Nobuntu has drawn international acclaim for its inventive performances that range from traditional Zimbabwean songs to Afro Jazz to Gospel. Implications of the study are discussed in terms of the state's increasing reliance on intercultural education as a policy panacea to the intensification of racism in Irish society.Part of the Park City Institute Equity Initiative The purpose of the research is to promote a deeper understanding of the ways in which racial inequality is reproduced through policies and practices which are purported to have egalitarian and anti-racist aims. Combining discourse analytic, observational and in-depth interviewing techniques, I examine how state and school-based intercultural policies and practices construct difference along racial-ethnic and national lines, and consider the implications of these policies and practices for sustaining and contesting racism. Informed by the intellectual oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu, my analysis investigates state-level discourses as they are articulated in recent anti-racist policy documents and in the national curriculum, and how these broader discourses are interpreted at the local school level. Working from the perspective that ideas about 'race' and nation are inextricably linked, I examine how contemporary nationalistic identity projects and processes map onto the current policy drive towards multicultural (or intercultural) education in Ireland. This research explores the interrelationship between the production of national identity and multiculturalism in Irish schools and society. If “loss and uncertainty haunt” Ireland’s present, the papers in this volume provide ways of recognizing such phenomena as reflections of an encounter that is “animated by fundamental questions that engage … both positively and negatively at the same time” (Blum 50). Whether it be changes in Irish cultural policy, or the relation of artists to the State, the contestation over the division the Irish flag plays in Downpatrick’s St Patrick’s Day parade, the changing eating and drinking habits of the Irish, the flourishing of community arts in Northern Ireland, reflections on three contemporary visual artists, the fascination of the Irish people with a television crime series, the art of Rita Duffy, or the historic debate in the Irish language during the last general election, all the papers offer interpretive responses to the common cultural situation of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. That is, by reflecting on cultural practices, these papers provide an opportunity to explore the ways in which the ambiguous object that is Ireland is clarified. In this introduction, we want to take up the conception of culture as fundamentally ambiguous, as “a locus of interpretation and action” (Blum 54), and seek to understand cultural and critical responses as ways of clarifying the object that is Ireland, in the papers that follow. While the dislocation of the Celtic Tiger years was largely welcomed by the Irish population because its wealth helped generate “optimism, confidence, a new openness and ease, an absence of fear” (O’Toole 3) the consequent financial crisis and the ensuing recession opened a new area of investigation for scholars on culture and the arts in cultural history, cultural economy, sociology, art history, and media studies. As Fintan O’Toole summarizes in his 2010 publication, Enough is Enough, throughout both the Celtic and Post Celtic Tiger eras, Ireland experienced significant destabilization.
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