Indigeneity, cosmopolitanism and the nation

Dreaming Forward: Postidentity and the Generative Thresholds of Tourism

“…In order to critique the operational practicalities of being seriously collaborative and manifestly compossibleand thereby render the subject contextually germane for this manuscript -attention will now be turned to Dibley and Turner's [71] inspection of the cultural production and consumption of "Indigeneity". They focus upon the act of compossibility vis-a-vis the everyday nationing of Australia: see Rowe, Turner and Waterton [72] for an explanation of "nationing" in terms of the banalities of nation-formation/nation-building/cultural nationalism, per se.…”

“…Representational decisions over "inclusion" chafe against the accountabilities faced by the-particular-partner/other-bodies. The imperative to faithfully and consistently produce programmes which richly reflect the Indigenous inheritance (or inheritances) grates against the governing remit for all television companies to maintain high audience numbers across the whole nation (refer Dibley and Turner [74] ).…”

Dealing with diversity: Australian television, homogeneity and indigeneity

“…In the light of that diagnosis, then, it is worth looking at an intervention that comes from a very different cultural background and which has the potential to create some change in the structure of the industry, by addressing the Australian audience in a way that foregrounds and promotes difference: this is the establishment of the National Indigenous Television network, NITV. This section of the article draws on research (Dibley and Turner, 2018) which was conducted in conjunction with a larger research project on Australian cultural consumption, the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) Australian Research Council-funded project led by Tony Bennett. 2 This larger project had a number of components.…”

“…The ACF project also hosted a workshop on the structure and mission of NITV; the contributors included some of those who had been involved in setting up the network, as well as some who were involved in the earlier indigenous community and commercial television organisations from which it had been drawn. This is a troubled history and it is dealt with in Dibley and Turner (2018) at some length. However, the focus there, as it is here, is upon what the network was hoping to achieve, as it pursued its mission of normalising indigenous culture for non-Indigenous Australia, and on what Therese Davis (2017) has described as bringing indigenous screen production into the mainstream.…”

“…There is also the possibility that the kind of diversity which is created by NITVs mix of content does represent a challenge to NITV’s cultural mission. Dibley and Turner (2018: 136–138) suggest that this particular formation of diversity risked devolving into a kind of cosmopolitanism. At some distance from more positive constructions of cosmopolitanism, they see it as a mode of inclusion that is comfortable for those who are already included but risks resulting in something like cultural commodification for those who are not.…”