Dialogisms: on language performativity and the location of multicultural difference in Melbourne

The presentation will examine the ways in which the politically imbued concept of multiculturalism, along with that of cosmopolitanism and the concept of (cultural) diversity are affirmed or challenged by the everyday socio-political practices in Melbourne. It will trace the networks of exchanges and transactions and examine the meanings that boundaries have in forming the dialogues between people in a multicultural society. The presentation will focus on the comparison of two marketplaces in Melbourne (Queen Victoria Market and Footscray Market) to discuss the interplay between national spaces and spaces of 'real diversity', major and minor languages, linearity and circularity of space and the notion of community. Both places will be examined in the context of the political multicultural discourse. The emphasis will be, however, on the possibility that places offer in terms of challenging the political multiculturalism and bring about the oppositional concepts that encourage us to talk about the social aspects of diversity

Community of citizens: intimacy of belonging and public space in Melbourne

'We are many, but we are one,’ reads the popular slogan that has been continuously in place since the beginning of the intense neoliberal wish to place diversity under its one-dimensional umbrella. Different, but the same rhetoric has been prominent not only in political speech, but also in social practices, design and usage of public space in Melbourne. This slogan is a reproduction of the desire for national unity national built via the multicultural diversity, and presents us with contradictions of inclusion/exclusion. The city of Melbourne, with Federation Square as its landmark, reflects the paradox of the desire for construction of a myth of communion and community based on its own myth. The paper argues that to think about citizenship as belonging and/or citizenship as a shared identity, we need to first problematise the multifaceted concept of ‘community’ and how the community is constructed through sentimentality and (public) intimacy. We will think about the ‘community of citizens’, the production of borders of citizenship and belonging and consequently materialization of symbolic borders in the city space. Following readings of works by Jean Luc Nancy and Étienne Balibar, the paper will argue that it is not exclusion that forms the deepest level of social alienation but inclusion itself, especially when it goes hand in hand with an intimate and normative fetishization of ‘being-in-common’