Mediating Multiculturalism

Daniella Trimboli

Description

An innovative model for reconceptualising multiculturalism using contemporary phenomena like digital storytelling

Using digital storytelling—a new media genre that began in California in the late 1990s and that proliferated across ‘the West’ in the 2000s—as a site of analysis, this book asks, ‘What is done in the name of the everyday?’ Like everyday multiculturalism, digital storytelling is promoted as an accessible, enabling, and ordinary phenomenon that represents cultural experience more accurately than official sites. As such, the genre frequently houses stories of migration, community, and ethnic and racial differences. In turn, digital story collections often act as digital monuments or repositories of multiculturalism, giving a digital life to narratives of migration, cultural difference, and national belonging. This is evidenced in one of the world’s largest public collections of digital stories, found in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and referenced throughout this book.

 

Using examples from this collection and pointing to comparable ones in the UK and North America, this book investigates how notions of the everyday become a channel through which certain long-standing discourses of race get redeployed in multicultural nations. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in these societies? Can digital storytelling re-mediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?

List of Figures; Foreword by Sandra Ponzanesi; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Multiculturalism as a Crisis of Contradiction; Part One Convergences; Chapter One Difference Returns to the Everyday: Multiculturalism, the Arts and ‘Race’; Chapter Two Digital Storytelling and Diversity Work; Chapter Three Meeting in the Middle: A Theoretical Framework; Part Two Multicultural Bodies; Chapter Four Everyday Ethnicity in Digital Publics; Chapter Five Harmonising Diverse Voices: Ethnic Performativity in Collaborative Digital Storytelling; Chapter Six In Pursuit of the Promise; Chapter Seven The Heart of the Matter; Chapter Eight Slipping Up: Performative Glitches; Part Three Future Digital Multiculturalisms; Chapter Nine Diasporic Disturbances: Alternative Digital Storytelling Techniques; Chapter Ten The Cosmos in the Everyday; Chapter Eleven Digital Cosmopolitanisms, Diasporic Intimacies; Conclusion: Remediating Multiculturalism; References; Index.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Ethnic studies
• Social sciences
• Media studies

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 04 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785273926
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mediating Multiculturalism
Mediating Multiculturalism
Digital Storytelling and the Everyday Ethnic
Daniella Trimboli
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Daniella Trimboli 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936448
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-390-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-390-6 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Some parts of this work have been adapted from:
Daniella Trimboli, ‘Faces Sailing By: Junk Theory and Racialised Bodies in the Sutherland Shire’, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture , vol. 6, no. 2 (2015): 181–91, https://doi.org/10.1386/cjmc.6.2.181_1 .
Daniella Trimboli, ‘Affective Everyday Media: The Performativity of Whiteness in Australian Digital Storytelling’, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies , vol. 32, no. 3 (2018): 44–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2018.1488879 . Copyright © 2018 Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press, reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press.
A thorough and diligent attempt was made via ACMI to contact authors Fatma Coskun, Kenan Besiroglu and Rita el-Khoury regarding reproduction of material, but was unfortunately unsuccessful. The authors are encouraged to contact ACMI or Daniella Trimboli should they have any questions or concerns.
For my brothers Matthew, Domenic and Tony
for always standing behind me when I need to step forward
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Foreword by Sandra Ponzanesi
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Multiculturalism as a Crisis of Contradiction
Part One Convergences
Chapter One Difference Returns to the Everyday: Multiculturalism, the Arts and ‘Race’
Chapter Two Digital Storytelling and Diversity Work
Chapter Three Meeting in the Middle: A Theoretical Framework
Part Two Multicultural Bodies
Chapter Four Everyday Ethnicity in Digital Publics
Chapter Five Harmonising Diverse Voices: Ethnic Performativity in Collaborative Digital Storytelling
Chapter Six In Pursuit of the Promise
Chapter Seven The Heart of the Matter
Chapter Eight Slipping Up: Performative Glitches
Part Three Future Digital Multiculturalisms
Chapter Nine Diasporic Disturbances: Alternative Digital Storytelling Techniques
Chapter Ten The Cosmos in the Everyday
Chapter Eleven Digital Cosmopolitanisms, Diasporic Intimacies
Conclusion: Remediating Multiculturalism
References
Index
FIGURES
4.1 Screenshots from Fatma Coskun’s digital story New Life, New Country (2007)
4.2 Screenshots from Fatma Coskun’s digital story New Life, New Country (2007)
4.3 Screenshots from Sam Haddad’s digital story Loving Lebanon and Australia (2007), courtesy of the author
4.4 Screenshot from Sam Haddad’s digital story Loving Lebanon and Australia (2007), courtesy of the author
6.1 Screenshots from Rita el-Khoury’s digital story Where Do I Belong? (2007)
8.1 Screenshots from Jimmy Domain’s digital story Ithal Damat = Imported Groom (2007), courtesy of the author
8.2 Screenshots from Sam Haddad’s digital story Loving Lebanon and Australia (2007), courtesy of the author
9.1 Screenshot from Carla Pascoe’s digital story The Spaces In Between (2007), courtesy of the author
9.2 Screenshots from Adam Nudelman’s digital story The Shoemaker (2007), courtesy of the author
9.3 Adam Nudelman’s Mania’s Shoes (2002) and Diaspora (2002), courtesy of Adam Nudelman
10.1 Screenshots from Newman Film Group’s The Chronicles of Liam’s Hair (2010), courtesy of the authors
11.1 Screenshots from Curious Works’ short film Khaled vs. Khaled (2014), courtesy of the author
C.1 Portrait of Sam Haddad
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I was privileged to carry out the maj