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ABSTRACT
Festivals are an increasingly more popular form of contemporary cultural activism. Countering prejudice through arts, using culture as a tool of communication, and creating an opportunity for marginalised groups to participate in public life, they represent a specific and novel means of civic activism. In this paper, I introduce a case study of the multicultural festival [fjúžn], aiming to enhance the public visibility of ‘new minorities’ and bring attention to the ethnic and cultural diversity in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia. Building on a festival ethnography and drawing on the perspective of boundary work [Jaworsky, B. Nadya. 2016. The Boundaries of Belonging: Online Work of Immigration-related Social Movement Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan], I show how the festival organisers work towards crossing and blurring symbolic boundaries in society. I offer a close interpretive reading of their attempts at capturing public places and cultivating a diverse language-scape, while showing how they simultaneously maintain, solidify, or even inscribe new boundaries. I conclude by raising critical points about the potential of activist cultural festivals to shift symbolic boundaries in the long run and serve as tools of social inclusion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I use the term ‘activist cultural festival’ as an analytical category in this study, aiming to emphasise the socially and politically engaged orientation of the studied festival. As opposed to conventional, i.e. non-activist cultural festivals, these events aim to bring attention to social problems and steer public debate as one of their main goals. When reproducing the discourse of my communication partners, I also use the category ‘multicultural festival’, as this is how the organisers define the festival.
2 Slovak legislation does not recognise the category of new minorities. The closest official category related to the term used by the festival organisers is the general designation ‘foreigner’, which is defined as ‘anyone who is not a citizen of the Slovak Republic’ (IOM-SK). This includes people of migrant origin without Slovak citizenship residing in Slovakia for various lengths of time with different legal statuses. It also includes asylum seekers and people with subsidiary protection. It does not include ethnic minorities, who have a distinct legal status. Although the two categories do not overlap completely, reflecting the vocabulary of my informants in the text, I use the categories of foreigners and new minorities interchangeably.
3 Quote from the interview with Laco, the program manager of the Milan Šimečka Foundation.
4 According to the official statistics, in 2016, there were 93,247 foreigners legally residing in Slovakia, which constitutes approximately 1.72% of the population. More than half (55.8%) are citizens of other European Union countries, including the neighbouring Visegrad countries. This number, however, does not include naturalised Slovaks of migrant origin or the second generation of immigrants (IOM-SK).
5 Although, as Androvičová (Citation2015) points out, there is an important distinction between the perception of migrants coming from countries understood as ‘culturally close’, and those understood as ‘culturally inferior’.
6 An estimated 30,000 foreigners with different forms of legal status reside in the Slovak capital.
7 Naturally, the group of foreigners living in Bratislava is far from homogenous and their (un)successful participation in cultural and civic life is determined by many intersecting factors, including class, gender, education, ethnic origin, or legal status. More detailed study of the needs and forms of participation of different ethnic communities and social groups is lacking. While keeping in mind the differentiated position of individuals resulting from a complex web of intersections, in this study I follow the perspective of my informants and understand the category of new minorities relationally, as all ethnic others, but ethnic minorities, living in Bratislava.
8 In the remainder of the text, the designations small team evaluation and full team evaluation are used.
9 Excerpts taken from the full team evaluation.
10 A notable exception is the neighbourhood surrounding the former factory Dimitrovka, which is highly populated by Vietnamese families (see Hlinčíková et al. [Citation2014]) and numerous low-income housing developments inhabited predominantly by Roma, such as Pentagon or Kopčany, which are in the eyes of many Bratislava dwellers perceived as ‘Roma neighbourhoods’.
11 My observation of the audiences for respective events suggests a variety in terms of age, gender, class, education, and interest in the topic of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism.
12 From the small team evaluation.
13 This attitude has sedimented also into a figure of speech, the saying ‘Na Slovensku po slovensky’, which loosely translates as ‘In Slovakia, speak only Slovak’.