Page 10 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

4 CULTURAL STUDIES

forms of ‘community’ as an ‘expensive and sometimes violent and dangerous
illusion’ (Hall, 1995:186). In opposition to such illusions, they posit a different
understanding of place— one in which places are not spatially bounded but are
the product of interactions with other places—and ‘community’ disappears from
their discussion. Other writers, however, are more reluctant to abandon the term
‘community’, perhaps because, as Williams (1976:66) pointed out, no other term
of social organization carries such positive connotations of collective solidarity.
For them, the task is to elaborate subversive concepts of community: a notion of
‘community’ ‘envisaged as a project’ and ‘interstitial’ between difference, for
example (Bhabha, 1994:3). Mercer (1994:10) also continues to use the term as a
description for a political collective, but redefines it as a dynamic process of
diasporic ‘communifying’ dependent neither on essential identity nor authentic
timelessness.
Diasporic understandings of ‘community’ pose a major challenge to the
attempts at stability inherent in dominant imagined communities. In this article,
however, I want to explore another attempt to rethink the geographies of
‘community’ in a radical way. During the first half of 1995, I conducted nineteen
in-depth interviews with practitioners from a variety of community arts projects
in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. These were taperecorded and transcribed, and
interpreted using a form of discourse analysis. My interpretation of the
spatialities through which they map notions of ‘community’ suggests other ways
of subverting essentialized understandings of the term. This article focuses on
this reimagining of ‘community’; I have explored its implications for the
practices of these arts workers elsewhere (Rose, forthcoming), and only briefly
comment on them here.

The `community' of community arts
The notion of ‘community’ is obviously central to the community arts movement
(Binns, 1991; Braden, 1978; Hawkins, 1993; Nigg and Wade, 1980; Rose,
1994). The community arts movement began in the late 1960s in Europe, North
America and Australasia. Its diverse practices all depend on a critique of the
mass media and high arts as reproducing only rulingclass ideologies by assuming
a consensual set of values, and that outside this centre are other groups with
different values who are excluded from the means of public self-expression.
Community arts practitioners address themselves to such marginalized groups,
using arts practices of all kinds to give them the skills and opportunities to
articulate their worldview. They describe those groups as ‘communities’
(Berrigan, 1977; Community Development Foundation, 1992). ‘Community’ in
this discourse means a group of people with shared values, the basis of which, it
is now argued, could be place or identity. Much of the funding for community
arts in Edinburgh depends on a place-based understanding of identity, however;
almost all the largest community arts projects in the city are funded by the Urban
Aid programme of the Scottish Office, which only supports work in areas