Mediating Multiculturalism by Daniella Trimboli

Author:Daniella Trimboli [Trimboli, Daniella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Media Studies, Minority Studies
ISBN: 9781785273926
Google: 3Wn0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2020-08-04T02:46:59+00:00

Conclusion

Literat et al. (2018, p. 264) argue that ‘all participation is participation in something, and therefore has an implicit collective dimension, which can be more or less pronounced’ (emphasis in the original). This implicit collective dimension is true for both individual digital stories (such as those produced by ACMI and previously discussed) and collaborative digital stories, such as JT. The latter exists on the collectivist end of the digital participation spectrum, involving a more deliberate ‘mobilization of collective action around a shared agenda’ (ibid.). In this chapter, I have illustrated how JT is mobilised around a shared agenda of community cohesiveness and belonging in the Shire, but implicit in this mobilisation is a collective performativity of certain ethnic norms. I examined Big hART’s JT in relation to the previous chapter’s analysis of ACMI’s digital storytelling programme to consider how national storytelling takes place in digital storytelling as a personal/public relationship between ethnic authors and an implied white audience. Within both ACMI’s and Big hART’s projects, there is an underlying attempt to bring private stories of racism and related violence into the public realm. Inevitably, this public storying of ethnicity compresses the complicated characteristics of everyday cultural difference and encounters into an assimilatory narrative. This public narrative is edifying and also reinstates the power of the Australian nation-state. As such, typical digital storytelling on cultural diversity plays a role in ensuring that the AoS of Australian multiculturalism functions smoothly.

The analysis also suggests that in Australian digital stories pertaining to ethnicity, the outcome is a material one that produces white and non-white bodies in accordance with normative discourses of whiteness. The analysis illustrated that the longer, collaborative process enacted by Big hART produced a more complex narrative and aesthetic product than the individual digital stories generated by ACMI. The performativity of whiteness can be seen to be lingering at all times in JT, but the digital project never fully collapses into the norm in quite the same way as the individual stories seem to. Indeed, it offers several moments of performative departure. This is an interesting outcome, as one might imagine the highly personalised style of the ACMI stories – in particular, the invitation to tell a story of one’s choosing – would create a more divergent film. Even across the films collected under ‘cultural diversity’, the type of ethnic performances carried out tend to conform to one another.

Nonetheless, JT also harbours manifestations of whiteness, especially in its formation of community, the underlying responsibility placed on ‘ethnics’ to enact social cohesiveness, and the reiteration of particular stereotypes and normative tropes about ‘ethnic Australians’ (even when trying to undo these). There is clearly a challenge facing Australian arts/media practice to continue in everyday settings but also remain attuned to how this practice might enact everyday forms of violence. The following chapter further explores this tension by examining how affective economies are regulated in migrant digital stories and to what outcome.

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