Page 166 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MULTICULTURALISM

abstract system of language (langue), but by the dialogic interaction
of social relations within which the potential for meaning is fixed.
In principle multi-accentuality is a property of all signs, but in
practice most signs are not constantly the object of active struggle.
However, the concept remains useful in accounting for such
phenomena as anti-languages or languages of resistance such as those
of slaves in the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
which are characterised by complete inversions of existing signs and
their values (thus ‘black’ is inverted to become the sign for ‘good’,
‘powerful’, ‘sacred’, and so on). Feminism too has demonstrated that
apparently inert signs (‘he’, ‘man’, ‘mankind’) are ideologically loaded
and represent social power relations.

MULTICULTURALISM

Diversity of population and culture as public policy. The advent of
multiculturalism as a governmental programme signified a deliberate
departure in the way that nation-states historically have chosen to
depict themselves. Rather than projecting an image of the nation as a
unified, culturally homogenous group, multiculturalism recognises
that contemporary society is made up of distinct and diverse groups.
The official policies of multiculturalism aim to manage cultural
diversity through welfare, culture and social justice initiatives. The
intention is to move away from ‘assimilation’ of migrants or
Indigenous people towards wider social acceptance of difference as
something legitimate and valuable.
Multiculturalism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth
primarily as a response to political demands from ethnic minorities.
Countries facing populations that contained distinctive cultural groups
as a result of migration policies began to accept that assimilation was
either not possible or not desired for a large proportion of groups.
Migration, as a result, took on newsignificance. It was no longer
simply a means to population growth, but something culturally
significant requiring government recognition and assistance.
In the 1970s Australia and Canada officially declared themselves
multiculturalist societies. Considerable infrastructure was erected to
support these policies, including, in Australia, the SBS or Special
Broadcasting Service, a national radio and television network
dedicated to ‘free-to-air’ broadcasting of materials in languages other
than English and English-language programming that promotes
multicultural aims. SBS television, run on a shoestring compared to

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