Читать книгу Mediating Multiculturalism - Daniella Trimboli - Страница 8

FOREWORD

Sandra Ponzanesi

To talk about multiculturalism today seems not only obsolete but also irrelevant. Yet nothing could be more untrue and problematic. Despite the decline in the popularity of the term and the somewhat shared feeling that multiculturalism has failed or is inadequate, multicultural coexistence and conviviality is more a reality now than ever before.

The necessity of continuing to address contemporary migrant flows, with the unresolved tensions about increasing diversity and intercultural conflicts, only testifies to the need to revisit multiculturalism not as a top-down policy instrument but as a part of everyday reality that is not going to wane any time soon. Doing multiculturalism as a form of participatory culture, where different voices and creative representations are given pride of place, is the focus of Mediating Multiculturalism: Digital Storytelling and the Everyday Ethnic, which offers a groundbreaking and innovative intervention into the notion of multiculturalism as ‘mediation’. This mediation takes place not just through different media and fields of media expertise but also though the articulations of different forms of everyday cosmopolitanism, where negotiations of identities, belonging and citizenship are the focal point within a wider national and transnational understanding.

This book provides an invaluable read for anyone wanting to know more about the international dynamics of multicultural theory, policy and culture, understood through the bottom-up perspective of migrants’ creative practices. Digital storytelling offers an engaging entry into the possibility for self-expression, self-representation and self-creation, mediated through the tools and practices of different media affordances and infrastructures. It is analysed as a genre that confirms or deviates from normative notions of whiteness and ethnicity, offering new creative insights into the multiplicities of everyday life for migrants and ‘strangers’ as subjects in Australia.

The book is particularly successful in bringing theoretical sources and creative material into dialogue to see whether the ‘subaltern’ subject can speak, even if this is within the narrative framework provided by institutionalised forms of digital storytelling. As this is a medium that enhances the voice of the other, it is particularly critical to dissect and analyse the genre in its potential, contradictions and reinforcing normativity. But the author takes this a step further by writing: ‘This analysis leads the book to consider how digital stories can allow for extensions of performativity and affect as political forces of change: capable of disrupting and resisting norms of whiteness to create alternative realities of everyday multiculturalism detached from racialisation’ (p. x). Digital storytelling is studied as enabling media practices for migrant groups, where the possibility of self-expression takes centre stage, showing how ethnicity can be produced and manipulated for positive affirmative actions and offering a useful intersection between cultural diversity and the arts. Everyday multiculturalism emerges as indicative of a broader shift in cultural studies, where the local, mundane and unofficial aspect of cultural difference is magnified: ‘Paying attention to what bodies are saying, or doing, placed the emphasis of this analysis on the mundane but material effects of culturally diverse storytelling for subjects of multiculturalism’ (p. x). Migrants shape a multimodal narrative of their own that allows them to combine the past and the present by using photographs, films, sounds and narration to achieve particular effects. Interestingly, this apparently empowering new tool, which allows strangers, migrants and others to find their own voice, is connected to the notion of multiculturalism and how ethnicity and integration get coded to normalise cultural diversity instead of opening up new venues for forms of belonging and participation.

The author’s focus on individual and collective storytelling manages to capture a complex reality of migrants living in Australia and dealing with different degrees of rejection and integration. Some of the stories are built as a collective tool to create tolerance and acceptance among different ethnic and religious groups, reinforcing normative ideas of happiness, love and success; others are ironic and unsettling.

Theoretically sophisticated and empirically original, this book weaves together multiculturalism, performance studies, affect theories, media studies, postcolonial studies and ethnic studies in a marvellous way, producing new ground for rethinking living together with difference.