Diasporas and the Media
John Sinclair and Stuart Cunningham
This work, on the role of communication technologies in the creation and sustenance of diasporic identities, is of profound significance. (Morley, 1996: 330)
Clara Law’s critically acclaimed 1996 film, Floating Life, provides some of the key motifs of the contemporary phenomenon of diaspora, and so has inspired the title of this book. Shot in Cantonese with English subtitles, Floating Life was the first feature film in Australia to be made in a language other than English. We adapt Clara Law’s title for this book with her kind permission. In Law’s narrative of displacement, members of a Hong Kong family have to come to terms with their dispersal into Australia and Europe, and the consequent experience of deterritorialisation, the psychological and cultural dislocation of making a “home” in alien “host” lands. While a woman goes into total social withdrawal for fear of the world outside, her parents wonder how their prayers to their ancestors will ever find their way back to Hong Kong. The film dramatises the literal dis-location of culture experienced by more and more people in the era of globalisation, “the archetypal late-modern condition” (Chen, 1996: 490).
The concept of diaspora can be usefully applied to understanding many of the major population movements of this century, and the complex processes of the maintenance and negotiation of cultural identity which go along with them. Significantly, the extent of the population movements of recent history can lay claim to beginning to break down the mutual identification between nation and culture which previously was asserted to exist in classical accounts of nationalism and the modern nation state (Collins, 1994: 382–83). Consider mass migration from the developing world to the richer countries, such as Latin Americans in the United States, Caribbeans and South Asians in Britain, Turkish and North African Gastarbeiter in Europe; the resettlement in several countries of millions of refugees from Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia and the former Eastern Bloc; the declaration of “multiculturalism” as a social policy reality for Australia and Canada. If we take into account other categories of people living more or less permanently outside their countries of origin, such as business expatriates, foreign students and academics, retirees, and even long-term cultural tourists, it is clear to see that the traditional “national culture” of many major nations no longer fits (if it ever really did) substantial proportions of the people who now actually inhabit the nation. Rather, these people’s cultural horizons are turned toward those they see as their kind in other nations, and (possibly) to their nation of origin, but also to the challenges of negotiating a place in the host culture.
It is not just the flows of the people themselves that are involved, but the whole “continuous circulation of people, money, goods and information” comprising the “transnational migrant [and refugee and other] circuit[s]” (Rouse, 1991: 14). In particular, flows of communication media services and contents are an integral part of what we are trying to pin down about the contemporary world when we use that buzzword of our age, “globalisation”. Along with the new flow patterns of media and people he calls “mediascapes” and “ethnoscapes”, Arjun Appadurai (1990), in his influential analysis, also lists flows of technologies, capital and ideas as constituting the current era. Importantly, he sees all these flows as “disjunctive”—they are occurring together, but in unsystematically related ways.
For example, whereas flows of people often have tended to be from what the world-systems theorists call the “periphery”, or developing world, and towards the “centre”, or metropolitan nations (e.g. Wallerstein, 1991), media flows historically have travelled in the other direction. More recently, however, there have been media flows which have developed from within centres of the periphery, such as Hong Kong, Mumbai, Mexico City, Sydney, Toronto or Cairo, which are not only thus breaking down the centre–periphery distinction itself, but beginning to define new kinds of world region (Sinclair et al., 1996). These include “geolinguistic regions”—that is, regions across which linguistic and cultural similarities are at least as important as geographical proximity has been in forming world regions in the past. The media space of a diaspora tends to be of this kind, to the extent that it is spread throughout several of the national markets which have been the territorial unit for international media distribution in the past.
The advent of quite particular technologies, notably international satellite television transmission, but also the humble video, have been instrumental in the fostering of such international niche markets, or “global narrowcasting”. At the upper socioeconomic end, business executives can check into any international hotel in the world and expect to watch CNN. At several points on the same continuum, members of diasporic groups can be dispersed widely, even into remote locations, but still pick up news from home on a satellite dish or cable in those places where they are more concentrated—or, in cases where homeland news and information transmission is underdeveloped, suppressed or radically contested, they may access video letters, Websites or special delivery orders flown in on a regular basis. Alternatively, they might rent a movie or popular television series which has come to their local store along the fine capillaries of distribution which emanate from their place of ethnic origin, or even from one of the new centres of diasporic media production now springing up in the West.
Shifting Ground
The purpose of this book is to trace the cultural significance of such global flows of audiovisual media for actually existing diasporas. This objective is pursued in the context of a number of basic theoretical paradigm shifts in sociology, population studies, and communication, media and cultural studies, to which the book is intended to contribute from a number of perspectives: from a social problem or welfare conception of the migrant to an appreciation of cultural difference; from a view of the media as an imposed force to a recognition of audience activity and selectiveness; and from an essentialist, or “heritage”, to a more dynamic, adaptive model of culture. Each deserves some commentary at this point.
Migrancy as Agency
First, let’s examine the image of the migrant and the settlement process. Representations of the migrant as a cultural victim have become familiar in both the humanities and social sciences over the decades since the end of World War II, during which ever-greater numbers and categories of people have, for different kinds of reasons, left their cultural homelands to settle elsewhere. Only more recently has attention been given to migration as a complex process of cultural maintenance and negotiation, or resistance and adaptation. With this attention has finally come an appreciation of the range of the cultural border-crossings achieved by many of the diasporas as they travel across major civilisational divides, and with it has come a new sense of what cosmopolitanism might mean now, beyond those specifically European or imperial sensibilities of the past fashioned within the grid of Western high culture. Of particular interest in this book is how diasporas make use of communications media in these dialectical processes, and how certain of the media used are thus able to create markets out of dislocated peoples, even as the diasporas redefine their cultural identities in hybrid terms, the transcendence of the dichotomy of “home” and “host”.
This is not to join in the fashionable postmodernist celebration of hybridity for its own sake. Indeed, the range of actually existing diasporas studied in this book defeats any singular grid of understanding. The Chinese are part of a great diaspora which dates in Australia from the 1840s—one which is extensively cosmopolitan and lifestyle-, education- and business-oriented and which cannot be understood in terms of the liminality of recent displacement. The Vietnamese and Fiji Indian diasporas, on the other hand, are much more recent and were precipitated by direct political domination and, at least in the case of the Vietnamese, maintain an official public face as political refugees. The Thais are very recent immigrants; the reasons that have impelled movement are neither exile nor predominantly business. So the case studies in this book move around foci on the unfinished, parlous, unstable path of “cultural bifocality” which “can be a source of much psychic pain” (Smith and Tarallo, 1995: 52) as much as a condition of celebration of successful resistance and assertion (e.g. Wong, 1994), or an achieved cosmopolitanism that may render such stances of historical value only.
We seek to help shift the paradigm away from seeing the cultural adjustments of migration in dichotomous, assimilationist terms. In the corresponding policy discourse, adjustment too often has been assumed to be a problem of helping the unfortunate migrant to adapt to the clichéd dilemma of “two worlds”, even in the more benign multiculturalist version which encourages migrants to retain their cultural differences at the same time as they assimilate to the language and the law of the host. It might be noted in passing at this point, as we shall return to it, that this is the version which has become institutionalised over the last two decades in Australia—the same period that has seen the term “multiculturalism” become associated with oppositional demands for social change and pluralism from and on behalf of the major minorities, rather than a project of the nation-state itself, in several other countries, including the United States and Britain (Bennett, 1998).
Using Media
Once again without lurching from one extreme to the other, there is a second paradigm shift in process which we want this book to give a push to: this is the shift from the power of texts to the power of audiences and readers to shape meaning and use of the media.
This shift is a welcome one, but media and cultural studies’ moves to factor in consumption and use have rarely concentrated on cross-cultural scenarios. On the other hand, treatments of diasporic identity have concentrated on issues of representation by mainstream media of ethnic and racial identities. Not surprisingly, the conclusions reached in the numerous studies of this kind tend to be that Western mass media operate as prime filters of a hegemonic discourse “othering” minority cultures and identities. Important and necessary as these researches are, they are not sufficient to understand the productive construction of new hybrid identities and cultures by the active processes, simultaneously, of maintenance and negotiation, of an original home and a newly acquired host culture. As the field of international media studies has begun to draw theoretical inspiration from cultural studies’ accounts of diasporic identity, it has begun to address media use, with studies of media and communications use amongst diasporic communities in Europe (e.g. Gillespie, 1994; Husband, 1992, 1998), in North America (e.g. Naficy, 1993; Srikandath, 1993) and in Australia (Kolar-Panov, 1997).
A closely related angle on this shift is to consider the strength and manner in which media can be assumed to exert influence over audiences. Since the demise of the “dominant ideology thesis” of the 1980s, with its implicit hypothesis of strong media effects being imposed on relatively passive audiences (Collins, 1990), there has been the not-uncontested rise of an alternative conception of the “active audience”, accompanied by new, postmodernist theories of “decentred” individual subjectivities (Ang, 1996).
Taken to its most absurd conclusion, this new perspective would suggest that the media carry so many different meanings for so many different people that the once-assumed social impact of media messages is dissipated. However, we do not have to go that far to recognise that there are many ways in which audiences actively seek out their own media experiences, assert their preferences and critically interact with each other, as well as with the media contents they choose. This emphasis links directly to our first shift in that, throughout this book, stress is placed on the active agency of minority communities constructing a media environment through patterns of consumption and production which address needs for maintenance and negotiation.
On the other hand—and even if we also accept the postmodernist insight that individuals respond to media discourses with multiple identifications of themselves, rather than as coherent, unified subjects—there is a sense in which the media are also actively seeking out audiences. Thus, whatever collective audience preferences and desires there might be, they are still shaped commercially and ideologically as markets for certain forms and genres by media corporations. In this book, amongst other things, we want to explore the process by which the desires generated by the diasporic experience—for example, wanting to stay in touch with news and popular culture from the homeland—become transformed into demand for certain kinds of media services and products—that is, how diasporas become formed by the use of their media as global narrowcast markets.
The third question is one of culture, “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 1976: 76) and now more problematic than ever. While the textbook “anthropological” definition of culture as a “whole way of life”—usually of a national society—became the common wisdom both inside and outside of academia during the 1980s, the notion came under attack within anthropology itself. Anthropologists recognised that the unity of the “cultures” which they studied was their own construction, “something made rather than found” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 2). As the impact of globalisation has been felt right across the social sciences and humanities, and especially as the formerly assumed autonomy of the nation-state has been challenged by globalising forces, there has been a more general reassessment of the assumption that we can meaningfully think of a “culture” as the distinct and separate way of life of a given people who occupy a particular territory on the globe—as in, for example, “Australian culture”. Indeed, for some time, the idea of each nation-state having its corresponding national culture had been eclipsed by the growing perception that national cultures are created in their own image by the dominant hegemonic groups in society (Morley and Robins, 1995: 48–49; Turner, 1994).
All of these developments have been calling for a redefinition of culture. The former orthodox view was that each society “has” a culture which it perpetuates, and which perpetuates it, through being passed on to each individual member. This had both consensus (functionalist) and conflict variants (Marxist, feminist) which, regardless of their fundamental differences, both took culture (or “the dominant ideology”) as a thing: a kind of complexly structured essence binding society together. This could be called the quantum view of culture, as if culture is something which societies strategically allocate to their individual subjects, albeit on a differentiated basis (Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital” is revealing here).
In this view, personal identity is a function of cultural membership. Every individual “has” a culture, or some culture, although they can lose it if it is not “maintained”. Furthermore, at least in the conflict versions, not all cultures are equal—stronger cultures can dominate or “marginalise” weaker ones (as in the discourse of “cultural imperialism”). It is implied that cultures are clearly demarcated from each other, almost as if they have mass and occupy space—or at least, that they are linked to place in much the same way as nation-states mark off their territories from each other with borders. Indeed, the assumption lingers that nation and culture are coterminous. This quantum conception deserves to be criticised simply for the static and reified view of culture which it offers, not to mention its lack of relevance to a world of people on the move across increasingly porous national borders. In such a world, individual cultural identities become decentred through the same process that causes national cultures to lose their hegemony.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1995) argues that the older territorial conception of culture, which he calls “Culture 1”, needs to be set against a more adaptive conception of culture, “Culture 2”, which recognises the breadth, variety and fluidity of social relations in “translocal” culture. This broader view takes account of the phenomenon of cultural fusion, variously conceptualised by others as the emergence of “third cultures” (Featherstone, 1990), mestizajes (Martín-Barbero, 1993), or “creolization” (Hannerz, 1996), though all of these refer to the innovative collective responses which real people can and do make when having to negotiate between one culture and another. Repudiating any sense of culture as a closed, impermeable and unified object, and rejecting the view that cultural identity is an ideal, fixed condition which individuals seek to preserve, Stuart Hall (1995) also has argued that cultures never remain static, “pure” and true to their origin, particularly in the process of diaspora. Diasporic culture in this new perspective is thus the product of the constantly configuring process which occurs when immigrant or otherwise displaced cultures selectively adapt to host cultures, intermingling and evolving to form a regenerative “new” culture, a culture related to, but yet distinct from, both the original home and host cultures.
The master metaphor for such cultural adaptiveness and innovation is “hybridity”, which—like the concepts of “culture”, “diaspora” and “broadcasting”—is also based on organic growth and transformation in nature. The theorisation of hybridity is found in some lines of work from Latin America, where cultural syncretism has long been institutionalised in both national and subordinate cultures (García Canclini, 1995), but most often it is “the fashionable wing of postcolonial theory” (Chen, 1998: 22), and particularly the work of Homi Bhabha, which are cited. Bhabha views hybridity as the product of what he calls “cultural translation”, in which the hybrid subject negotiates cultural difference in a performative interplay between home and host. Importantly, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as articulating between dominant and marginal discourses long associated with diasporas and other forms of postcolonial cultural contact opens up a “third space” for cultural strategies to become active forms of resistance to domination and marginalisation (Bhabha, 1994: 5–9). To simply assume this kind of role for hybrid cultural activity, however, risks a stance of postmodernist celebration for its own sake of the “subject-in-process”.
Yet, in the context of this book, the most appropriate revision of all of the concept of culture comes from James Clifford, who proposes that, in order “to focus on hybrid, cosmopolitan experiences as much as on rooted, native ones” in a world of people in flux, “we rethink culture and its science, anthropology, in terms of travel” (Clifford, 1992: 101). Thus, instead of the traditional trope of culture being an organic outgrowth of a particular place, the motif of travel can incorporate all those forms of movement experienced by people today, which take them or keep them away from their real or putative place of origin. Even if they are not all travelling in the same class, Clifford’s shifting of the concept of culture away from “roots” and towards “routes” instead (1992: 108) endows it with a more flexible way to deal with the many different kinds of “floating lives” which characterise our times.
Delineating Diaspora
Commenting on the revival of the concept in the late 1980s, Khachig Tölölyan has observed, “ ‘diaspora’ is now used as a synonym for related phenomena until recently covered by distinct terms like expatriate, exile, ethnic, minority, refugee, migrant, sojourner and overseas community” (Tölölyan, 1996: 10). Thus most definitions of diaspora emphasise the marginal status of those groups which, although they have settled outside their lands of ethnic origin, still maintain strong sentimental or material links with them (Esman, 1986; Sheffer, 1986). Some definitions even include irredentist consciousness as part of the concept—that is, the desire of such groups in different countries to link together and work for a return to the homeland (Safran, 1991: 83–84). Diasporas can also be very long term—even millennial—as in the archetypal Jewish case. And it is possible to claim (although this dissipates the strength of the term as one concerning minoritarian cultures) that dispersal of dominant ethnicities, such as the movements of elites and settlers emanating from the imperial powers, might also constitute instances of diaspora. The term is certainly contestable as a way of grasping all forms of dispersed peoples (see Rex, 1996; Delafenetre, 1997), but we wish to retain it in this expansive sense as it captures the dynamics of particularly cross-cultural and cross-language settlement better than terms as neutral and technical as “immigration”.
Just as Benedict Anderson has definitively characterised national cultures as “imagined communities” (1991), bonded discursively by a sense of deep, horizontal belonging to an imagined common origin and a mythical past, the imagi(nations) of deterritorialised peoples—even when scattered through different lands—may be marked correspondingly by “absentee patriotism and long-distance nationalism” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1995: 49). As Anderson argues, what matters in constituting communities is not their authenticity or otherwise, but “the style in which they are imagined” (1995: 6). In this vein, William Safran (1991) points to how expatriate minority communities may be sustained by a collective homeland myth fetishised through cultural memory and (trans)national desires, and represented as mythical landscapes, invented traditions, stories and ceremonies.
Certainly, some sense of difference, marginality and displaced belonging is essential to the concept, including a strong identification with a homeland, and the corresponding resistance of diasporic groups to complete assimilation by the host nation. However, the most literal element in any definition must be that of dispersal. Etymologically, the word “diaspora” stems from the Greek diaspeirein, meaning “to disperse”, or as speirein suggests, “to scatter”, as of seed. “Diaspora” thus refers to a dispersion, or scattering, of people belonging to one nation or having a common culture beyond their land of origin. Archetypically, it has referred to such a dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Palestine in the eighth to sixth centuries BC, and later to the classical Greek and Armenian diasporas, but now, in the present era of the globalisation of peoples, the term is applied more universally. In the context of this book, it is most significant that the concept of “broadcasting” is based on precisely the same organically rooted metaphor of the scattering of seed, implying both dispersal and propagation.
Diasporic communities have thus sown themselves into several host nations, and can cover a whole world region or beyond. Still, there is a tendency to identify the diaspora phenomenon with the figure of the exile (Gandhi, 1998: 132). However, while expatriation forced by disasters, war and political and ethnic expulsion might create a diaspora, exile and diaspora are not coterminous. Exiles are not necessarily dispersed into several countries, as would occur in a diaspora, while diasporas are not necessarily sparked by cataclysmic events. Furthermore, while exiles cannot go home, some other kinds of diasporic people can and do. Contemporary diasporas include those whom current migration policy blandly labels as “economic migrants”—that is, people wanting to improve or just maintain their life-chances, and willing to go and work in any one of a whole range of countries in order to do so. (This fits the model for most of the Indian diaspora, for instance.) And there might be socioeconomic conditions that give rise to very specific circumstances, such as the “bride trade” which has brought Thais and Filipinas to Australia. This displacement is not necessarily permanent—and even if it is, more successful migrants will often make pilgrimages back to their homeland, an activity of central importance to those from Taiwan or Hong Kong. So temporality is unavoidable in delineating diaspora: the liminal state of the recent shift gives way, over sufficient time, to settlement, and issues of cultural maintenance and negotiation are reconfigured. The exile may cease being exilic due to the effluxion of time or to changes in political regime or economic circumstances (while the Vietnamese diaspora of the 1970s and 1980s fits the model of exile, during the 1990s this has changed significantly with homeland changes and legal emigration).
While there is still no shortage of displacement caused by disaster and conflict, much diasporic movement today has been motivated by “flexible accumulation” (Harvey, 1989) and other such contemporary modes of globalising capital (Clifford, 1994: 331). However, it is fundamental to take into account that there are two kinds of class relation involved here, just as there was a distinction to be drawn in the historical diasporas between the entrepreneurial “middlemen minorities” and the “proletarians” (Esman, 1986: 336–37). Thus, at one level, diasporic movement is a cause of the globalisation of capital, in the sense identified by Joel Kotkin: “the continuous interaction of capitalism with dispersed ethnic groups—not just the staid history of financial flows or the heroic stories of nation builders—constitutes one of the critical elements in the evolution of the global economy” (Kotkin, 1992: 17). The control over both financial and industrial capital investment in Asia and elsewhere which has been attained by the “Overseas Chinese” and the “NRIs” (Non-Resident Indians) are the classic cases in point. Karim Karim (1998) suggests that we can even think of such diasporic communal networks as “a third tier of inter-regional connections”, after world organisations and nation-states. Indeed, the economic output, in the early 1990s, of the 55 million overseas Chinese was estimated to be roughly equal to that of the 1.2 billion within China itself (Seagrave, 1995). This reminds us of the close interrelation of diaspora, culture and commercialism that necessitates this book being a study of the business as well as the culture of diasporic media use.
Yet, for many more people, their diasporic movement is an effect of global investment patterns and international inequalities—witness the current situations of Malaysian Chinese “airplane jumpers” working illegally in Japan and Taiwan (Nonini, 1997), or Indian labourers in the Middle East. Or consider the central case of the Fijian Indians described later in this book, whose nineteenth-century origins lie in a form of indenture close to, if not coterminous with, slavery. Such structured class and economic differences are in tension with mythic notions of common ethnic origins and cultural belonging. David Morley quotes Aijaz Ahmad on “the issue of post-modern, upper-class migrancy”, the contradiction of people who have come from dominant-class origins in peripheral nations and become complicit in “a rhetoric which submerges the class question and speaks of migrancy as an ontological condition” (Morley, 1996: 347). While it might be true that “the rich also cry”, and have their own forms of alienation, it is clearly a fallacy to identify the diasporic experience exclusively with the subaltern, and not to observe the dangers of a naive postmodernist culturalism on which we have already commented. With the partial exception, for particular reasons, of the Thais, every diaspora treated in this book is seen as a collocation of class, ethnic, origination, education, work and financial configurations, whose status as a “community” is the product of strategic unities and alliances, sometimes engendered more from without than within, rather than ethnic “essences”.
A glance over the theoretical and research literature published under the rubric of “diaspora” during the 1980s and 1990s shows how the discourse itself is “loose in the world” (Clifford, 1994: 306). However, if we can set aside those works which, whatever their considerable qualities, have been written more for a general lay audience than for the research community (Kotkin, 1992; Pan, 1994), it is possible to discern a continuum ranging from social scientific to cultural studies approaches. While the former are more empirical (whether demographic, historical or comparative), such as Helweg’s (1986) account of the Indian diaspora, the latter are highly theorised, though often in a diffuse manner, with diaspora serving as a universal metaphor for the deterritorialised, decentred, postmodern or postcolonial subject (Gandhi, 1998: 30–32). At its extreme, this is the idea that “we” are all nomads, although even some of the writers most associated with postmodernist cultural studies have sought to distance themselves from this romantic conceit (Chambers, 1994: 5–7). (A pertinent example of the issues that arise across the social science-cultural studies divide is seen in the critique of Kolar-Panov’s work (1997) on the former Yugoslavia by Skrbis (1998).)
Area studies, comprising interdisciplinary approaches from geography, politics, history, literature and art history, could benefit from a greater sense of the mutability and adaptability of culture that cultural studies embodies. Aihwa Ong says that “[a]n essentializing notion of Chineseness continues to dog the scholarship, because the Chinese past, nation, singular history, or some ‘cultural core’ is taken to be the main and unchanging determinant of Chinese identity” (1999: 134–35). Terry Rambo (1987) and Neil Jamieson (1987) criticise the untoward focus on absolute origins in Vietnamese area studies: “It seems that, to many scholars in our field, knowing the origin of a thing is a sufficient explanation of its contemporary character.” (Rambo, 1987: 115) And Jamieson argues, from within cultural anthropology, that a focus on diaspora communities provides the most dramatic and concrete examples of culture as a mutable, hybrid process undertaken by subjects in the process of reconstructing themselves. Nowhere is this perspective more needed than in apprehending the dynamics of contemporary popular media cultures—and the opposition or misunderstandings engendered about them—studied in this book.
Nonetheless, as Clifford warns, the concept of diaspora is in danger of becoming appropriated as a poststructuralist figure of speech for multiple identities of all kinds, unless it is “historicized” to affirm the distinctiveness of particular diasporas (Clifford, 1994: 319). Thus we have Paul Gilroy’s (1993) remarkable study of the “black Atlantic” diasporas, impelled at different stages by slavery and free migration, and disseminating their expressive cultures in an alternative history of modernity. Yet, implicitly, this movement only makes sense in relation to the “white Atlantic”, which is not just the Anglo-American “Atlantic economy”, but by extension the whole diaspora of the British in their age of imperialism (Kotkin, 1992: 84–89).
To characterise the long history of British colonialism and imperialism as a kind of diaspora might seem provocative, given the very considerable extent to which the concept has become identified with post- (and anti-) colonialism. However, rather than slaves or native workers, in several countries the labour for colonial expansion involved the “proletarian” diasporas of Scots displaced by enclosures, Irish driven out by famine and transported English convicts. If it seems perverse to call these movements diasporas, it is not so much because of the concept’s postcolonial associations, or even an index of the very considerable extent to which it has been racialised, but more a reminder of how much diasporas are defined by a relative lack of assimilation. Like other diasporic groups, Anglo-Celtic proletarians have had to deal culturally with displacement and longing for home, but without the same kind of exclusion from the dominant group experienced by, to take a pertinent case in point, immigrants of Asian origin in Australia. Even the great diasporas from continental European countries, notably the German, Italian and Greek, have been fairly readily absorbed into their host societies, relative to those from the postcolonial world. Ultimately, however, the value of drawing attention to the proletarian dimension of European colonisation and settlement is to underscore the point that ethnic similarities and common cultural provenance can conceal other kinds of social difference. In this instance, it is class—although Clifford (1994: 313–15) makes a similar point about gender.
Just as historicising the concept can thus tie it down in such specific—if unexpected—ways, this is also true of politicising it. Stuart Hall, while identified more with the cultural studies than the social scientific end of the spectrum, is careful to distinguish between most irredentist forms of diasporic identity, notably that of the original diasporites in their return to Israel, and progressive forms, which favour a hybrid over an essentialist conception of both culture and identity (Hall, 1990: 235). As a geopolitical imperative, Hall argues that cultural pluralism must triumph over cultural absolutism, since “the capacity to live with difference” is “the coming question of the twenty-first century” (Hall, 1993: 361). The theoretical corollary is that, to the extent that globalisation presents more and more people with the experience of difference and displacement, the diasporic experience becomes not so much a metaphor as the archetype for the kind of cultural adaptiveness which our era demands. Hall is worth quoting at length on this:
the new diasporas which are forming across the world . . . are obliged to inhabit at least two identities, to speak at least two cultural languages, to negotiate and “translate” between them. In this way, though they are struggling in one sense at the margins of modernity, they are at the leading edge of what is destined to become the truly representative “late-modern” experience. They are the products of the cultures of hybridity. This notion of hybridity is very different from the old internationalist grand narrative, from the superficiality of old style pluralism where no boundaries are crossed, and from the trendy nomadic voyaging of the postmodern or simplistic versions of global homogenisation—one damn thing after another or the difference that doesn’t make a difference. These “hybrids” retain strong links to and identifications with the traditions and places of their “origin”. But they are without the illusion of any actual “return” to the past. Either they will never, in any literal sense, return or the places to which they return will have been transformed out of all recognition by the remorseless processes of modern transformation. In that sense, there is no going “home” again.
They bear the traces of particular cultures, traditions, languages, systems of belief, texts and histories which have shaped them. But they are also obliged to come to terms with and to make something new of the cultures they inhabit, without simply assimilating to them. They are not and will never be unified culturally in the old sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several “homes”—and thus to no one particular home . . .
They are the product of a diasporic consciousness. They have come to terms with the fact that in the modern world . . . identity is always an open, complex, unfinished game—always under construction. (Hall, 1993: 362).
This sense of cultural adaptiveness, innovation and hybridity which, along with the notions of dispersal and unassimilated difference, is at the heart of the concept of diaspora, has held a fascination for generations of social scientists interested in the dynamics of modernisation. In the 1930s, Robert Park wrote of the “marginal man” who arose when cultures were thrown together, living in “two worlds”, taking “the role of the cosmopolitan, and a stranger”. Thanks to his “wider horizons”, he is a “more detached and rational . . . civilized human being” (cited in Rogers, 1969: 147n). A similar affirmative evaluation was given by Everett Rogers to the quality of “cosmopoliteness”, which was not so much universal civility as “the degree to which an individual is oriented outside his immediate social system”, particularly through communication media. This was a key variable in motivating social change (Rogers, 1969: 147). In these sociological formulations, the common element was the triumph of modernity over tradition, or the value of more “global” perspectives, however minor, being brought in to transform “local” social settings. Notwithstanding the limited scope of their ideological blinkers, these writers provided a positive way of conceptualising minority status and of exposure to difference as the mediation of knowledge of a world beyond.
However, in more recent times, the notion of cosmopolitanism has become rather fraught, to the extent that it has become associated with the worldview of privileged castes in the West (Hannerz, 1990; Robbins, 1992). Against this tendency, several writers have sought to rework it—for example, Homi Bhabha with his “translational cosmopolitanism” (1996: 204)—or otherwise reclaim it—for Kotkin (1992: 4), diasporic populations are “today’s quintessential cosmopolitans”. Similarly, for Hannerz (1996: 90), the “real” cosmopolitans are those who “are in the nation, but not of it”, yet Hebdige (cited in Lash and Urry, 1994: 309) draws attention to the way in which tourism and the media, as vehicles of consumer culture, have made cosmopolitanism less elite and more “mundane”, at least in the West.
Once again, it is Clifford who provides an historical, comparative and class- and gender-sensitive formulation of the concept, with his notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”. This employs his metaphor of culture as travel, yet also takes into account the dialectic of cultural maintenance and negotiation, home and host, margin and centre: “what is at stake is a comparative cultural studies approach to specific histories, tactics, everyday practices of dwelling and traveling: traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling” (1992: 108).
In other words, not all diasporas are created equal: the cosmopolitanism of diasporas is historically variable, and also relative to the quite different experiences of individuals within the same diaspora. As with Stuart Hall, we are exhorted here to get down to the observation and analysis of particular, empirically grounded diasporas, and that is what this book presents. It will deal with the abjection of exile and displacement, but also the commercial businesses—from the modest middleperson who arranges for some videotapes to be shipped on a weekly plane flight from Bangkok to Sydney, to imposing international concerns like Hong Kong’s TVBI, one of the five largest program distributors in the world—whose product is used to constitute markets for cultural maintenance. It will chart the imperative of hybridity and the cosmopolitan mentalities it engenders without celebrating such cultural expression as an achieved state in the abstract.
Constructing a Research Object
Just as in the 1960s, when there were social researchers who sought to bridge the “middle range” between the rarefied heights of “grand theory” and the dense depths of untheorised empiricism (Rogers, 1969: 44n), the task today is to construct a valid object of knowledge in the absence of the now discredited “grand narratives” of even the recent past, and with regard to the new-found relativism and reflexivity of research methods. Like the Marxist and feminist versions of the “dominant ideology thesis”, the positivist idea of an objective world in which the facts almost select themselves for researchers to observe, measure and report upon is one which is well and truly discredited, but alternative epistemologica! paradigms are still in the process of formation. Methodologies cannot be taken for granted, to the extent that the “findings” of a piece of research are an artefact of the theoretical framing of its problematic, and the design of the research itself.
Just as anthropologists now have become aware of how much their ethnographies are a product of their own preconceptions, researchers in media, communication and cultural studies need to be reflexive, in the sense that they know they are constructing their own object of research when they set out to investigate something. Ien Ang’s advocacy for a “radical contextualism” which can bring to light “the articulation of world capitalism with the situations of people living in particular communities” in the context of “the progressive transnationalization of media audiencehood” is to begin to construct an object we would like to align ourselves with in this book (Ang, 1996: 81).
All of the particular communities examined in this book are contextualised in this way, as members of worldwide diasporas who happen to be located in certain cities of Australia. The studies strive to bring to awareness not only the global character of these diasporas, but also the very local nature of how diaspora is experienced, which includes the use of media at both these levels. The researchers self-consciously seek to ground their work in the middle range, between the theoretical and the empirical, the macro and the micro. While there are several contributing authors in this book, it is not a conventional edited volume. Each of the four case studies (which form the basis for the chapter divisions) seeks to address our central research question: how are media—audiovisual media in particular, such as video, music video, television and music—drawn on in opening up a cultural space for negotiation between the demands for positioning within the dominant host culture and the desire for cultural maintenance? This question is pursued through attention to the businesses that service Asian diasporic communities; the communities’ responses to media produced for the communities or otherwise consumed by them; and the nature of the material produced for and consumed by the communities. Each chapter addresses the specifics of its methodologies and local variations within the book’s methodological “template”.
Consideration of some direct models of media studies’ engagements with media use by diasporas provides a useful guide for how we might proceed. Hamid Naficy’s (1993) study of what he calls the “exilic” television produced by Iranians in Los Angeles in the 1980s is a model for how communications media can be used to negotiate the cultural politics of both “home” and “host”. Largely Shah-supporting exiles from the Islamic revolution of the late 1970s in Iran, this community was able to fashion a wholly advertising-supported cable television presence redolent with longing, nostalgia and fetishisation of an irrecoverable homeland displayed in both low-budget fiction, variety show and information formats. Naficy provides a detailed account of cable television production by Iranians in Los Angeles during the period since the overthrow of the Shah and the so-called “Islamic revolution”. He explores the political economy of this production, examines the program texts broadcast, and theorises the consumption and production in terms of the dialectic of diasporic hybridity:
On the one hand, Iranian exiles have created via their media and culture a symbolic and fetishized private hermetically sealed electronic communitas infused with home, memory, loss, nostalgia, longing for return, and the communal self; on the other hand, they have tried to get on with the process of living by incorporating themselves into the dominant culture of consumer capitalism by means of developing a new sense of the self and what can be called an “exilic economy”. (Naficy, 1993: xvi)
By incorporating the industrial as well as the narrative features of the television services and program genres developed by the Iranian exile community, Naficy shows the relationship between the transnational experiences of displacement and migration (enforced in this case), and strategies of cultural maintenance and negotiation within the liminal slipzone between “home” and “host”, as seen on TV. His study is useful for our purposes as it combines the strengths of media studies—with its emphasis on political economy and media production processes and outcomes—and cultural studies—with its emphasis on social and identity formations informed by psychoanalytic and textual methodologies.
Marie Gillespie’s (1995) study of “the microprocesses of the construction of a British Asian identity among young people in Southall [West London], against the backdrop of the emergence of “new ethnicities” in the context of post-colonial migration and the globalisation of communications” (1995: 205) also sets a benchmark in its detailed audience ethnography and the need for different methodologies to capture consumption of different media formats (mainstream soaps, news, advertising, and community-specific or narrowcast media such as Hindi television and film).
The same attention that Naficy pays to the liminal experiences of the exile from a broken national community is seen in Dana Kolar-Panov’s Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination (1997). Like Naficy’s work, Kolar-Panov’s study goes “below” the level of consumption of mainstream media in capturing the role played by video “letters” used as news media by overseas citizens of the former Yugoslavia as their country breaks up during the early 1990s. The politics of intercommunal discord in the homelands as they are played out in the diasporas, and the textual alterity of “atrocity videos” which perform the role of virtual palimpsests of the “real time” destruction of the homelands are relevant features of Kolar-Panov’s work for our purposes.
These media studies models do not allow us to forget that hybrid cultural expression is a struggle for survival, identity and assertion, and that it can be a struggle as much enforced by the necessities of coming to terms with the dominant culture as it is freely assumed. And the results may not be pretty. The instability of cultural maintenance and negotiation can lead, at one extreme, to being locked into a time warp with the fetishised homeland—as it once might have been but no longer is or can be—and, at the other, to assimilation to the dominant host culture and a loss of place within one’s originary culture. It can involve insistent reactionary politics; extreme over-commercialisation (Naficy (1993: 71) cites a situation in 1987 when Iranian television in Los Angeles was scheduling over 40 minutes of advertising per hour) due to the necessity to fund expensive forms of media for a narrowcast audience; and textual material of excoriating tragedy (the (fictional) self-immolation and (actual) atrocity scenarios played out in some, respectively, Iranian and Croatian video).
Australia as a Situated Research Field
Australia is one of the most “multicultural” nations on earth, with 40 per cent of its population born elsewhere, or at least one parent born elsewhere. In 1947, the Australian population was 7.6 million, of which only 9.8 per cent were overseas-born. Of these, 90 per cent were from Great Britain and Ireland. According to the 1991 Census, 24 per cent of Australia’s population were immigrants and some 40 per cent of Australians were born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. More than half of Australia’s post-World War II population growth was driven by immigration, with the proportions changing from overwhelmingly British and Irish to migrants from eastern and southern Europe and, since the 1970s, Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East. The relaxation of a race-based immigration policy around 1966 and the subsequent abolition of the “White Australia” policy in 1973 has greatly diversified the cultural composition of Australia’s resident population. By the late 1980s, more than half of its total immigrant intakes were originating from Asia. A recent estimate by Kee and others (1994) suggests that there are now over a million Australians of Asian descent. As a result, for example, Chinese has become the second largest language group in wider Sydney and is expected to replace Italian as the second most commonly spoken language in Australia by 2000.
In response to this, since the late 1970s, Australian governments—at least until the mid-1990s—have constructed an official policy of multiculturalism and organised an impressive array of state support for this policy, including the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which is both a TV and radio broadcaster, one of the few major public broadcasters in the world dedicated to not only the reflection, but also the propagation, of multiculturalism.
However, while Australia is, in proportional terms, the world’s second largest immigrant nation next to Israel, the relatively low numbers of any individual group have meant that a critical mass of a few dominant non-English Speaking Background (NESB) groupings has not made the impact that Hispanic peoples, for example, have made in the United States. Further reasons for this include the fact that the largest immigrant groups have been historically British and Irish; the sheer variety of immigrant and refugee/humanitarian communities (at present, over 150 ethnic groups speaking over 100 different languages); and that immigration has occurred in several distinct waves over a period of 50 years (some earlier groups successfully negotiated their resettlements more than a generation ago, while many Asian groupings have only just begun the process). Nor do Australians experience “strong” cultural diversity through policies of official multilingualism (such as in Canada); nor the considerable cultural intermixing caused by the sheer contiguity of the major imperial languages in Europe; nor the significant accommodation in the daily life, the polity and the public rhetorics of those societies with a critical mass of indigenous persons, such as New Zealand.
In addition, the history of direct subvention to multicultural cultural forms from government arts bodies has tended to focus on the folkloric and the literary rather than the most popular cultural forms such as video and popular music. Typically, then, with the exception of zones of “official” contact like the SBS, community radio and the like, the media’s, and most mainstream cultural institutions’, embrace of cultural diversity goes little beyond a sort of mutual distance and monolingual incomprehension. As a recent study (Jamrozik et al., 1995) put it, the bulwarks of monocultural power in Australia have not yet been fundamentally challenged.
No one non-Anglo-Celt ethnic group has therefore reached “critical mass” in terms of being able to operate significantly as a self-contained community within the nation. For this reason, Australia offers a strategic site for the examination of a number of themes in the theory and policy surrounding diasporas, and the cultural industries supporting them. As subsequent chapters show, theories of diaspora need to be “de-essentialised”, adapted to conditions where ethnicities and sub-ethnicities jostle in ways that would have been unlikely or impossible in their respective homeland settings or where long and sustained patterns of immigration have produced a critical mass of singular ethnicities. It is important to focus on the gaps and slippages between policy and practice in a country that has an official policy of multiculturalism—albeit one currently under great stress. The lack of critical mass also means that expensive Australian-based electronic media production for such small numbers is very underdeveloped. The book thus concentrates on an aspect of globalisation often neglected in the rush to write up the latest exploits of the American, British, European or Japanese world-spanning multinationals. This is the diasporic ethnoscape and the truly global but ethno-specific media flows that are to a significant extent its condition of existence. Both the policy focus and the lack of critical mass come together in the focus on the relations between broadcast media and diasporic narrowcast media, which often, in debate, concentrates on the role of the SBS.
The SBS as Social Change Agent?
It is worth spending a moment at this stage on the SBS, as it “quite simply is the most outstanding expression of multiculturalism as policy” in Australia (Jakubowicz, 1994: 136) and thus acts as a major lightning rod for NESB communities’ expectations about the state’s and the society’s commitment to cultural diversity. In recognition of the political power and skills of the “ethnic lobby” reflected in elections during the 1970s, the Fraser conservative Coalition government decided to set up a multicultural television service in the late 1970s. In contrast to grassroots ethnic radio, what became SBS-TV was a creature of government initiative.
Over time, this distinction has consolidated: SBS-TV markedly differs from multilingual radio services, which are found both within SBS and in the community-based sector. The model for television centres on the employment of broadcasting professionals rather than community representatives and volunteers. Further, there is a policy that virtually all material is subtitled in English, the national lingua franca which is assumed to be the common linguistic denominator uniting disparate ethnicities. Also, there has been an expectation that the programming schedule would not be too radically different from the “norm”, especially with broad-appeal material being broadcast in prime time, and that the core programming of the service—its news and current affairs—would be English-language based.
While SBS radio allocates broadcast time to language groups largely on the basis of their numerical representation in the community, there has always been an arguably necessary disparity between community languages and SBS-TV programming. Programming centres on that which is of conventional “broadcast standard”—thus omitting much that communities watch as diasporic video, and instead running programming from the major non-English language film and television industries which can be afforded within the SBS’s very limited budget. Indian films are often too expensive; French, German, Brazilian or Swedish films and television long-form drama are very over-represented (according to these language groups’ numerical place in Australian demographics) because these are the product of experienced export industries which can sell some of their material cheaply. Programs are chosen on the basis of their ability to address, within the discourse of multiculturalism generically, potentially all Australians, rather than address specific language groups. Added to this is the effective displacement of SBS’s original charter of multiculturalism by contemporary notions of “cultural diversity” (where sexual orientation, or age, or physical disability becomes as valid a marker of cultural difference as ethnicity) during the last decade in SBS’s policy discourse, as the service has moved to seek a broader base (Jakubowicz, 1994; O’Regan, 1993).
It is therefore easy to see how the service could be perceived as a general-interest station for cosmopolitan taste cultures rather than a social change agent for those marginalised by language and (non-British, Irish or broad European) culture. This has been the major criticism the service has had to field in the 1990s, and it has come from high-ranking politician and senior representatives of ethnic communities, as well as from critics and journalists (see Lawe Davies, 1997). So it is refreshing to see that there can also be a spirited defence of the SBS in its catering to cosmopolitan taste cultures (Hawkins, 1996; Hartley, 1992). As the discussion of the use of SBS’s news services in Chapter 2 makes clear, this approach assumes a high level of global cosmopolitanism inherent in the reality of diaspora, whether the migrant is working class, middle class or “middle classing”, thus displacing the debate about whether SBS exists basically for an internationalising Australian middle class or a cosmopolitan world citizen, or should exist for a marginalised lumpenproletariat defined by an essentialist ethnicity.
As might be expected, assessing the role and functions of the SBS—precisely because of its enthusiastic uptake of its charter responsibility to not merely reflect multiculturalism but actively proselytise for social change—has engaged critics, broadcasters, policy-makers and its public in large-scale debates of social and cultural power and representation. In a concerted critique of the power of established media to resist social change, Jakubowicz et al. (1994: 136, 14) argue that “multiculturalism as a policy has not achieved significant change in the commercial media” and that the creation of a special multicultural service has “allowed the television industry in general to remain largely unaffected by the cultural changes wrought by migration”.
This is a debate endemic to any large-scale project of programmatic social change conceived in an era of greater state intervention. The problem with it is that it is largely a debate which is insoluble inside the structural constraints of channel scarcity in a terrestrial free-to-air environment. The SBS simply cannot successfully program to meet the diverse and incommensurate needs of Australia’s multifarious communities within the constraints of a single-channel service. The changing demographics of multicultural Australia also need to be considered, particularly the middle-classing of a core SBS demographic, based on the post-World War II waves of southern and central European immigrants. The structural conflicts between the established European ethnic lobby and the emerging influence of the 1970s and 1980s waves of migrants and refugees which have had increasing components of Asian origin make the ground of debate a shifting one. It is also a debate about class, overlaid on the combustible rhetorics of race and ethnicity, especially Asian ethnicity.
Asia-in-Australia
If we are concerned, at the broadest level, with cultural diversity and its articulations to the media, and if there are communities of particularly southern European non-English speaking background which are larger and longer established in Australia, why the focus on Asia? Despite fluctations in the rhetorics surrounding Australia’s “Asian future” (from Paul Keating’s “a peaceful multicultural nation in Asia” to John Howard’s overly cautious withdrawal from any direct identification as part of the region), and in particular economistically driven concerns about the region’s financial health, the focus of this book underlines the ongoing and inescapable interpenetration of “Asia-in-Australia” and charts some of the cultural dynamics and policy implications that flow from this. We seek to contribute to the maintenance of this country’s focus on its regional identity through a period of political, economic and policy drift, but great cultural dynamism.
The inescapable importance of Australia’s Asian context has resulted in an increasing focus on the representation of Asia and Asian-Australians by mainstream Australian media (e.g. Bell, 1993; Jakubowicz, 1994) and on the opportunities for audiovisual export to the region (DITARD, 1994; Cunningham and Jacka, 1995). However, much of the public rhetoric about cultural export is one-sided. Australia’s population originating from Asian countries is the basis for more importation from the region than there has been scope up to the present for export to the region. Audiovisual import, mainly in the form of Hong Kong movies and videos, other Chinese-language material, and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) imports, and the pay rates for them, at present outweigh export figures to the region by a significant amount. But traffic in non-English language programs need not be seen only in these terms. Treating the multicultural composition of the country as the basis for a long-term regionally oriented audiovisual strategy should be part of any focus on the economic benefits of “productive diversity” (Kalantzis and Cope, 1997).
The present realities of audiovisual media use by Asian-originating diasporic communities in Australia represent a noticeable absence, both in current research and in public discourse about this country’s “Asian future”. While there have been significant advances in our understanding of Asian immigrants’ cultures, literatures and print media dynamics (e.g. Gunew, 1993), very little is known about such diasporic communities’ audiovisual media use. Those few studies that have been done (e.g. Bednall, 1988) provide valuable data from questionnaire-style surveys, but fail to interrogate the dynamics of cultural maintenance and negotiation. Additionally, while SBS-TV stands as the major single contribution to serving the broadcasting needs of Australia’s multicultural society, there is little publicly available research into SBS’s relations with Asian-language communities.
Public “Sphericules” and Policy Scenarios
If we eschew a singular focus on diasporic imagination as an “ontological condition” occupied by the migrant subject, in what sense is the diasporic a series of public or civic cultures, particularly as they exist in a transnational, global space, and what (national) public policy challenges do they continue to pose?
The public sphere, in its classic sense advanced in the work of Jurgen Habermas (1974), is a space of open debate standing over against the state as a special subset of civil society in which the logic of “democratic equivalence” is cultivated. The concept has been regularly used in the fields of media, cultural and communications studies to theorise the media’s articulation between the state/government and civil society. There are those for whom the contemporary Western public sphere has been tarnished or even fatally compromised by the encroachment of media, particularly commercial media and communications (Schiller, 1989), while there are those for whom the media have become the main—if not the only—vehicle for whatever can be held to exist of the public sphere in such societies. Such “media-centric” theorists within these fields can hold that the media actually envelop the public sphere:
The “mediasphere” is the whole universe of media . . . in all languages in all countries. It therefore completely encloses and contains as a differentiated part of itself the (Habermasian) public sphere (or the many public spheres), and it is itself contained by the much larger semiosphere . . . which is the whole universe of sense-making by whatever means, including speech . . . It is clear that television is a crucial site of the mediasphere and a crucial mediator between general cultural sense-making systems (the semiosphere) and specialist components of social sense-making like the public sphere. Hence the public sphere can be rethought not as a category binarily contrasted with its implied opposite, the private sphere, but as a “Russian doll” enclosed within a larger mediasphere, itself enclosed within the semiosphere. And within “the” public sphere, there may equally be found, Russian-doll style, further counter-cultural, oppositional or minoritarian public spheres. (Hartley, 1999: 217–18)
Hartley’s topography has the virtue of clarity, scope and heuristic utility, even while it remains provocatively media-centric. We will complicate that topography by suggesting that minoritarian public spheres are rarely sub-sets of classic nationally bound public spheres, but are nonetheless vibrant, globalised but very specified spaces of self- and community-making and identity (see, for example, Husband, 1998). We will strongly agree with Hartley, however, in his iconoclastic insistence that commercial and public/state-supported spheres of activity are closely related and interdependent. We will also be stressing another neglected aspect of the public sphere debate developed by Jim McGuigan (1998: 92)—the “affective” as much as “effective” dimension of public communication, which allows for an adequate grasp of entertainment in a debate dominated by ratiocinative and informational activity.
Todd Gitlin has posed the question of whether we can continue to speak of the ideal of a public sphere/culture as an increasingly complex, polyethnic, communications-saturated series of societies develop around the world. Rather, what might be emerging are numerous public “sphericules”: “does it not look as though the public sphere, in falling, has shattered into a scatter of globules, like mercury?” (Gitlin, 1998: 173). Gitlin’s answer is the deeply pessimistic one of seeing the future as the irretrievable loss of elements of a modernist public commonality. In contrast, we argue that the emergence of ethno-specific global mediatised communities suggests that elements we would expect to find in “the” public sphere are to be found in microcosm in these public sphericules. Such activities may constitute valid, and indeed dynamic, counterexamples to a discourse of decline and fragmentation, while taking full account of contemporary vectors of communication in a globalising, commercialising and pluralising world.
Hartley’s Uses of Television (1999) is also perhaps the most sophisticated account of the constructive (civic, educational) role audiovisual media play in contemporary societies. For him, these media have a “permanent” and “general”, rather than specific and formal, educational role (1999: 140) in the manners, attitudes and assumptions necessary for citizenly participation in communities. It is clear that the ethno-specific minoritarian public “sphericule” is a special exemplification of Hartley’s account of television as general education. Epistephilic desire, that heightened need for information about the homeland and others within the diaspora, suggests a concentrated sense in which the information–entertainment dyad of popular media is more strongly blurred in the diasporic setting. It should be stressed that much of the diasporic media traced in this book constitutes displaced broadcast television—displaced from its original moment of transmission by satellite retransmission, video piracy or Web-based consumption.
There is another sense in which information–entertainment distinction—usually maintained in the abundance of available media in the dominant culture—is blurred in the diasporic setting. As there is typically such a small diet of ethno-specific media available to these communities, they are mined deeply for social (including fashion, language use and so on) cues, personal gossip and public information, as well as singing along to the song or following the fictional narrative. Within this concentrated and contracted informational and libidinal economy, “contemporary popular media as guides to choice, or guides to the attitudes that inform choices” (Hartley, 1999: 143) take on a thoroughly continuous and central role across the information and entertainment divide. Hartley’s allied claim for the media’s role in promoting “do-it-yourself” (DIY) citizenship is even more strongly borne out in the case of the minoritarian sphericule. The “permanent” and “general”, rather than specific and formal, education (1999: 140) in the manners, attitudes and assumptions necessary for citizens’ participation in communities spread across the world brings its “DIY” nature into sharp focus.
Multiculturalism, Arts and Media Policy
Our emphasis on the public nature of diasporic cultures and their relation to nation states and the public sphere raises issues of policy. Do multicultural policies need to take account of popular culture dynamics amongst diasporic groups to a much greater extent than hitherto? Are government apprehensions of Asian-Australian culture bound to inadequate notions of tradition and folklorics? To what extent are the current broadcasting and video industries, and future expansion within them, serving the cultural needs of Asian-Australian communities?
This focus on the “public sphericules” of diasporic communities goes below and beyond state-supported programs of multicultural production, which are characterised by their being typically traditional “high” cultural forms (such as literature and the visual and performing arts) or residual folklorics practised firmly within the boundaries of the nation state even as they draw on cultural traditions established elsewhere. It goes below such forms in its concentration on vastly popular cultural practice, such as Vietnamese music video, Hindi cinema (widely known as “Bollywood”, based as it is on Mumbai, once known as Bombay) and Hong Kong action films. It goes beyond in the sense of focusing on the dynamics of ethno-specific narrowcast mixed entertainment and information media which, while they may originate in specific locales, are consumed globally.
In doing this, we also raise questions about the focus and effectiveness of multicultural policy. State multiculturalism can be criticised as cooptative insofar as it offers a space for cultural maintenance, respect and tolerance while requiring conformity to liberal democratic practices and acquiescence in the hegemonic position of the dominant (British–Irish) cultural formation. Culture can thus be deployed as a safety valve, essentialised and made largely manifest as language, food and ritual. In defensive response to opponents of migrant intakes of certain sizes and compositions, it can also lead to situations where the greatest stress is placed on economics to the effective exclusion of the challenge of genuine cultural apprehension. In the United States, for instance, “when the refugees from Indo China first came in 1975, the United States government was more concerned about their self-sufficiency and employment than about their cross-cultural adjustment and communication” (Nguyen, 1987: 100).
However, since 1996, concerns with the limitations of state multiculturalism have been overtaken by the re-liminalisation of “Asian-Australian” ethnicities by the overt racism of the notorious Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party. This, together with a barely covert desire on the part of the current Liberal–National Party federal government to displace and de-fund multiculturalism, officially Australia’s policy on the management of cultural and linguistic pluralism for more than two decades, makes it imperative that it is defended vociferously, even as its limits are explored. Acknowledging that the basic assumptions of Australian multiculturalism are distinctly better than other policy frameworks which could be conceivably won politically in the climate of our times marks out our stance from those strong critiques of the policy such as Ghassan Hage (1998), Jon Stratton (1999) or Charles Husband (1994).
The area of state-supported arts practice, while it has been subject to significant democratisation for a generation (with clear examples such as the Community Arts Board of the Australia Council), remains some considerable distance from the popular media activity documented in this book. This disparity between state-supported programs and the popular culture of minorities is an international phenomenon. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the major federal arts funding body in the United States, has found it very difficult to attract minority applicants, “so profound is their alienation from organs of governance, which are seen to police them, and service others” (Miller, 2000, citing Gilmore, 1993: 159). The organs of arts, audiovisual and cultural support, pre-eminently the Australia Council and the Australian Film Commission at the national level and the various arts bodies at the state and territory level, have developed policies of targeting NESB groups for special support programs in various ways. However, through inconsistent attention to ethnic/cultural diversity objectives in recruitment, selection and appointment policies, and through these policies being historically “narrowly conceived as the folk practice of a disadvantaged minority” (Stevenson, 2000: Ch. 7) and latterly being grafted on to pre-existing precepts of “excellence” (Castles et al., 1994), the relevance of state cultural support to the popular media production and consumption canvassed here is distant at best.
The key issue for media policy raised by this study is the need to structure screen services for both majoritarian and minoritarian populations in the interests of equity, access and the acquisition of social and cultural capital. Mass market, free-to-air, mainstream television will rarely meet all the needs of culturally pluralistic societies. To place stress, therefore, on other forms of media is by no means to absolve the mainstream of its responsibilities for implementing, at the very least, the codes of advisory practice, Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policies and anti-discrimination and racial vilification laws that are specific industry standards and general legal prescription that may see a greater representation, both behind and before the cameras, on Australian screens and related media. As the chapters that follow detail, while mainstream media are in most instances consumed widely amongst Asian communities (subject to people’s degree of comfort with the dominant lingua franca), their expressed dissatisfaction with the effect of the monocultural maintenance it achieves is equally widespread.
Stronger community-based media are necessary to meet the needs currently serviced through diasporic cinema and video circuits and the other methods outlined through this book (see, for example, Husband, 1992; Thussu, 1998); these need to be better controlled by minoritarian communities themselves but supported by the state to a greater and more creative degree than currently is the case almost anywhere in the world. However, the future for enhanced community broadcasting services is complicated strongly by the increasingly complex mix of technologies, and subscription-based as well as free-to-air terrestrial services emerging in most countries, with Australia being no exception.
From where we write in 1999, the strongest developments in minority broadcasting in Australia are occurring in subscription (pay) television. With about a million households (now close to 20 per cent of total households) signed up, and reasonable expectations of further growth, and with more than 60 channels available on one or more of the services (Foxtel, Optus, Austar), there is corresponding growth in languages other than English (LOTE) and ethnic-specific programming. The Optus subscription package in the largest cities offers up to seven non-English language channels and many of these offer programming specifically designed to address interests not catered to by SBS. However, there will remain for the foreseeable future real volatility in subscription-based specialist services. The marginal financial position of such services will not improve until the costs of delivering specialist and narrowly themed channels are driven much lower.
The costs of production, distribution and consumption are each keys to the growth of viable ethnic minority audiovisual media, and while there are viable models elsewhere, the lack of critical mass amongst any one community group in Australia makes the costs of distribution a key inhibiting factor. At least in the medium term, Australian broadcasting policy on the introduction of digital platforms will drive this scenario further out of reach, with its adherence to digital television being focused on the production of high-definition television formats rather than on the proliferation of channels that may compete with the established mainstream broadcasters for advertising share.
Around the world, there is significant evidence that ethnic communities themselves place significant store on the development of their presence on specialist, community and non-mainstream audiovisual formats. For example, British Independent Television Commission research on ethnic minority viewing preferences and perceptions shows that Asian and African-Caribbeans are “far more positive about cable and satellite channels, and their hopes for the future probably lie here, where there is greater scope for specialist programming” (Hanley, 1995: 17).
In conclusion, then, we see that accepted models of citizenship as identification with and participation within single nation states, and of a binary divide between public and commercial cultures, are tempered by the forms of Asian diasporic cultural citizenship traced in this book. In the mainstream media, we hear the term “global citizen” usually attributed to the Rupert Murdochs and Ted Turners of this world. But perhaps the term should be made equally available to those whose civitas connects communities in dozens of countries, while also embracing their situatedness in this one. These lines from “Buoc Chan Viet Nam/The Footsteps of Vietnam”, from the ASIA Productions music video Tinh ca 75–95 Chon Loc (Selected Love Songs 75–95), in which vivid rememorisation of the abjection of exile are tempered by confident community assertion, and thankful ensconcement within a host country by cosmopolitanism, captures what we want to say:
Thanks America for your open arms
Grand merci la France pour vos bras ouverts
Big thank you to France for your open arms
Thanks Australia for your open arms
Merci Canada pour la liberte
Thank you Canada for liberty
Ngay nao con day ngo ngac
The day when we were still bewildered
Tung tieng noi xa la
Every language foreign and distant
Nhin duong phang phiu ngut xa
Looking at the smooth road far away
Nghe long tuoi than tung buoc
Hearing the pity in our hearts at every step
Nho doi day nang lui toi
Owing to a life of frequent coming and going
Thanh men pho quen duong
We grow to cherish and become accustomed to the streets
Ban be vai muoi sac dan
Friends from several tens of ethnicities
Nuoc rieng nhung than phan chung
Different nations but together the same conditions
Ta tham thia tu sinh, cuoi buoc nhuc nhan
We are penetrated with life and death, bowing, we step in disgrace
Ta niu anh binh minh giua con tu sinh
We cling to the light of dawn amidst the flush of life and death
Doi du phon hoa lap lanh
Although life is prosperous and sparkling
Long van nho que nha
Our hearts are missing our homeland
Me hien trong cho rat ngong khi troi nua dem ve sang
Gentle mother awaits when midnight comes dawn
Doi du buon vui van the, dung gay them chia lia
Though happy or sad life is still so, don’t cause further separation
Lac loai la mot noi dau
To be lost and astray is an aching pain
Thay nhau hay tin con nhau
Seeing each other, believe that we still have each other
Khap noi tren dia cau
Everywhere throughout the globe
Gio in dau buoc chan Viet Nam
Now is stamped with the footsteps of Vietnam
Nhung doi chan miet mai dang vuon toi duoi anh ban mai
The footsteps of devotion are reaching towards the light of the early morn
Lau nay ta lang thinh, hai muoi nam ngai ngan
For a long time now we have remained silent, twenty years of hesitation
Song giua an va oan, muon hat len doi lan
Living between gratitude and resentment, wanting to sing up a few times.