Third Text

edited by Richard Appignanesi

Commissioned as a report by Arts Council England and published in 2011, Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity offers a timely and uncompromising investigation of what has gone wrong, and why, with state-sponsored cultural diversity policy in Britain. It argues that state funding of cultural diversity can result in cultural ghettoisation, but goes beyond criticism to propose a new concept of creative diversity to promote a culturally integrated British society. It proposes a radical shift of historical perspective in a ten-point programme of institutional, educational and policy reforms to develop a culturally whole Britain, basing its case on a model of creativity and diversity already seen in British art after World War II. African, African Caribbean and Asian artists contributed decisively to the modernist canon of British art from the 1950s to the 1970s, but this model of so-called ‘ethnically diverse’ artists working interactively within the British mainstream artworld has been wilfully ignored. This report restores it to the centre stage of Britain’s cultural heritage.

Beyond Cultural Diversity marks a first significant advance since Naseem Khan’s 1976 report ‘The Arts Britain Ignores’. This report is a platform of independent views expressed by cultural practitioners from institutions such as art colleges, Tate Britain and the Arts Council. Their proposals concern a simultaneously diverse and integral public culture increasingly under threat.

About the Editor: Richard Appignanesi was the editor of Third Text from 2004–2014, and reviews editor of the future studies journal Futures. A co-founder and editorial director of Writers & Readers Publishing Co-operative and Icon Books, he has also served as a curator, lecturer and conference organiser for the British Council. He is the author of the fiction trilogy Italia Perversa: Stalin’s Orphans, The Mosque and Destroying America (1983–1985), the novel Yukio Mishima’s Report to the Emperor (2003) and other non-fiction writings.

Published in 2011
Paperback
152pp with 15 colour & 6 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-0-947753-11-5


The book can be purchased from Central Books, but the contents are also available here on the Third Text website (see the menu on the left).