Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

The role of the media in the cultural practicesof diasporic communitiesResearch position paper 6By Annabelle SrebernyCentre for Mass Communication ResearchUniversity of LeicesterIntroductionThe brief for this report proposed a “focus on the ways in which the members ofdiasporic communities make use of the media in the maintenance and developmentof distinctive cultures, paying particular attention to the role of video, newmedia, cable and multichannelling in these regards” in the seven countriesincluded in this project, namely Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada,Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.It is important to note certain aspects of and conceptual assumptions in the briefbefore moving to substantive matters. First, within the new paradigm of globalisation,a rewording of older sociological categories seems to be taking place, suchthat old “ethnic minorities” and “immigrants” are increasingly reconstructed as“diasporic communities”. The implications of the former centred around issues ofacculturation, broadly speaking, and of identity re-formation within the newnational cultural space; the implications of the latter are to privilege binational culturalspaces, the old “homeland” and the new home/host culture, if not an evenbroader global space in which the dispersed group finds itself entered into numerousnon-native locations. An “ethnic minority” was also a more abstract, statisticallyrelevant social category, while the noun in “diasporic community” seems tosuggest a coherence that actually needs to be problematizsed rather than taken forgranted. In the European audiovisual space, it also suggests more of a focus ongroups of people from outside Europe: India, Pakistan, the Maghreb, China, etc.The minority focus allows a stronger focus on intra-European movements and theexistence of European non-national groups, such as Greeks and Greek Cypriots inBritain, Slovenians and Croats in Austria, Italians in Belgium, and Italians,migrants from former Yugoslavia, Spanish and Portuguese in Switzerland. 1 And itsupports a focus on Roma/Gypsies in Bulgaria and other parts of Europe. 2 155__________1. Main minority groups in various European countries as defined in Frachon and Vargaftig, 1995. Onthe Slovenian minority in Austria, see Busch, 1998.2. See the Bulgarian country report by Genka Markova, in Education and Media in Southeast Europe:Country Reports, available on the website of the University of Graz/Center for the Study of BalkanSocieties and Cultures: (30.07.00).