Diversity has increasingly become coveted in the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs), with a significant presence in institutional and policy vocabularies. The concern to employ diverse staff and cater to diverse audiences is driven by socio-economic rationales and in terms of ethnicity, the focus of this article, is justified by the levels of ethnic inequality within CCIs. This article argues that the painfully slow progress in advancing ethnic equality in CCIs pertains to the discursive conceptualisation of diversity, which translates into practices lacking in efficacy and legacy. It traces the evolution of the diversity discourse in CCIs from impassioned calls against racial inequality to a less politically conscious multicultural vision of society, and shifts to a discourse on creative diversity. Focusing on the production of, rather than representation in, culture, the article draws uniquely on an intensive institutional ethnography and interviews in two organisations in the museum and TV production sectors, both of which had committed to diversifying their workforce and practice. With a recognition of the historical and contextual differences in the two sectors’ approaches to diversity, we present an analysis of the micro institutional ways in which diversity is performed as a way of understanding the macro workings of diversity in CCIs at large. Our empirical discussion examines Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policy as one of the more institutionally entrenched and visible practices of diversity and explores diversity schemes as a ‘quick fix’ that cultural organisations have increasingly pursued. While examining these practices, we centre the experiences of ethnically diverse cultural workers as the bearers of diversity work in the context of what we term white institutional benevolence. Those accounts reveal a complex web of intersecting institutional and socio-cultural barriers that need to be urgently addressed for a future cultural sector that is purposely anti-racist, equal and representative.

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Ethnic minority artists are often entrapped in cultural spaces that define their representation as ‘marginal’ and limit their visibility and reach. The challenge facing minority artists – like Muslim, Arab or South-Asian American artists, to name a few – lies in creating spaces that would free their plays from being demarcated as ‘marginal’ or ‘subaltern’, and attract a wider audience to view and engage with their issues and concerns. Ethnic theatre initiatives are actively interacting with the wider community to change such narrative by creating new spaces for the distribution of their art, and imbedding civic engagement in the mosaic of that art. This article investigates a new socially-engaged discourse being developed by companies like Silk Road Rising (SRR) in Chicago, whose artists are disseminating their work to new virtual audiences in digital ‘counterpublics’. In particular, the article focuses on the company’s recent direction to harness the online public sphere in the making and distribution of artistic works to challenge cultural, political and institutional limitations. SRR is benefiting from and harnessing new technologies to: firstly, make its projects visible and accessible to a wider audience; secondly, engage its audiences in a participatory process that would effectively render them as ‘spect-actors’; and thirdly, redefine the artistic output of ethnic artists as polycultural, rather than subaltern or marginal.

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