Representing cultural diversity in a global context

Abstract

In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the cultural diversity project has its roots in the multiculturalism and biculturalism of the 1970s, the political and civil, ethnic unrest experienced in the 1980s, and the pedagogical shift in the 1990s that saw a rejection of the more traditional museum and its historical commitment toward an array of singular or non-compromising representations of identity. Connected to a movement toward a new, possibly hybrid, and definitely transcultural globalization that has been driven by an increased understanding of the interplays between nation and region, the past 10 years have been especially important in regard to recentralizing identity politics; and where, on the one hand, we have seen debate over the interrelationships governing culture, politics, sovereignty and the museum, there has also been a concurrent shift in cultural policy to embrace localized models and examples of the cultural centre or eco-museum. In this article, I consider the ways that the National Museum of Australia (2001) and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (1998) have attempted at some level to both maintain the representational authority of multiculturalism and biculturalism as their respective governing policies, and yet also integrate or facilitate the potentially competing concept of globalization that is projected by the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity(2001).