Illiberal White Fantasies and Netflix's The Witcher

Illiberal White Fantasies and Netflix's The Witcher, 2023

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.

2021

In Hungary, the last few years were witness to an increasing appropriation of Nordic Noir aesthetics. Books, films and a television series were written and produced under a ‘Scandinavian’ crime label on this small-scale market, adapting, relatively late, the bestselling genre of the last two decades. Our aim is to situate this tendency in the context of Hungarian creative industries by underlining the most important discursive elements involved in the remediation of Hungarian crime stories within a “network of similarities” (Garcia-Mainar 2020) with Nordic Noir. An investigation of the paratexts of these cultural products sheds light on the main idea behind the creation of those different mediatic appropriations: in Hungary, a market where the crime genre has had, and still has, a difficult and discontinuous affirmation, adopting the label of a globally successful (sub)genre may help crime fiction through its process of cultural institutionalization.

Traditiones, 2008

media studies 1 in post-socialist and post-eu enlargement contexts illuminate the ways in which individuals are vested not only with judicial competences, obligations, and entitlements (or lack of them) bestowed by the state and media empires, but also with particular modes of status, authority, and prestige endowed by the media market. moreover, media production and consumption is an arena in which majority-minority interests, ideologies, and practices of the markets, states, and the eu collide and collude. in these intersecting spaces, producers, state officials, and policymakers as well as consumers rearticulate and re-circulate identities, values, and meanings to create political and cultural identities. this analysis explores the dynamics of the media regimes and cultures of hungary, which joined the eu in 2004. rather than privileging the eu, the state, or the market, i examine the interchanges among them by asking how they both influence and reflect majority and minority consumer views. in particular, i investigate how media production and consumption is involved in creating subjectivities and public identities, shaping sociability, and belonging. What is clear is that the notion of "europeanization" necessarily involves domestication of eu media directives. however, by renegotiating neoliberal values and engagements of these directives, the various local consumers remake europe as europe remakes them. this is what manuel Castells may have in mind when he discusses the configuration of a global public space as dependent on the "global/local communication media system" (Castells 2008: 89). in an insightful study, daniel hallin and paolo mancini (2004) pinpoint three major models of the globalized media 1 this essay is a revised version of an earlier study (kürti 2008). research in hungary has been supported by the eu susdiv. eurodiv project diversity in arts production.

The Undeclared War (1997) David Putnam, one of the key figures behind the European film and media policy, said: 'Stories and images are among the principal means by which the human society has always transmitted values and beliefs from generation to generation and community to community [... they] are at the heart of the way we run our economies and live our lives'. This paper will analyse the 'imaginary Europe' from this perspective and look at what characterizes European television fictions and films and what the structure of the national and the European fictional space is. The European fictional space as a whole is strongly dominated by American culture. But it is a fact that just as national fictional products have formed and influenced our national and cultural identity, our understanding of European culture is also strongly linked to European fictions crossing national borders -just like the American fictions. Our Imaginary Europe is therefore a strong and sometimes forgotten cultural dimension in the European integration project and a dimension with important social, political and 2 democratic implications for the construction of a European public sphere.

In this paper I argue that the racial ideology of the Western nations of the worldsystem has converged over the past twenty years. This new ideology or, as many analysts call it, the "new racism," includes: (1) the notion of cultural rather than biological difference, (2) the abstract and decontextualized use of the discourse of liberalism and individualism to rationalize racial inequality, and (3) a celebration of nationalism that at times acquires an ethnonational character. I contend that this ideological convergence reflects the histories of racial imperialism of all these countries, the fact that they have all developed real-although different-racial structures that award systemic rewards to their "White" citizens, and the significant presence of the "Other" (Black, Arab, Turk, aboriginal people, etc.) in their midst. I use the cases of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand to illustrate my point. A specter is haunting Europe as well as other Western nations,' and this time, unlike in 1848, it is not the specter of communism. This time around it is the ghost of an old Western tradition, the tradition of racism that, as Mam once said about past collective history, "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the li~ing."~ In the words of Fernand Braudel, "It is an old problem, and it is still with us. It is the problem of otherness, that is, the feeling that a foreign presence is other, a challenge to one's own self and identity" (Braudel 1990, p. 208). This problem of otherness affects today all Western nations and is signified in many ways. Newspaper reports in various Western nations refer to immigrants of color as "hordes," "strangers," "aliens," and "1 'invasion pacifique" (Layton-Henry 1994; Withol de Wenden 1991).

Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2019

21st Century Medievalisms, 2022

This paper makes the argument that the First World War was the decisive, traumatic event that moved the medieval from lived reality to history in the popular consciousness, forming a wall between popular medievalism and the academic study of the middle ages. Further, the popular desire to still access the medieval as part of lived reality was the impetus for the advent of neomedievalist media, a trend which originates in the fusion of history and fantasy in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This legacy has a profound importance for academic engagement with popular culture, particularly as it abuts the construction of race.

Manchester University Press eBooks, 2024

The 'racial contract', 'whiteness contract', and Central Europe Bolaji Balogun Charles Mills' The Racial Contract (1997), as a conceptual framework, offers an understanding of the mutually constitutive nature of contractual agreements and provides an account of white supremacy that is partly rooted in economic arrangements based on consensual agreements. The framework took different forms, including the 'colonial contract' that paved the way for the subordination of particular groups. Despite its familiarity, Mills' racial contract theory has so far centred on the United States and Western Europe. The concept has never been considered in the theorisation of populism that brought the questions of the 'whiteness contract' into the lexicon of Central Europe. As I will use the term, racial contract concerns those different ways in which power relations between white and non-white people are shaped by their representations and historical actuality. Following Mills' logic, I deploy the terms racial contract and 'whiteness contract' through the experiences of people who are often racialised, socially and biologically, as non-Europeans. In doing so, first, I acknowledge the racial contract as the creation of the modern world, 'a racially hierarchical polity, globally dominated by Europeans', 1 hence, the racial contract is a global one, between people racialised as white or non-white. Second, I recognise the racial contract as an arrangement that cannot be reduced to Western European hegemony, but is better understood by exploring the broader boundaries between Europeanness and non-Europeanness as part of a global history. These conditions are evident in the perception of race that are shared between Central and Western Europe, a legacy of a common history that runs through the Renaissance, Reformation, and the continent's 'overseas discoveries'. 2 The intended scope of my argument is that the effect of the racial contract is global, especially in relation to the darker and lighter 'races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea'. 3 European expansionism brought into existence a white-dominated world from which less powerful

Portrayals of Eastern European countries as “bridges” between East and West are commonplace both in the media and in the political discourse. While the question of the historical origin of Europe’s East-West divide is still under heavy dispute among social scientists, it can be argued that it was the Orientalist discourse of the 19th century that decisively shaped the content of the present categories of Western and Eastern Europe and made policies of demarcation from “the Orient” an important strategy of geopolitical and cultural identification with Europe. The enduring quality of Orientalism’s effects on both national self-definitions and social and cultural policy in Eastern Europe is examined in the present paper in two successive steps: first, by looking at the intellectual discourse in 19th century Romania against the background of the country’s political independence from the Ottoman Empire and increasing economic, cultural and political orientation toward Western Europe; second, by discussing the resurgence of systems of representation based on this type of discourse in the context of the European Union’s “Eastern enlargement”. In the first case, the terms of the Western European discourse were appropriated such as to make the “Oriental barbarism” in which Romanian society had been “steeped” until acquiring independence from the Ottoman Empire the point of departure for the development of a European (civilized, Christian, modern) identity. In the second case, the degree of connection to the Ottoman, and therefore Islamic legacy of Eastern European candidates to the European Union has been reinstrumentalized as a legitimating strategy for discursive practices of inferiorization, exoticization, and racial othering that parallel the region's economic peripheralization.

Despite the taboo surrounding race in Europe, racism continues to define its sociality. The post-war drive to expunge race has not overcome the effects of race thinking which structure conceptions of Europeanness and non-Europeanness. The inability to see race allows European states to declare themselves non-racist, or even anti-racist, while continuing to imply an inherent European superiority which determines both international relationships and with those seen as 'in but not of Europe' within its domestic spheres. I conclude by asking what the repercussions of this envisioning a Europe always less homogeneous in reality than it is commonly imagined to be.