Ethnicities

Mainstream cultural institutions such as museums are increasingly called upon to increase their accessibility to culturally diverse communities and audiences, including migrant groups who do not generally visit museums. This essay discusses the challenges experienced by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the largest art museum in Sydney, Australia, in mounting an exhibition of Buddhist art in 2001, and in its efforts to use the exhibition as a vehicle for drawing new audiences in, especially Asian Buddhist groups. The case study raises important questions about possibilities and limits of engaging cultural diversity in the art museum. The biases inherent in the operations of the art museum, especially its non-negotiable reliance on a Western concept of ‘art’, are at the heart of the predicament of diversity for art museum practice.

This article revisits the theme of representation by examining the relationship between difference and transparency. I argue that the current purchase of multiculturalism and diversity marks the ‘officialization’ of the 1980s politics of difference, which refashioned previous formulations of racial and cultural difference without challenging their ontological premises. Through a reading of the Bloco Olodum’s 1988s carnival lyrics, I chart the articulation of signifiers of Africanity, as a marker of cultural difference, which writes the black Brazilian as subaltern subject without producing a particular version of a (self-)transparent (interior/temporal) African subject. Instead, in this emancipatory text, Africanity delimits a region of subalternity, one inhabited by Africans and economically dispossessed blacks in the diaspora, which is defined in terms of a political struggle that marks their existence in post-Enlightenment social configurations. Not only does the interpretive strategy I deploy show how an attention to social scientific knowledge’s role in production of modern (post-Enlightenment) subject is crucial for a critique of the notion of difference informing the global principles of multiculturalism and diversity. More importantly, it also indicates why the logic of exclusion, the prevailing account of social subjection has been now added to the arsenal of racial subjection.

This article examines the form and effects of differentiation that surface within the artifice of racial sameness. Using contemporary debates between ‘native-born’ and ‘foreign-born’ blacks in the USA over the right to ‘African American’ identity and the socioeconomic threat posed to the former by the latter, I show how the operation of the logic of race internally within a racial group reiterates familiar effects of racialization. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ as a framing device, I point out that this difference/sameness relation is not simply antagonistic through an analysis of the ambiguity of Africa as posing a socioeconomic threat in the migrants it sends while also presenting the historical and symbolic basis for African American claims to cultural distinctiveness. The article builds a critique of the invention of sameness that makes difference in two key ways: first, through the representation of difference as an antithesis that affirms the racialized self characterized by sameness; and second, that this makes a political difference in the sense that this dialectic of black as self and other reifies the social problematic of its sameness/difference relation as intrinsically (intra)racial to the extent that the substantive socioeconomic causality of racial stratification and racism are obscured.

World music has been immersed in a series of complex ethical, political and aesthetic debates since its emergence as a new musical category in the 1980s. These debates have been fuelled by competing perspectives that portray world music as either an exemplar of progressive cosmopolitan politics that foster cultural hybridity or as reinforcing fixed and unitary conceptions of difference through an essentializing representation of cultures.

By utilizing interviews with key people involved in the organization of world music in Britain, this article centralizes this tension by examining the role of difference in world music. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural intermediary is used here as a descriptive label for the work of those involved in this research and as an explanatory tool to highlight how difference defines the interaction between the substantive and symbolic processes within the British world music scene.

This article argues that the work of cultural intermediaries demonstrates the ambivalent cultural processes within the performance, management and consumption of world music. This is evident in the series of recursive shifts within world music that employ a model of difference that draws on both the binary logic of traditional meanings of race/ethnicity and hybridity. In so doing, this article also examines how world music affinity and consumption, which takes people across arbitrarily ascribed boundaries, challenges the idea that normative racialized identities are meant to provide a fixed set of cultural values, musical tastes and social attitudes.

This article investigates how recently arrived refugees living in Fair-field - the most culturally diverse locality in Sydney - relate to citizenship and experience belonging in a global city context, where different people are compelled to live side by side. Extending Ang’s notion of ‘togetherness in difference’, the discussion explores the formation of horizontal alliances in a multicultural locality. Two small-scale empirical examples demonstrate how locations for citizenship are actualized outside the frame of the nation state, and signal the contours of a progressive multicultural politics, in this case, neighbours collectively dealing with landlord authorities, and young people discussing their encounters with Australia’s immigration regime.