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The contemporary migration experience is mobile, fragmented and mediated, creating a new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads of media, culture and art. However, studies of transnationalism within media, culture and art scholarship continue to collapse into binary models, ultimately streamlining the complex cultural translations that occur in this interface. This essay argues that the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism allows for a more rigorous account of the diasporic interface, keeping alive the kinetic element that permeates transnational cultural production.

The contemporary diasporic experience is fragmented and contradictory, and the notion of ‘home’ increasingly blurry. In response to these moving circumstances, many diaspora and multiculturalism studies’ scholars have turned to the everyday, focussing on the local particularities of the diasporic experience. Using the Italo-Australian digital storytelling collection Racconti: La Voce del Popolo, this paper argues that, while crucial, the everyday experience of diaspora always needs to be read in relation to broader, dislocated contexts. Indeed, to draw on Grant Farred (2009), the experience of diaspora must be read both in relation to—but always ‘out of’—context. Reading diaspora in this way helps reveal aspects of diasporic life that have the potential to productively disrupt dominant assimilationist discourses of multiculturalism that continue to dominate. This kind of re-reading is pertinent in colonial nations like Australia, whose multiculturalism rhetoric continues to echo normative whiteness.

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This article explores how the arts-for-social change company, Big hART, responded to the Cronulla riots in Western Sydney, Australia. The riots were instigated on 4 December 2005 following an altercation between three Anglo-Australian lifeguards and a group of men identified as being of Lebanese background. Big hART’s creative response, ‘Junk Theory’, involved the collaboration of youth from diverse cultural groups in the Sutherland Shire and resulted in a moving-media installation that projected digital stories onto the sails of a junk boat. With its message, ‘It’s harder to hurt someone when you know their story’, the work raises important questions regarding diversity, social cohesion and the corporeal force of community-based art. My critique of this work is the starting point for my interest in the material – and often subtle – ways that racialized bodies come to be produced through multiculturalism discourse. I want to add to the contemporary scholarship account of a tension between theoretical/political multiculturalism and its everyday engagements, by utilizing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to examine the multicultural body in both public and creative space. The article uses performativity to consider how it is that certain bodies came to be seen as beyond the limits of not only the Cronulla beach, but humanness itself. It then considers how the same theory makes way for slippages, which, if harnessed, may be used to deconstruct the racialized body in everyday art forms.