ICS Seminar Series

Amanda Wise presents: 'Convivialities in Everyday Multiculturalism: Sydney & Singapore Compared'

This paper focuses on the question of conviviality in a comparative context. While the focus is on everyday interactions, everyday encounters with difference are understood as mediated through the larger cultural, political, economic and social context in which they occur. The paper will explore how convivial modes of inhabiting diversity are lived and negotiated in two distinct settings; one ‘East’ (Singapore) and one ‘West’ (Sydney).

In comparing these two contexts, I attempt to draw out some specific ‘enabling’ and ‘filtering’ factors in convivial modes of co-inhabitance; ways of talking (scripts, intercultural lingua franca, humour); individuals we call ‘transversal facilitators’; spatial orderings; policy and institutional factors; and the ‘intercultural habitus’.

Comparison highlights how different modes of conviviality exist in a super-diverse setting like Sydney, compared to a simpler (although increasingly contested) official landscape of ‘four races’ in Singapore.

Alana Lentin presents: 'Good and Bad Diversity: The Crises of Multiculturalism as a Crisis of Politics'

Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Drawing on 'The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age', Lentin's latest book with Gavan Titley, she argues that the commonplace suggestion that we have crossed the ‘colourline’ into a post-racial world allows for the laundering of persistent racism.

The idea that multiculturalism is a failed experiment foisted upon overly tolerant liberal elites by braying minorities is the dominant way in which racism finds discursive expression in the West today. Commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies. The common themes, repeatedly rehearsed, include parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national ‘ways of life’ and universal values.