Rethinking the Aesthetic Geographies of Multicultural Festivals: A Nietzschean Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".