Lisa Lowe’s examination of the 1990
Los Angeles Festival of the Arts helped me to question the purpose of such
events. Although this event was meant to
be a “celebratory…vision of Los Angeles as multicultural metropolis,” Lowe says
that it does not address the larger issues of “exclusion…dissent, conflict, and
otherness” (Lowe 85-86). In other words,
there is a false sense of heterogeneous groups coming together under the
auspice of showcasing performing arts and also acceptance by the dominant race.
This immediately made me think of Anne Cheng’s discussion of the poem “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman in relation to Smith’s Twilight. Cheng says that
this poem “seems to embrace a fundamental assumption that the maintaining of
the prevailing condition of not seeing
the other…is necessary for an imaginative fusion” (Cheng 193).
The LA Festival and Whitman’s poem
both advocate multiculturalism as a sort of utopia
where differences in race, ethnicity, and class are
overlooked. This notion is “problematic”,
because as an audience, we are asked to “forget history” (Lowe 86). Diversity festivals create the illusion “that
American culture is a democratic terrain to which every variety of constituency
has equal access and in which all are represented” (Lowe 86). Cheng says that “Love must look away in order
not to look away” (Cheng 194). In the
context of the multicultural festival, we are asked to embrace the many
cultures and peoples of our vast nation by overlooking their differences. However, participating alone in the festival
signifies difference and exoticness. The
performers become objects to which the dominant race fixates its gaze. As a spectator, the dominant race can attend
these events and feel it is active in achieving the myth of the melting pot
with the racial other.
But outside of the festival
environment, how much interaction actually occurs between the dominant race and
racial other? This relates to what was
said in class about how a potential white PBS audience can watch the film
version of Twilight, attempt to be empathetic, and then return to their
everyday lives without considering true coalition and resolution with racial
others. On the same token, how much
interaction occurs between different racial and ethnic groups? Why is art the site of attempting to unify
disparate groups and what purpose does it serve? Can art bridge differences? As a Chinese-American poet in the 21st
century, these are all questions I would like to pursue in my own work and my
own future participation in diversity festivals.
Works Cited
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham, Duke University Press, 1996.
I wonder about extending this even beyond race. Have you seen the documentary "Trekkies"? I sometimes use it in classes to get students thinking about the variety of people who become fans and/or want to bond over something like a tv universe. Isn't a festival, in some ways, more than just race/ethnicity and is instead a celebration and/or exploration of what it means to belong to a group? Not sure if this makes sense but you've got me thinking!
ReplyDeleteI like this idea of multiculturalism as imaginary fusion. I'm also fascinated by the false sense of unity proposed by multiculturalism. I like Lowe's reading of multiculturalism,
ReplyDelete"Multiculturalism is central to the maintenance of a consensus that permits the present hegemony, a hegemony that relies on a premature reconciliation of contradiction and persistent distracts away from the historically established incommensurability of the economic, political, and cultural spheres...In this sense, the production of multiculturalism at once 'forgets' history and , in this forgetting, exacerbates a contradiction between the concentration of capital within a dominant class group and the unattended conditions of working class increasingly made up of heterogeneous immigrant, racial, and ethnic groups" (86).
I think Sa-I-Gu did a brilliant job of showing a history that challenges what Lowe critiques as the problem of multiculturalism, especially in its discussion of the media coverage of the LA riots.
The film, Sa-I-Gu gave a voice to the voiceless Korean women who suffered from the violence of the LA riots. It is a perfect example of how minority groups try not to “forget” the history of hegemony that they encounter, especially as immigrant women. The LA riots defied the notion of multiculturalism by showcasing the contradictions of multiculturalism. The women’s voices in Sa-I-Gu also disrupt the heterogeneity of multiculturalism by discussing the tensions with other ethnic groups and more broadly hegemony, as the women blamed the police and upper class white people. It is one example of how minorities can challenge multiculturalism and thus hegemony.
I'm intrigued by the idea of challenging the "good" in multiculturalism. There were a lot of people who said racism had to be gone because the US finally elected a non-white president,b ut does it go away? Does a focus on diversity and multiculturalism really, instead, say hey we still have a need to point out these differences....Just has me thinking.
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