Rimi Khan

Going ‘mainstream’: evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts

This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more ‘mainstream’, MAV has increasingly adopted market‐based rationales for its work – particularly the use of ‘audience development’ policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to ‘cultural development’ goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage’s analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV’s other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.

Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts

This article examines the contemporary field of Australian community-based arts in light of Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital. It considers how questions of ethnicity have complicated the field of community-based arts and informed the experience of artists and participants. These questions have implications for what it is that these organisations seek to do; specifically, the sorts of ‘capital’ they impart to participants in their programs, and what the significance of such capital is. Articulating a critical notion of cultural capital – and one that can accommodate the knowledges and competences that are relevant to the contemporary Australian context – can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role such arts organisations have in redefining or contesting the hierarchies of value that inform the art field.

The concept of minority for the study of culture

Abstract Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities and minorities, and the various historical and intellectual agendas that have shaped these social practices of classification. It begins by examining Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ as an anti-sociological reworking of minor and minority, then turns its attention toward the policy-driven sociological traditions of the Chicago School, and how this has informed the contemporary construction of ‘minorities’ reflected in Australian immigration debates. As a third key paradigm in the study of the ‘minor’, the article revisits cultural studies’ own embrace of the Popular as a site for political struggles over the meanings attached to ‘major’ and ‘minor’ social identities. Finally, we consider the range of transformative cultural practices addressed in this Minor Culture special issue, and reflect on the utility of the minor in holding together disparate political projects. There are a range of ways in which the minor might productively imagine or construct collective identities, in ways that do not anticipate, or even desire, majoritarian endings. It is argued that minoritised social categories do substantive political and cultural work, while acknowledging that numerical descriptions of minorities can hide as much as they reveal.

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

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.

New Communities, New Attachments: Planning for Diversity in Melbourne's Outer-Suburbs

This article reflects on the cultural policy and planning challenges raised by the changing demography, particularly the increasing cultural diversity, of new, outer-suburban Australian communities. While there is much scholarly thinking about the forms of spatialised belonging that exists in urban, multicultural Australia, there is less discussion of Asian identities in more dispersed suburban communities that have a very different relationship with the cultural infrastructure of the inner-city. Asian presences in Australian cities have been discussed in terms of racialised discourses of dysfunction and strategies of ethnic commodification, but these do not account for the practices of belonging and self and community-making that take place in these outer-suburban areas. An analysis of cultural programmes and urban planning documents surrounding a residential development in outer-suburban Melbourne – the proposed Quarry Hills precinct – reveals that these instruments mobilise limited frameworks of knowledge about these communities. Such governmental discourses struggle to account for the implications of cultural diversity, and the forms of belonging and attachment that are enacted in these areas.

Researchers, bureaucrats and the lifeworlds of cultural policy

Abstract This paper reflects on the value of cultural policy research, particularly when such research forms part of projects that seek to produce insights or ‘outcomes’ that are useful to non-university research partners. The paper draws from the author’s involvement in a project examining cultural diversity in the arts that was funded as part of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Project scheme. It addresses Eleonora Belfiore’s provocation that this kind of instrumental cultural policy research routinely amounts to ‘bullshit.’ However, in order to understand the critical function of such research, there needs to be greater attention to the lifeworlds of cultural policy and the multiplicity of the policy-making process. This multiplicity both complicates the possibilities for usefulness in policy research, at the same time that it enables such research to be generative in unpredictable ways.

The Multicultural Artist as Citizen

This chapter examines the provisional politics of the multicultural artist. It describes the governmental context in which ‘multicultural art’ has emerged in Australia, and analyses the experiences of a number of multicultural artists, highlighting the relationship of mutual dependence and affirmation they have with the organisation, Multicultural Arts Victoria. Critiques of the politics of multicultural display and consumption might regard this relationship a problematic one, but it is argued that multicultural artists are able to leverage this relationship in strategic ways, and accrue contingent forms of power. The artists negotiate relations of difference through personal projects of art- and self-making. These in turn highlight how the work of such arts organisations might reconfigure the boundaries between art worlds, and enable citizens to move between these.

From Consensual to Open-Ended Communities

This chapter examines the meanings of community that shape community art. While a seemingly natural category, community is in fact mobilised by governmental programs which enlist citizens into wider strategies of power. By examining how community has been defined by communitarian thinking and in political discourses of social cohesion, it is argued that community art carries an uncertain normative power: citizens are positioned within programs of governmental responsibilisation but also encouraged to express themselves through art. The history of Footscray Community Arts Centre highlights the practical problems with defining community. While historical definitions of community have tended to rely on consensual and homogenising visions of community, community arts’ organisations have a role in enabling more provisional and open-ended forms of belonging.

Art as Aesthetics, Culture and Economy

This chapter assesses the ways in which art is defined and imbued with value. Art’s historical definitions as aesthetics and culture complicate the democratising agenda of community art. These tensions are exacerbated by the contemporary art world’s recent interest in community, its tendency to reinstate existing hierarchies of power and its links to economic rationalisations for the arts. Recent governmental interest in the value of ‘creativity’ also means that community art is drawn into potentially exclusionary processes of urban regeneration. It is argued that today art in community is embedded within global flows of culture, economics and practices of belonging, which present community art with conflicting possibilities — art in community can disrupt exclusionary hierarchies, at the same time as it risks perpetuating them.

Introduction: Resituating Art, Community and Citizenship

There has been a diversification and dispersal of the ways in which art and community intersect. This chapter introduces the governmental, aesthetic and economic shifts that have enabled this dispersal, suggesting that they present new rationales and forms of value for art in community. These forms of value present the subjects of art in community — artists, arts participants, cultural workers and bureaucrats — with multiple and conflicting strategies of self-making. It is this unstable terrain that gives rise to the provisional citizen, a figure which reflects new kinds of relationships between government, art and everyday practices of the self.