Illiberal White Fantasies and Netflix's The Witcher, 2023
This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of ra... more This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national selfdefinitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes' claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.
This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of ra... more This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national selfdefinitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes' claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.
This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of ra... more This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national selfdefinitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes' claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.
Abstract In her article," Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central Euro... more Abstract In her article," Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture," Anikó Imre discusses gender, literature, and film in Hungary in the context of East Central European national cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Anikó Imre analyzes the analogous gender structures that underlie both nation and literature in these transitional cultures. She challenges both social science studies of post-communist transitions and studies of East Central European literatures and cultures for their traditional neglect of ...
Abstract Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss ho... more Abstract Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the figure of the migrant is construed within the popular imagination as a ‘threat’ to the prosperity of the European Union, and the unique way in which Radivojevic seeks to critique both conservative and liberal discourses around migration through her film. Evaporating Borders examines the present-day experiences of asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus, the majority of who are Palestinians, as they face increasing hostility and violence from Cypriot nationalists on the island. By framing the film through Radivojevic’s personal voice-over, disrupting linear narrativity, and juxtaposing visual imagery of life on the island with aural testimonials offered by refugees and Cypriots alike, Radivojevic subtly connects worsening economic conditions to the growth of nationalism and xenophobia in Cyprus and Europe more broadly. The film’s exploration of three national traumas – the occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey, the denial of Palestinian statehood, and Radivojevic’s personal narrative of escaping to Cyprus from Yugoslavia during its collapse – makes visible the multiple temporalities migrants experience and the time politics used by nation states to limit migrants’ mobility. Through our examination of the film’s narrative structure and aesthetics, we show how Radivojevic renders more complicated the simplistic liberal approaches to the figure of the ‘migrant’ to reveal the fragmented and contradictory nature of national identities, and to compel an examination of the idea of the nation state.
Abstract This article examines a quintessential genre of early socialist television entertainment... more Abstract This article examines a quintessential genre of early socialist television entertainment: the historical adventure series. It draws on two popular series, the Polish Janosik (1974) and the Hungarian Captain of the Tenkes (1964) to foreground two formative tensions within early socialist television: that between the state's paternalistic, top-down imperative to educate a supposedly docile and homogeneous national audience and television's position as a home-based medium of family entertainment on the one hand, ...
American television programs have long been perceived as instruments of media imperialism and a t... more American television programs have long been perceived as instruments of media imperialism and a threat to local cultures. This essay argues that the global proliferation of so-called “quality” shows in the last few decades also presents a challenge and opportunity for a transnational understanding of feminism and postfeminism. Television scholars have argued that the turn towards “quality” in both television studies and the television industry requires “remasculinizing” the medium by disavowing its “feminine,” melodramatic ...
A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas is the first comprehensive exploration of Eastern Europea... more A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas is the first comprehensive exploration of Eastern European film cultures. Featuring contributions from both established and emerging film scholars, essays trace the development of Eastern European cinemas utilizing a variety of approaches-from political, economic, and cultural contexts to aesthetics and themes pertinent to the cinemas of the post-Soviet region. Topics explored include well-established areas of film study such as dissident national art cinemas and auteurs, as well as issues ...
Postcolonial Whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire, Feb 3, 2005
WHITENESS AND NATIONALISM IN EASTERN EUROPE" i BELIEVE AMERICA TAUGHT our son's killer ... more WHITENESS AND NATIONALISM IN EASTERN EUROPE" i BELIEVE AMERICA TAUGHT our son's killer to hate African-Americans." This is how Camille Cosby's controversial article starts in the July 8, 1998, issue of USA Today (Cosby, 15A)." Presumably," she continues," Markhasev did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero. Nor was he likely to see America's intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union ...
I argue that postcolonial discourses are essential to unearthing and revising the complicated dyn... more I argue that postcolonial discourses are essential to unearthing and revising the complicated dynamic of codependence between Western and Eastern European nationalisms, which is haunted by internalized and rarely acknowledged traces of imperialism on both sides. However, the spatial expansion of postcolonial discourse to Europe’s own backyard needs to be matched by an expansion of research methods and objects. Postcolonial studies’ traditional commitment to theory and to textual analysis of literature and art cinema is beneficially complemented by engaging with popular media, such as television. It is also crucial to critically analyze the contexts of production and dissemination in which certain aesthetic and theoretical models are formed, lest we risk simply reaffirming the patterns in which Eastern European cultural nationalisms have reproduced themselves, which have also functioned to contain and disavow racism and imperialism. I propose to integrate within the postcolonial sphe...
HBO has carved out a unique position in the crowded European television marketplace among the man... more HBO has carved out a unique position in the crowded European television marketplace among the many competing terrestrial, cable, and over-the-top streaming services. In a European Union fraught with political and economic divisions, where the dream of a pan-European identity is receding farther and farther into the distance, the values associated with the HBO brand-quality, flexibility, mobility, and cosmopolitanism forged across local affinitieshave conjured up what comes closest to a palatable and desirable European identification. There is a synergy between the European Union's cultural and economic policies, which have been visualized as a database of nimble, adaptable identifications among equally available national, regional, European, and global registers at once, and its media regulation directives, which favor borderless, increasingly Internet-based media services that are able to operate in a trans-European and global scope and offer an expansive catalog of viewing choices to the savvy, cosmopolitan European consumer. HBO is an exemplary match for this cultural, economic, and regulatory landscape. Its catalog of high-quality films and TV programs is available via cable and via streaming platforms, and its specialization in creating quality format adaptations and original television series combines a transnational aesthetic sensibility with themes and genres that resonate across countries but are delivered with local inflections.The HBO brand has given a viable representational form to a pan-European identity that has been criticized as idealized and exclusionary in the past few years. This is a complex phenomenon fraught with irony, where technology, production strategies, delivery platforms, and marketing as well as local histories, themes, narratives, genres, and aesthetics all play a role. I acknowledge this complexity when examining how the HBO brand has aligned itself with the elusive European brand, navigating across the various crises and divides that have afflicted the European Union in recent decades. I am particularly interested in HBO's work in bridging the political division between Eastern and Western Europe through establishing production companies and making original programs in countries
Transnational feminist media studies has a prominent role to play in tackling the normativization... more Transnational feminist media studies has a prominent role to play in tackling the normativization of binary gender and sexuality templates that lend coherence to the Global Right’s epistemological universe. Feminist scholars can begin to interrupt the traveling script at some of its most vulnerable points. The brief example here is the glaring divide between populist leaders’ seemingly invulnerable political masculinities and their actual weakness, which the HBO mini-series allegorically exposes.
Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the fig... more Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the figure of the migrant is construed within the popular imagination as a ‘threat’ to the prosperity of the European Union, and the unique way in which Radivojevic seeks to critique both conservative and liberal discourses around migration through her film. Evaporating Borders examines the present-day experiences of asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus, the majority of who are Palestinians, as they face increasing hostility and violence from Cypriot nationalists on the island. By framing the film through Radivojevic’s personal voice-over, disrupting linear narrativity, and juxtaposing visual imagery of life on the island with aural testimonials offered by refugees and Cypriots alike, Radivojevic subtly connects worsening economic conditions to the growth of nationalism and xenophobia in Cyprus and Europe more broadly. The film’s exploration of three national traumas – the occupation of northe...
This article looks at television’s so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive fram... more This article looks at television’s so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive framework at the intersection of postsocialist memory and history studies. It zooms in on postsocialist nostalgia as a relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network. Televisual nostalgia also implicates Western Europe and makes explicit a Western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War. This longing, in turn, shores up Europe’s repressed imperial history. Television’s role at the pressure points of postsocialist institutional and economic policy, consumption and narrative concerns makes it an indispensable window into the intertwined workings of nostalgia and nationalism within a postcolonial Europe.
This is the sociologists' assessment. While the underclass dialectic is a useful... more This is the sociologists' assessment. While the underclass dialectic is a useful model because it interrupts monolithically negative ideas about the Roma rooted in discrimination, racism and poverty, it still remains somewhat too homogenising. If we reach across disciplinary fences and take into account the extent to which global media culture has penetrated and transformed post‐communist economies, societies and identities, we will see multiple, fluid connections not only between the upwardly mobile and ghetto‐bound parts of the Romany populations ...
Illiberal White Fantasies and Netflix's The Witcher, 2023
This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of ra... more This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national selfdefinitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes' claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.
This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of ra... more This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national selfdefinitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes' claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.
This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of ra... more This paper explores fantasy narratives that allow European nations to transcend the history of racial violence, and that connect Eastern and Western European manifestations of white innocence. This racialised connection highlights a relationship between the two Europes which hinges on mutual projections, which lives in narratives that have sustained schizophrenic national selfdefinitions in the eastern region and that have propped up the stability of national self-definitions within the western core. I zoom in on the current Polish and Hungarian right-wing populist regimes' claims of racial exceptionalism by pointing to the ways in which locations in the east of the EU function as a resource for white innocence in the transnational media industries. I look closely at the relationship between the political-economic and discursive-cultural dimensions of white innocence through a case study of The Witcher franchise, based on Polish source material for a Netflix fantasy series, whose first season was shot primarily in Hungary. The Witcher involves multiple crossings where Eastern European national fantasies and global corporate fantasies of diversity and democracy converge in white innocence. These meeting points produce a racial and economic interface against which we can observe how whiteness operates in the regional networks of racial capitalism.
Abstract In her article," Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central Euro... more Abstract In her article," Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture," Anikó Imre discusses gender, literature, and film in Hungary in the context of East Central European national cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Anikó Imre analyzes the analogous gender structures that underlie both nation and literature in these transitional cultures. She challenges both social science studies of post-communist transitions and studies of East Central European literatures and cultures for their traditional neglect of ...
Abstract Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss ho... more Abstract Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the figure of the migrant is construed within the popular imagination as a ‘threat’ to the prosperity of the European Union, and the unique way in which Radivojevic seeks to critique both conservative and liberal discourses around migration through her film. Evaporating Borders examines the present-day experiences of asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus, the majority of who are Palestinians, as they face increasing hostility and violence from Cypriot nationalists on the island. By framing the film through Radivojevic’s personal voice-over, disrupting linear narrativity, and juxtaposing visual imagery of life on the island with aural testimonials offered by refugees and Cypriots alike, Radivojevic subtly connects worsening economic conditions to the growth of nationalism and xenophobia in Cyprus and Europe more broadly. The film’s exploration of three national traumas – the occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey, the denial of Palestinian statehood, and Radivojevic’s personal narrative of escaping to Cyprus from Yugoslavia during its collapse – makes visible the multiple temporalities migrants experience and the time politics used by nation states to limit migrants’ mobility. Through our examination of the film’s narrative structure and aesthetics, we show how Radivojevic renders more complicated the simplistic liberal approaches to the figure of the ‘migrant’ to reveal the fragmented and contradictory nature of national identities, and to compel an examination of the idea of the nation state.
Abstract This article examines a quintessential genre of early socialist television entertainment... more Abstract This article examines a quintessential genre of early socialist television entertainment: the historical adventure series. It draws on two popular series, the Polish Janosik (1974) and the Hungarian Captain of the Tenkes (1964) to foreground two formative tensions within early socialist television: that between the state's paternalistic, top-down imperative to educate a supposedly docile and homogeneous national audience and television's position as a home-based medium of family entertainment on the one hand, ...
American television programs have long been perceived as instruments of media imperialism and a t... more American television programs have long been perceived as instruments of media imperialism and a threat to local cultures. This essay argues that the global proliferation of so-called “quality” shows in the last few decades also presents a challenge and opportunity for a transnational understanding of feminism and postfeminism. Television scholars have argued that the turn towards “quality” in both television studies and the television industry requires “remasculinizing” the medium by disavowing its “feminine,” melodramatic ...
A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas is the first comprehensive exploration of Eastern Europea... more A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas is the first comprehensive exploration of Eastern European film cultures. Featuring contributions from both established and emerging film scholars, essays trace the development of Eastern European cinemas utilizing a variety of approaches-from political, economic, and cultural contexts to aesthetics and themes pertinent to the cinemas of the post-Soviet region. Topics explored include well-established areas of film study such as dissident national art cinemas and auteurs, as well as issues ...
Postcolonial Whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire, Feb 3, 2005
WHITENESS AND NATIONALISM IN EASTERN EUROPE" i BELIEVE AMERICA TAUGHT our son's killer ... more WHITENESS AND NATIONALISM IN EASTERN EUROPE" i BELIEVE AMERICA TAUGHT our son's killer to hate African-Americans." This is how Camille Cosby's controversial article starts in the July 8, 1998, issue of USA Today (Cosby, 15A)." Presumably," she continues," Markhasev did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero. Nor was he likely to see America's intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union ...
I argue that postcolonial discourses are essential to unearthing and revising the complicated dyn... more I argue that postcolonial discourses are essential to unearthing and revising the complicated dynamic of codependence between Western and Eastern European nationalisms, which is haunted by internalized and rarely acknowledged traces of imperialism on both sides. However, the spatial expansion of postcolonial discourse to Europe’s own backyard needs to be matched by an expansion of research methods and objects. Postcolonial studies’ traditional commitment to theory and to textual analysis of literature and art cinema is beneficially complemented by engaging with popular media, such as television. It is also crucial to critically analyze the contexts of production and dissemination in which certain aesthetic and theoretical models are formed, lest we risk simply reaffirming the patterns in which Eastern European cultural nationalisms have reproduced themselves, which have also functioned to contain and disavow racism and imperialism. I propose to integrate within the postcolonial sphe...
HBO has carved out a unique position in the crowded European television marketplace among the man... more HBO has carved out a unique position in the crowded European television marketplace among the many competing terrestrial, cable, and over-the-top streaming services. In a European Union fraught with political and economic divisions, where the dream of a pan-European identity is receding farther and farther into the distance, the values associated with the HBO brand-quality, flexibility, mobility, and cosmopolitanism forged across local affinitieshave conjured up what comes closest to a palatable and desirable European identification. There is a synergy between the European Union's cultural and economic policies, which have been visualized as a database of nimble, adaptable identifications among equally available national, regional, European, and global registers at once, and its media regulation directives, which favor borderless, increasingly Internet-based media services that are able to operate in a trans-European and global scope and offer an expansive catalog of viewing choices to the savvy, cosmopolitan European consumer. HBO is an exemplary match for this cultural, economic, and regulatory landscape. Its catalog of high-quality films and TV programs is available via cable and via streaming platforms, and its specialization in creating quality format adaptations and original television series combines a transnational aesthetic sensibility with themes and genres that resonate across countries but are delivered with local inflections.The HBO brand has given a viable representational form to a pan-European identity that has been criticized as idealized and exclusionary in the past few years. This is a complex phenomenon fraught with irony, where technology, production strategies, delivery platforms, and marketing as well as local histories, themes, narratives, genres, and aesthetics all play a role. I acknowledge this complexity when examining how the HBO brand has aligned itself with the elusive European brand, navigating across the various crises and divides that have afflicted the European Union in recent decades. I am particularly interested in HBO's work in bridging the political division between Eastern and Western Europe through establishing production companies and making original programs in countries
Transnational feminist media studies has a prominent role to play in tackling the normativization... more Transnational feminist media studies has a prominent role to play in tackling the normativization of binary gender and sexuality templates that lend coherence to the Global Right’s epistemological universe. Feminist scholars can begin to interrupt the traveling script at some of its most vulnerable points. The brief example here is the glaring divide between populist leaders’ seemingly invulnerable political masculinities and their actual weakness, which the HBO mini-series allegorically exposes.
Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the fig... more Using the recent documentary essay film Evaporating Borders as a platform, we discuss how the figure of the migrant is construed within the popular imagination as a ‘threat’ to the prosperity of the European Union, and the unique way in which Radivojevic seeks to critique both conservative and liberal discourses around migration through her film. Evaporating Borders examines the present-day experiences of asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus, the majority of who are Palestinians, as they face increasing hostility and violence from Cypriot nationalists on the island. By framing the film through Radivojevic’s personal voice-over, disrupting linear narrativity, and juxtaposing visual imagery of life on the island with aural testimonials offered by refugees and Cypriots alike, Radivojevic subtly connects worsening economic conditions to the growth of nationalism and xenophobia in Cyprus and Europe more broadly. The film’s exploration of three national traumas – the occupation of northe...
This article looks at television’s so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive fram... more This article looks at television’s so far neglected contribution as a relay and interpretive framework at the intersection of postsocialist memory and history studies. It zooms in on postsocialist nostalgia as a relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network. Televisual nostalgia also implicates Western Europe and makes explicit a Western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War. This longing, in turn, shores up Europe’s repressed imperial history. Television’s role at the pressure points of postsocialist institutional and economic policy, consumption and narrative concerns makes it an indispensable window into the intertwined workings of nostalgia and nationalism within a postcolonial Europe.
This is the sociologists' assessment. While the underclass dialectic is a useful... more This is the sociologists' assessment. While the underclass dialectic is a useful model because it interrupts monolithically negative ideas about the Roma rooted in discrimination, racism and poverty, it still remains somewhat too homogenising. If we reach across disciplinary fences and take into account the extent to which global media culture has penetrated and transformed post‐communist economies, societies and identities, we will see multiple, fluid connections not only between the upwardly mobile and ghetto‐bound parts of the Romany populations ...
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