. However, the greater city of Sydney occupies other areas, all of which fall within Eora territory; therefore, Eora is used henceforth.
7.More recent examples of everyday multiculturalism in other geographical locations include Pratsinakis et al.’s (2017) work in Greece, Back and Sinha’s (2016) work in the United Kingdom, Wong’s (2016) Singapore study and Shan and Walter’s (2015) Canada-based research.
8.A feeling indicative of the distrust that has been expressed towards globalisation and technological revolution, in particular towards rapid digitalisation, increased mobility and the fragmentation of networks.
9.SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) began with radio but has since extended to television and online formats.
10.See also Ang and Stratton (1998) regarding the lack of language to describe a racism based on ‘race’ in Australia.
11.It should be stressed that terms such as ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim Australians’, and other related terms used in this book, for example, ‘Lebanese Australian’, are slippery and used interchangeably at times. The identity politics and cultural embeddedness of these terms should not be overlooked.
12.There is something significant in this outstretched hand, and it is comparable to the discussion of the hand reaching to tear off the burqa that Hage (1998) undertakes in his chapter in Arab-Australians Today (2002a). The outstretched hand is taken up again in Chapters Six and Seven as a metaphor for the corporeal performativity of race.
13.See also Ang (2001, p. 158):
What if we were to do the unthinkable and agree with Hanson that there is something fishy about the nation’s enjoyment of ancient Aboriginal traditions? About the national celebration of a social law preceding the messiness of national history? About the tacit silences surrounding the content of Aboriginal traditions?
14.Rimi Khan (2011, 2015) critically problematises this association. See also Hawkins (1993) and Andreas Huyssen (2007).
15.Although a Southern-Sydney suburb, Cronulla is imbricated with West Sydney, an area known for its pronounced multicultural constituency. ‘Mark’, a young man involved in the Cronulla riots, explains this spatial-social connection:
You’ve got the surrounding suburbs like Bankstown, Hurstville, Lakemba, they’re all west and they’re also connected by the train line that goes into Cronulla. Also, that’s their local beach as well. And pretty much out there it’s a lot of Middle Eastern culture. There’s definitely – there’s a lot of Middle Eastern people out there […] from Lebanon, wherever. (Four Corners 2006)
