From Gangs to Shopping Malls: Sentimental Aesthetics in Vietnamese Australian Community Arts

Abstract

This article describes developments in Vietnamese Australian community arts in the context of recent reforms to Community Cultural Development (CCD) funding. While a discussion of two case studies suggests these reforms have encouraged a shift towards post-welfarist and enterprising modes of project development, the article argues that conspicuously ‘cosmo-multiculturalist’ and ‘sentimental aesthetics’ cannot be explained entirely in terms of post-1980s cultural policies of the Australian Labour government. The article concludes that recent attempts to link CCD work to professional arts networks were in fact anticipated by the explicit agendas of Vietnamese Australian CCD workers themselves, although for quite different purposes.