Diversity and the Arts

Diversity and the Arts:Issues and Strategies Gerard Béhague Today, we are on the eve of a new century. The arts and humanities are more essential than ever to the endurance of our democratic values of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom, and to our understanding of where we are and where we need to go. At a momentous time in our history like this when so much is happening to change the way we work and live, the way we relate to one another and the way we relate to the rest of the world, we cannot fully understand the past, nor envision the future we need to pursue without the arts and humanities. President Bill Clinton (1997) Creative America, a 1996–97 report by the Presidential Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, referred to the assets and deficiencies of the North American cultural sector. Among the assets was cited a "rich variety of cultural communities and traditions," and among the deficiencies "a climate of intolerance for challenging works and ideas." But hardly any attention was given to the question of diversity and multiculturalism. American society has long been recognized as racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse. Because the arts, whether literary, visual or performative, are particularly powerful in asserting individual and group identities, many public arts agencies have developed policies regarding "multiculturalism" and "diversity." These terms have entered our daily language but have been used somewhat too loosely. David Pankratz (Multiculturalism and the Arts, 1993) describes multiculturalism as "the coexistence of groups of racial minorities within a common socio-political system." He notes that such groups, [End Page 19] while continually undergoing change, are seen and see themselves as having relatively unique shared and transmitted values, dispositions, behaviors, and outlooks on the world as well as a shared economic future, and . . . draw on the loyalty of group members to harness discontent in the face of racial discrimination and powerlessness as a basis for social and political action. (1993, 18) Given this definition, it would seem pertinent to consider the role of both culture and ethnicity in the very concept of diversity. In the context of the present essay, "culture" is used in its general social scientific sense as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871). "Ethnicity" is if anything even more difficult to define and use. Fredrick Barth introduced the term in his work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (1969) in relationship to the construction, maintenance and negotiation of boundaries. Ethnic boundaries, he argued, define and maintain social identities, "which can only exist in a ‘context of opposition and relativities'" (Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, 1994). In addition, Gerhard Kubik (in Béhague ed. 1994) has asserted that ethnicity can be descriptive of a state of consciousness aiming at the reconfirmation or reinforcement of dormant ethnic or cultural identities. Kubik argues that for Africa, "the idea of ‘ethnicity' is strange and even suspicious, because it seems to promote identities which African governments are trying to discourage. To many African intellectuals ‘ethnicity' sounds as if it were just a new euphemistic surrogate term for ‘tribalism'" (19). In daily language, therefore, "ethnicity" can be politically loaded and rather ambiguous. To resolve some of this ambiguity, it seems crucial to differentiate between, as argued anthropologist Richard Adams, an "internally defined ethnicity" from an "externally defined ethnicity" (Adams 1989). The first concept represents a native group's definition of self identity, the second an identity ascribed to the group by outsiders. The discourse of identity reveals frequently adaptive strategies of change and embodies political agendas. To add to the complexity of what is meant by ethnicity, a new conception has emerged recently especially in the United States: one that tends to shift from an emphasis on ethnic heritage based on language, national identity, and religion, to an insistence on biological differences and determinism. Thus race has become a more primary factor rather than culture or social class. However conceptualized and voiced, ethnic and class

Aesthetics · Art · Cultural diversity · Cultural pluralism · Democracy · Epistemology · Multiculturalism · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The arts · Anthropology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Law

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