Suchergebnisse

This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of 'celebrating cultural diversity' and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of 'Asians' in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire for Australia to become 'part of Asia' has resulted in a relatively positive valuation of 'Asia' and 'Asians', an inversion from the racist exclusionism of the past. Against the self-congratulatory stance of this discourse, this article signals the operation of ambivalence at two levels: at the structural level, insofar as it points to the inherent contradictions in the idea of the 'multicultural nation' and its fantasy of a harmonious 'unity-in-diversity', and at the subjective level, in the sense that the ethos of multiculturalism doesn't erase the ambivalent relations of acceptance/rejection between majority and minority subjects. Several instances of such ambivalence pertaining to the positioning and representation of the 'Asian' woman are given.

The irresistible march of transnational media has given rise to widely experienced problems concerning cultural autonomy and identity. The research tradition of `cultural studies' offers a very appropriate and distinctive way of analysing these questions, especially by means of a critical ethnography of reception. The tendency in some recent reception research to celebrate `the popular' as a source of resistance to `the hegemonic' is criticized.

"Das unaufhaltsame Fortschreiten transnationaler Medien hat umfangreiche Probleme in bezug auf kulturelle Autonomie und Identität hervorgebracht. Die Forschungstradition der 'kulturellen Studien' bietet ein sehr angemessenes und eigenständiges Mittel zur Untersuchung dieser Probleme, insbesondere durch eine kritische Ethnographie der Rezeption. Die Tendenz einiger jüngerer Arbeiten zur Rezipientenforschung, das Populäre als Widerstandsquelle gegen das Hegemoniale zu feiern, wird kritisiert." (Autorenreferat)