Introduction: Towards a New Interculturalism?

This chapter examines the relationship between social and aesthetic interculturalisms in contemporary Irish performance and social policy structures in a national context. Following increased inward migration in the 1990s, Ireland’s social policy responses to increased racial and ethnic diversity have occurred under the rubric of ‘interculturalism’ and frequently drawn on theatre and performance practices in order to integrate new communities. This introduction considers what a rhetorical shift from ‘multi’ to ‘inter’-culturalism in social policy in not only Ireland, but in a wider European and Canadian context, means in terms of how interculturalism might be newly conceptualized as an aesthetic (and political) practice in theatre and performance studies.