Affective Everyday Media: The Performativity of Whiteness in Australian Digital Storytelling

ABSTRACT

Digital storytelling is popular in Australian community-based arts and contemporary art more broadly, providing an accessible way for people to creatively describe their everyday experiences. While the field has been rapidly growing, little research currently exists on the material implications of digital stories, let alone those about cultural difference. By comparing Big hART's Junk Theory (2006) against Sam Haddad's Loving Lebanon and Australia (2007), this study argues that migrant digital stories represent a conjuncture of multiculturalism, affect, and performativity, and thus act as a useful node for thinking through “cultural diversity.” A new, more specific way to consider the connection of performativity and affect is mapped out and demonstrates its relevance for projects where identities are (re)articulated has to be one word on one line. The paper argues that while digital stories can function as a useful archival and personally transformative artistic medium, they carry a danger of consolidating normative affective responses, which may ultimately maintain the materiality of Otherness in Australian society.

Keywords:

• digital storytelling
• affect theory
• performativity
• whiteness
• everyday
• ethnicity
• new media