Making and remaking multicultural arts: policy, cultural difference and the discourse of decline

Abstract

Currently, a discourse of decline shadows multiculturalism, claiming it is ‘no longer’ viable as a governmental technique to manage present-day social complexity. This article revisits multiculturalism as an intervention in the discourse of decline, shifting the terms of the multiculturalism debate from the abstract struggle between competing political ideologies, to the minor material processes through which multiculturalism was enacted. Through a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality, we examine in particular the invention and evolution of multicultural arts over the last 30 years. We attend to the multiple ways in which cultural difference has been mobilised and understood by policy-makers and the constituents they served; how these various framings of cultural difference informed the shifting objectives and constituencies of multicultural arts; and how these shifts were influenced by the dispersed nature of policy formation, crossing multiple sites and stakeholders, each subject to, but also resisting and reshaping, the discursive parameters of this category. Such an approach dismantles the coherence and stability of multiculturalism upon which the discourse of decline is premised, but also anticipates the way multiculturalism is presently transforming in response to a transnational, neoliberal cultural imaginary.

Keywords:

• multicultural arts
• cultural difference
• cultural policy
• governmentality
• Australia Council

Notes

1. Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition situates Indigeneity at the centre of Australian multiculturalism. While a seminal work in Aboriginal anthropology, this book‘s concerns are somewhat peripheral to the key debates about Australian multiculturalism emerging in recent years. See Toby Miller’s comprehensive critique (2002, pp. 609–622).

2. This is revised in 2000 to ‘Arts in a multicultural Australia’.