Rethinking the Aesthetic Geographies of Multicultural Festivals: A Nietzschean Perspective

Critiquing dismissals in geography of the aesthetics of multicultural festivals as bland, superficial, and apolitical, this article illustrates how they can be also invigorating, imaginative, and empowering. To elaborate my argument, I draw on interviews and participant observations of the 2010 Fusion Festival (hereafter Fusion), an annual event located in the “ethnoburban” context of the city of Surrey, British Columbia. My theoretical framework uses Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of aesthetic “justification,” which refers to art's capacity to infuse human experience with constructive meaning and affirmative power. For Nietzsche, aesthetic justification incorporates two artistic forces: the Apollonian, which refers to illusion, beauty, and order, and the Dionysian, which refers to music, sensuality, and ecstasy. The article explores three ways through which Apollonian and Dionysian delimitations of space and time justify the multicultural values and identities of Fusion's participants: first, how the Apollonian illusions of “cultural pavilions” manifest the creative capacities of local communities; second, how musical and theatrical performances generate Dionysian senses of belonging among performers and audience members; and third, how the embodied and transfiguring practices of dancing, painting, singing, and dressing up shift perspectives in ways that affirm diversity, combat despair, and raise awareness about protecting the environment. The article concludes by considering some future directions in geographical research on the aesthetics of multicultural festivals.