Contemporary Multiculturalism Research Articles

Innovations in Contemporary Multiculturalism

Innovations in Contemporary Multiculturalism

Forgotten Refugees and Erased “Multicultural” Subjects: The Vietnam War and South Korea's Subimperial Nation-Building

This article revisits South Korea's mostly forgotten involvement in the Vietnam War and examines lingering effects of the war on South Korea's subimperial nation‐building in general and on its contemporary multicultural policies in particular. The Vietnam War served as a stepping stone for South Korea to transform itself from a war‐torn country to an economic subempire in Asia. Encounters with Vietnamese refugees in the aftermath of the war helped form South Korea's subimperial gaze, solidifying the racial inferiority of South Koreans to the United States but establishing their superiority over the Vietnamese. Further, the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees laid the foundation for the practices of contemporary South Korean multiculturalism. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, South Korea presented itself as a benevolent protector of Vietnamese refugees. The brutal acts committed on the battlefields and the neglect of the Vietnamese refugees living at the margins of South Korean society have been effaced from public memory. Through the work of selective memory, the “multicultural” South Korea presents itself yet again as a caring supporter of Vietnamese migrant wives. It is through this cultural amnesia that the myth of ethnic homogeneity was maintained, allowing the contemporary multiculturalism discourse and practice to be advertised as a novel cultural globalization project that is free of historical guilt or responsibility.

Aging in a Changing World: Older New Zealanders and Contemporary Multiculturalism

Aging in a Changing World: Older New Zealanders and Contemporary Multiculturalism

Digital Ethnic Enclaves: Mate Preferences and Platform Choices Among Chinese Immigrant Online Daters in Vancouver

In light of the growing racialized immigrant population in Canada and advances in dating technologies, this study examines Chinese immigrants' partner preferences and mate selection processes through the lens of online dating. We draw on in-depth interviews with 31 Chinese immigrants who have used online dating services in Metro Vancouver to search for different-sex partners. Chinese immigrant online daters show strong preferences for dating Chinese. They emphasize permanent residency status and similarity in age at arrival when evaluating potential partners. Given their preferences, Chinese immigrants strategically choose the dating platforms they primarily use. Men exhibit higher selectivity in their preferences and choices of platforms. Notably, platforms catering to Chinese users create "digital ethnic enclaves" where Chinese immigrant daters congregate. The findings illuminate the intersection of race, gender, immigrant status, and age at arrival in shaping divergent experiences of mate selection and immigrant assimilation in the digital era.

The evolution and development of pop art in the visual field of digital art design

Pop art originated in Britain in 1950, became popular in the United States in the 1960s, and then spread to Italy, Japan and other countries. It pulled art from the high altar, obliterated the boundary between art and life, and made art less inscrutable and obscure, but more affinity. This paper focuses on the pop art style in modern and contemporary art and design works, and discusses the audience's demand for pop art pop culture in the context of contemporary multiculturalism. As a common, popular and commercial art form, pop art has exerted a subtle influence in many fields of design. It emphasizes interest and rebellious spirit, affecting the diversified development of design. This paper is an accurate control of the current design trend, and also a practical exploration of digital redesign of pop art style.

Building a collective multicultural consciousness

ABSTRACT Evidence indicates that old approaches to and paradigms of multiculturalism and multicultural education are struggling to meet the emerging needs of society. In response and drawing on international research, this essay presents two examples that seek to change how we do multiculturalism in order to build a collective multicultural consciousness in societies and in schools. The first example shows how social media is being used to end on-line, racist hatred by destroying the financial returns it generates. The second example shows how young people, in line with international research, are calling for schools to be transformed into social havens of belonging that support diversity, equity and social inclusion. Building a collective multicultural consciousness will inevitably involve multiple strategies, but these two examples testify to the growing momentum for educators and policy leaders to engage with the important conversations that are reframing contemporary multiculturalism and multicultural education policy and practice.

“Britain’s Own Muslim Polymath:” On the Politics of Representing Ziauddin Sardar

This essay seeks to unravel the cultural politics that underpin the approbation of Ziauddin Sardar, one accepted by the author himself, as "Britain’s own Muslim polymath." It explores how Sardar models himself after the Muslim polymaths of Islam’s “Golden Age,” dwelling on the importance of knowledge and travel in the worldview of Muslim intellectuals. But it also points to the implied anomalousness of the idea of a Muslim polymath, the difficulties that inhere in the idea of multiculturalism, and the necessary ambivalence with which a Muslim intellectual such as Sardar must negotiate the shortcomings of contemporary Islam and multiculturalism alike.

Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.

"Goethe Boom" Films: Bildung Reloaded

"Goethe Boom" FilmsBildung Reloaded Bridget Swanson The project of German reunification in the 1990s coincided with a marked decline in film adaptations based on German canonical texts. The move signified a turn away from classical literary adaptations and broke with a longstanding trend in the German film industry. Whereas previous eras of cultural crisis and change, such as during the 1930s and 1970s, had often prompted renewed interest in classical adaptations, changes in funding structures in the early 1990s shifted the German adaptation industry's attention away from eighteenth-century Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) to the works of contemporary bestselling authors. With these sorts of book-to-film endeavors proving economically successful on the global market, in part due to financially advantageous changes in the book publishing industry,1 such adaptations promised Germany's film industry a strengthened foothold in commercially successful entertainment cinema. From Joseph Vilsmaier's Schlafes Bruder (Brother of Sleep, 1995) to Tom Tykwer's Parfüm. Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 1995), the adaptations created during this era indeed garnered national and international acclaim, with Caroline Link's Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001) even winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. At this point, it seemed that the relevance of Weimar classicism had waned. Starting in the early 2000s, however, German film studios began to return to canonical texts and have released numerous adaptations based on the works of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Kleist, among others. Loosely grouped under the umbrella term "contemporary classical adaptations," these films range from more conservative theater-based productions like Leander Haußmann's Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 2005), to modernizations such as Christoph Stark's Julietta (2001), Sebastian Schipper's Mitte Ende August (Sometime in August, 2005) and Uwe Janson's Werther (2008), to biopic-oriented heritage films like Philipp Stölzl's Goethe! (Young Goethe in Love, 2010) and Dominik Graf's Die geliebten Schwestern (Beloved Sisters, 2014). As suggested by Paul Cooke, Randall Halle, and Brad Prager and Jaimey Fisher, the cultural shift toward eighteenth-century German literature in the early twenty-first century complicates scholarly treatments of the current transnational German film market.2 Whereas these scholars outline contemporary German film output as increasingly outward-looking, with Germany's traumatic twentieth-century past and contemporary multiculturalism often [End Page 351] stylized for consumption by global markets, the contemporary classical adaptations discussed here point toward a pervasive national preoccupation with two intertwined endeavors that can be traced back to production and reception processes of the eighteenth century. First, German cinema has sought to rival Hollywood's successful "Shakespeare boom" period via acts of emulation and appropriation reminiscent of Enlightenment-era German literary practices. Second, the contemporary German film industry has been engaged with concerns about the perceived need and mandate for the media literacy of young Germans—doing so in a manner that co-opts aspects of the discourses of Bildung inherent to the very texts upon which the contemporary classical adaptations were based. The resulting adaptations are thus culturally unique compared with earlier eras of German Literaturverfilmungen, as they emphasize, across both aesthetic and industrial lines, figurations of transnational pop culture, national Bildung, and pedagogy. In terms of the appropriative practices at play in the initial emergence of this genre, eighteenth-century Shakespeare emulation resurfaces as twenty-first-century Shakespeare boom emulation. That the German film industry has channeled Hollywood Shakespeare film adaptations to create contemporary cinematic fare based on Germany's literary trove is, from a film historical perspective, distinctive, contrasting with most other national cinema contexts. Here, filmmakers imitate the translocation and modernization of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (2006) and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) and fit Shakespeare's works to their geographical and linguistic contexts, examples of which are described at length by Mark Thornton Burnett, Maurizio Calbi, and Sonia Massai.3 However, in Germany, where the Hollywood Shakespeare boom films garnered the greatest profits of any foreign market, several German critics and filmmakers immediately responded with laments that "die Amerikaner und die Engländer 'ihren' Shakespeare rauf und runter verfilmen, mal klassisch, mal...

(Re)reading Acculturation Process in Multicultural Space of Zadie Smith’s NW

The present study seeks to delineate the impact of the Other on the acculturative options of the diasporic minorities in the multicultural space of Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). The extent to which the selected characters can be successful in acculturation process to experience conviviality and escape from ethnic absolutism will be discussed by taking an ethico-socio-cultural approach. The interdisciplinary approach includes ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Gilroy’s socio-cultural critique of contemporary multiculturalism in Britain, and John Widdup Berry’s acculturation theories. This article attempts to demonstrate not recognizing the Other’s difference can be the main cause of the failure of multiculturalism. Time in its philosophical and temporal sense is associated with race to evoke the way past can lead to the present inter-subjectivity breakdown; moreover, the role of ethical responsibility in the subjects’ acculturation process will be addressed.

Research on the Coordinated Development and Innovative Application between National Music and Contemporary Multicultural Music Education Based on Big Data

Multiculturalism, as a new educational mode, is a new form of education that meets the requirements of the times. Music, as an important discipline interrelated with culture, has gradually been paid attention to. Contemporary big data technology is applied in all aspects, and the direction of music culture is no exception. As an important part of national culture, many music works circulated to date can reflect the characteristics and connotation of Chinese national culture. Multicultural music education provides an important theoretical basis for the innovation and reform of music teaching.Based on big data analysis, folk music and multi-cultural music promote the effective development of music education in China. Therefore, Based on big data, this paper starts from the theory of multi-cultural music and the relationship between national music and multi-cultural music education, this paper analyses the important role of multi-cultural music education in the education of national music in China and the path of coordinated development.

Access To Justice, Moral Distance And Changing Demands On Law

This paper reflects theoretically on the concept of access to justice – focusing in turn on each of its limbs – the idea of justice and that of access. ‘Justice’ is considered here not philosophically but socio-legally in terms of a spectrum of types of justice-demands made in relation to law. The idea of ‘access’ is analysed by drawing on socio-legal theory concerned with the remoteness of lawmakers from citizens. The aim is to put the concept of access to justice into a wide theoretical context that highlights changing demands on law and new socio-legal conditions – especially those associated with contemporary multiculturalism and the increasingly significant transnational dimensions of law. The paper argues that these demands and conditions make such a wide view timely and necessary. It proposes that an analysis of relations of law and solidarity taken from Durkheimian sociology can help in clarifying the possibilities and limits of state receptiveness to access to justice demands.

A Double-Edged Pluralism: Paradoxes of Diversity in the International Institute Movement, 1945–1965

Abstract As a study in US pluralism, this article examines the International Institute movement—an urban network of liberal pluralist social welfare and intercultural agencies—in the early post-1945 era. It argues that the institutes were practitioners of a double-edged, or paradoxical, pluralism, in which progressive and conservative elements coexisted in tension with each other. An assessment of Institute records from the national headquarters and several local affiliates dealing with group and cultural programs and casework methods considers the possibilities, limits, tensions, and ironic implications of institute theories and practices. The analysis highlights the challenge of attaining that ever-elusive “balance” between promoting cultural diversity (and integration) and ensuring a degree of assimilation. It sheds light on a major irony—namely, that the application of modestly relativist cultural insights often generated hypotheses of im/migrant pathology. And, in regard to processes of racialization, it illuminates a paradox: that race could inflect institute “cultural” theory and practice with respect to both ethnic and racialized im/migrants and minoritized Americans. Finally, the authors suggest their framework might be of wider applicability and that critical historical thinking about contemporary multiculturalism and its long roots is both timely and important.

Ethnic-racial discrimination experiences and ethnic-racial identity predict adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment: Evidence for a compensatory risk-resilience model

Theory and empirical evidence indicate that ethnic-racial discrimination serves as a risk factor for adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment, whereas ethnic-racial identity (ERI) development promotes positive youth adjustment and can mitigate the negative outcomes of discrimination-related risk. In Colombia, the legacies of an ethnic-racial hierarchy, mestizaje ideology (i.e., the assumption that everyone is racially mixed), and contemporary multiculturalism education reforms create a unique context for understanding adolescents’ experiences of ethnic-racial discrimination, ERI development, and their implications for psychosocial adjustment. In this study of Colombian adolescents (N = 462; Mage = 15.90 years; 47.3% female), almost 40% of participants reported experiencing ethnic-racial-based discrimination. Experiencing more frequent ethnic-racial discrimination was associated with lower self-esteem and higher depressive symptoms, whereas higher ERI resolution (i.e., gaining sense of clarity about ethnic-racial group membership) and affirmation (i.e., feeling positively about ethnic-racial group membership) were associated with higher self-esteem and lower depressive symptoms. ERI exploration (i.e., learning history and gaining knowledge about ethnic-racial group membership) was also associated with higher self-esteem and moderated the association between discrimination and depressive symptoms, such that this association was stronger at higher compared to lower levels of ERI exploration. Findings provide novel evidence for ethnic-racial-related risk and resilience processes among Colombian youth.

Een schroothoop als gezamenlijk project

Abstract A Scrapheap as Joint Enterprise: Intercultural Empathy in Tom Lanoye’s Het derde huwelijk So far, within the field of Dutch studies few have employed empathy to study texts on contemporary multiculturalism. Studying empathy as a cognitive and an affective phenomenon, this article combines insights from cognitive, affective and postcolonial research to establish several guidelines on how empathy functions between novel characters in an intercultural context. Rather than focussing on the empathic relations between reader and text, the article investigates empathy between fictional characters. As an example, an analysis of Tom Lanoye’s novel Het derde huwelijk [The Third Marriage] is offered. The analysis concentrates on the way in which the narrative uses a highly prejudiced author as an indictment against the West’s emotional inability with regard to migrants.

Extraction and Analysis of Rock Painting Color Data Based on Data Association of Color Psychology

We should continue to dig and develop the breakthrough point of color composition in rock color painting based on color psychology. This paper objectively evaluates the present situation of rock color painting in contemporary China. We should conform to the development of contemporary multiculturalism. We should promote and inherit the development of rock paintings, so as to broaden the manifestations of rock paintings and truly meet the aesthetic demands and value pursuits of contemporary people in the new context.

Exemplary Lives and the Normative Theory of Culture

AbstractThis article defends an essentialist account of culture against the recent turn toward nonessentialism in contemporary liberal multiculturalism. It does so by drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche's early period and argues that Nietzsche provides an alternative to the dominant tradition of Volk conceptions of culture that derive from J. G. Herder. Nietzsche's alternative—what I call the “Exemplar Account” of culture—defines culture in terms of the patterns of human excellence that constitute it. This alternative overcomes standard concerns about essentialism by embracing the nonessentialist insight into the fluidity and variability of any culture's beliefs, values, and practices, yet holds that exemplary lives transcend the flux of culture and individuate one culture from another. I suggest in conclusion a practical benefit of this conception of culture for contemporary multiculturalism—namely, it fares better than other conceptions in fostering integration among diverse cultures, a pressing worry facing the current project of multiculturalism.

The Transcultural Projections of the Strategies of Global Integration of the Contemporary Multicultural Societies

The article deals with the innovative theoretical problems related to the research of the prospects for the further development of the integrative multicultural practices and the harmonization of intercultural communications in the multicultural societies of the modern world under economic, political, and cultural globalization. The author presents the characteristic of the conceptual evolution of the idea of ​​multicultural coexistence and analyses the cognitive potential of the concepts of acculturation and cultural diffusion in the cultural and sociological studies. The scientific significance of generalization of the specialized knowledge concerning the real practices of realization of the multicultural projects into the processes of organizing the social order of modern societies under the contexts of increasing the global social movements of the forced and voluntary character of various ethnocultural groups and communities is argued. The article substantiates the need for wider use in scientific studies the concept of transculturalism which has distinct perspectives to become an effective methodological tool to provide the non-violent coexistence of interacting ethnocultural communities presenting different national-states and regional unions. The author identifies specific problematic complexes of transcultural studies paying attention: 1) to the problem of basic determinants that restrict the global universalism of multicultural politics; 2) to the problem of identification of the most conflicting spheres of the contemporary multicultural world; 3) to the problems of the integrative potential of new socio-cultural phenomena. Further scientific researches will contribute to the creation of a new conceptual model of the transcultural integration of contemporary societies.

Multicultural Policy: Nigeria, Canada, and Switzerland

Author(s): Emmenegger, Heidi | Abstract: This paper will investigate the extent to which Switzerland, Nigeria, and Canada have successfully implemented multicultural policy. It will also explore how each nation’s history has affected contemporary multiculturalism within its borders. Nigeria has gone through multiple stages of multicultural policy, from coexistence and celebration of cultural diversity to assimilation and homogenization, since its independence from the British in 1960. Unlike Switzerland, Nigeria struggles with a colonial past that has manifested into detrimental consequences for multicultural policy in the form of religious violence and governmental corruption. The legacy of colonialism has greatly damaged multiculturalism in Nigeria, and it is reflected in their contemporary policies. Switzerland is protectionist both externally and internally. Multicultural policy in Switzerland is, and has historically been, centered around preventing immigrants (second and third generations included) from becoming legal citizens and formally integrating into society. Because of Switzerland’s direct democracy approach, the small homogeneous population of legal citizens have direct power over multicultural policy, and this is one of the main reasons Switzerland struggles to create a prejudice free environment and successfully implement inclusive policy. Canada has been more successful in implementing multicultural policy and this paper will explore how it has accomplished that.

The Senility of Group Solidarity and Contemporary Multiculturalism: A Word of Warning from a Medieval Arabic Thinker

AbstractThis paper discusses the thought of the medieval Maghrebin thinker Ibn Khaldun through the prism of the philosophy and sociology of law and politics. I will first try to illustrate how, even if Ibn Khaldun wrote in the fourteenth century, he anticipated many core concepts that are characteristic of modern Western sociological and philosophical thought. The argument is thus made that his thought can, and indeed must, be rescued from the wide neglect that, outside the specialized field of Khaldunian studies, it has so far suffered in our treatment and teaching of the history of politico‐legal sociological thought. I will then claim that the scheme he devised to explain the rise and fall of civilizations can also, with due care, be used to frame and understand the political and cultural landscape in which the West and the Islamic world are presently engaged in a difficult dialogue. The discussion is in this sense offered in the hope of making a contribution to the current politico‐legal philosophical and sociological debate on multiculturalism, and on the limits of its scope.