Mediating Multiculturalism: Digital Storytelling and the Everyday Ethnic(Anthem Series in Citizenship and National Identities)

Using digital storytelling—a new media genre that began in California in the late 1990s and that proliferated across ‘the West’ in the 2000s—as a site of analysis, this book asks, ‘What is done in the name of the everyday?’ Like everyday multiculturalism, digital storytelling is promoted as an accessible, enabling, and ordinary phenomenon that represents cultural experience more accurately than official sites. As such, the genre frequently houses stories of migration, community, and ethnic and racial differences. In turn, digital story collections often act as digital monuments or repositories of multiculturalism, giving a digital life to narratives of migration, cultural difference, and national belonging. This is evidenced in one of the world’s largest public collections of digital stories, found in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and referenced throughout this book.   Using examples from this collection and pointing to comparable ones in the UK and North America, this book investigates how notions of the everyday become a channel through which certain long-standing discourses of race get redeployed in multicultural nations. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in these societies? Can digital storytelling re-mediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?

Table of Contents:
List of Figures; Foreword by Sandra Ponzanesi; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Multiculturalism as a Crisis of Contradiction; Part One Convergences; Chapter One Difference Returns to the Everyday: Multiculturalism, the Arts and ‘Race’; Chapter Two Digital Storytelling and Diversity Work; Chapter Three Meeting in the Middle: A Theoretical Framework; Part Two Multicultural Bodies; Chapter Four Everyday Ethnicity in Digital Publics; Chapter Five Harmonising Diverse Voices: Ethnic Performativity in Collaborative Digital Storytelling; Chapter Six In Pursuit of the Promise; Chapter Seven The Heart of the Matter; Chapter Eight Slipping Up: Performative Glitches; Part Three Future Digital Multiculturalisms; Chapter Nine Diasporic Disturbances: Alternative Digital Storytelling Techniques; Chapter Ten The Cosmos in the Everyday; Chapter Eleven Digital Cosmopolitanisms, Diasporic Intimacies; Conclusion: Remediating Multiculturalism; References; Index.

About the Author :
Daniella Trimboli is a postdoctoral research fellow in cultural studies at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Review :
‘Trimboli demonstrates how everyday multicultural digital artworks are able to leap beyond the contradictions inherent in focusing on cultural difference to approach Australian storytelling as though for the first time.’ —Sneja Gunew, FRSC, Professor Emerita, Department of English Language and Literatures/Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia, Canada ‘Daniella Trimboli gives us both an intimate portrayal and a sharp analytics of the Australian world of multicultural digital storytelling. But she also uses this field to stage an encounter between Australian writings on multiculturalism and global critical social theory. What we end up with is one of the most astute, critical and scholarly investigations of multiculturalism I have read.’ —Ghassan Hage, Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia ‘Mediating Multiculturalism brings together an incisive exploration of theoretical ideas and rich case studies to offer an original analysis of the intersection of digital storytelling and multiculturalism. Trimboli’s examination of the complexities in this relationship provides an innovative approach to the critical, cosmopolitan possibilities of creative digital interventions.’ —Greg Noble, Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia