Why We Need to Talk About Race in the Arts, or the Limits of Aspirational Diversity

Rimi Khan

In The Australian Art Field, edited by Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson, Fred Myers, Tamara Winikoff, pp.158-169.

2020

Routledge

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429061479

Over the last decade, the Australia Council has abandoned its Arts in a Multicultural Australia policy and embraced a discourse of aspirational diversity. However, while post-multicultural policies address a hybrid and culturally diverse ‘we’, issues of inequality and exclusion in the arts persist. This chapter argues that Australian arts policy needs to engage with the discourse of race in order to address the reality that Australian arts have ‘a diversity problem’. Claims that we exist in a fluid, post-multicultural era are at odds with a heightened sense among many artists that they live in increasingly racialised times, where bounded categories of race and ethnicity are used to fix and minoritise them. Despite current arts policy efforts to reflect the complexity and multiplicity of identity by eschewing the language of race, the policy discourse of aspirational diversity does not offer the political or administrative tools necessary for achieving its own vision. Engaging with categories of race would enable arts policy frameworks to more effectively account for, and evaluate, racialised exclusion, as well as offering critical resources that could support and make visible, the efforts of artists who are narrating experiences of racism.

This work was supported by Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant (LP110100039, 2011-2015).