Full Description
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?
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.
