In our previous column, we considered recent American and British docu-fictional television programs and films that draw on Romania for caricatured images of the Cold War and have thus greatly hindered the country’s own rebranding efforts. In this follow-up article we show the other side: Romanian struggles to develop a successful destination brand emancipated from the legacies of Dracula and Ceausescu. Our larger purpose is to caution against the myth of neoliberal market rationality that underscores nation-branding experts’ narratives of progress and democratization. Our assumption remains that Romania’s story offers ample lessons beyond the case’s national specificities.

After the fall of communism, the Romanian state sponsored several large-scale campaigns promoting the country as a tourist destination. Aimed primarily at foreign tourists, the first significant series of advertisements aired on Euronews, Eurosport, Discovery, CNN, and BBC in the summer of 2004. Although professionally produced, they were criticized for having failed to distinguish Romania from other countries. One of the more memorable ads from the series relies on the repetition of syntactic similarities for rhetorical effect. It posits that even though many tourist attractions in Romania may appear ordinary, this is just a matter of perspective. Thus, what may seem at first sight as a “simple sculpture” is in fact “a Brancusi masterpiece.” What to outsiders appears as “a simple cross” is revealed to be part of the Merry Cemetery at Săpânţa, an attraction in Transylvania.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In 2009, controversial tourism minister Elena Udrea launched a much bolder campaign with a musical-viral-tactical “tourism anthem” that invited tourists to ”Come to Romania, The Land of Choice.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video’s unrealistic portrayal of the country drew heated debate about national identity and harsh criticism for Udrea. It also generated a series of viral response videos with titles such as “The Truth about Romania” and “We are the End of Choice,” which sarcastically foreground the dire conditions that the ad concealed about Romania. Veniti la Vara cind sintem plecati din tara,” (Come in the summertime, when we are abroad,” says one of the response videos, the implication being that Romanians themselves prefer to travel abroad because “it’s cheaper in Turkey, Greece and England.” The daily Cotidianul described the song as a “very bad joke.” “The real question,” the newspaper noted, “is what sense such a song can make for a sector that really deserves a requiem or a funeral march.”

In response, Udrea commissioned a new series of ads to run on CNN and Eurosport, which enlisted Romanian-born celebrities as ambassadors of Brand Romania. One of these spots challenges potential tourists to admit the surrealistic projections associated with Romania. It begins with the image of a happy bride in the company of four men dressed in suits. “This is Romania,” Nadia Comaneci playfully comments, “the only country where a woman has the right to marry four men at the same time!” “Discover Romania, the country where people are riding zebras,” urges Ilie Năstase. “Come to Romania and test the fish fruit!” Gheorghe Hagi concludes, leaving us with the image of a tree full of hanging fish while a voiceover says: “You know nothing about Romania, do you? It’s time to come and discover it. Real Sites. Real Experiences. Real People.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Statistics reveal that these ads have been ineffective at attracting tourists. Despite the two million Euros used for the Land of Choice campaign, the number of tourists in Romanian hotels decreased by 21.9 % in 2009. Newspaper articles with headlines such as “Romanian Tourism in Free Fall” and “Romania, the European Country with the Lowest Number of Foreign Tourists,” reported a shrinking number of foreign visitors. In other words, the state’s attempts to divert its rebranding strategy away from the “Draculescu” legacy have failed so far. Foreign marketing experts, and even some critical scholars, tend to blame the strategy itself. Geographer Duncan Light, noting Western visitors’ stubborn interest in the “old” Romania, laments that there is little desire to exploit the commercial potential for dark tourism represented by the communist period. Embracing this potential, he claims, would be an important yardstick of the country’s progress and maturity as a postcommunist democracy.

Simon Anholt, the high guru of place branding, insists that nation branding is an ethically neutral tool, which countries must employ proactively to defend themselves against the trivializing tendency of international public opinion, to ensure that public opinion is as “fair, accurate and positive” as it possibly can be. Much like the docu-fictional media representations we analyzed earlier, such a gesture necessitates erasing the violent history of Eastern Europe’s colonial dependence on the West and Western Europe’s continued economic and political interest in sustaining a two-tiered Europe. It conjures up a blank slate on which to re-draw nations as corporations engaged in friendly competition, rather than bloody war, channeling their citizens’ love of brands instead of irrational hatred of others. For states not to “choose” the glorious opportunity to start over amounts to irrational and indefensible wallowing in traumas of the past.

As we showed, for the Romanian state, let alone the actual citizens, constructing a “fair, accurate and positive” brand is hindered not only by Western investment in the dictator and the vampire but also by citizens’ own skepticism about upgrading the nation’s brand. While the state has followed rational marketing recipes in reinventing itself as a desirable destination for rural tourism, for foreign visitors Romania has come to function as one of the last authentic destinations of dark tourism, unlike Budapest or Prague, shinier places that have more confidently erased their communist past. Ceausescu’s monstrous monument, the People’s Palace, continues to be the most visited tourist site in Romania, despite post-socialist administrations’ efforts to turn it into the seat of Parliament, the symbol of a democratic future. This persistent desire for inferior otherness within Europe has also revived the Dracula myth, associated with the dark Carpathian mountains at the edge of civilization, where civil unrest and instability are the very stuff of the people’s and the place’s soul and where fictional horror is always ready to burst into real-life violence. Even though both the government and the people have been eager to forget the Ceausescu period and steer fascination away from Dracula, they have little control over a heritage promoted and consumed only by foreigners.

Travel guides such as The Rough Guide to Romania primarily target “postmodern tourists,” or “travelers” in search of dark experiences. Following this prescription, the most valuable resource for a profitable Brand Romania seems to be the hilarious Jetlag mock travel guide to Molvania, a fictional East European country, “a land untouched by modern dentistry.” While the authors compile a large number of negative clichés about Eastern Europe, the country’s name rhymes most closely with that of Moldavîa, a region whose largest part falls within modern-day Romania. The recipe for economic success seems to be for the state to market itself as a place of vampiric neoliberalism, ready to incorporate its citizens and sell its embarrassments to visiting consumers eager to be horrified.

In the case of small and disadvantaged countries, nation branding is promoted, paradoxically, in the guise of a post-national order that magically relieves individuals and states of nationalism’s ideological burden and converts nationalism’s pleasures into a platform for consumer identification. The rhetoric of freely constructed individual and collective identities, in effect, perpetuates nationalism, visualized as a cheery, quirky brand, erasing the violence at its core and precluding transnational affiliations.

Image Credits:
1. Marvaoguide.com
2. About: East Europe

Please feel free to comment.

To claim that we live in a global brand culture probably doesn’t require much argument. Branding has gone far beyond linking a product with a name and logo; it has become an organizing principle of communication, identities, even political activism. However, it might still be odd to think of entire countries as branded. In fact, while the notion of country or nation-branding might be relatively new, it is not so counter-intuitive. Borrowing the language of branding specialists, globalization pits nation-states against each other today in an economic competition that hinges on products, tourism, and foreign direct investment. Nation-branding as a field of research emerged in the 1990s at the intersection of marketing and public diplomacy; and focuses on how state governments, hand in hand with corporations and marketing agencies, manage their country’s image in the global marketplace. While marketing research normalizes such practices as not only inevitable but also desirable and progressive, nation-branding also brings up a number of critical issues.

First of all, such a paradoxical, “postnational” remapping of the world as a series of competing nation-brands tends to reinforce neo-imperial inequalities among nation-states. States that have established powerful brands thanks to their long-standing economic power, tradition, cultural and touristic offerings or products are at a significant advantage compared with smaller countries with weak or damaged brands, or with countries with non-existing brands, such as the new successor states of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union. Here we examine one of these disadvantaged cases, that of “brand Romania.” We focus on a significant obstacle to Romania’s reinvention as a competitive brand: American and Western European films’ and television programs’ recent, renewed investment in the interlinked legacies of Count Dracula, the terror of Transylvania, and of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a modern-day vampire, whose oppressive reign ended in his bloody execution in December 1989. As we show through four snapshots, a recent series of (pseudo-)documentary representations have rekindled this double legacy and fixed Romania as a repository of images that evoke, link and deploy for commercial purposes Cold War and medieval backwardness.

#1 — Borat
As is well-known, the “Kazakh” scenes of Sasha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary were filmed in the Romanian Gypsy village of Glod. Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet republic with vast oil resources, engaged in a diplomacy battle with Cohen for tarnishing its image. However, it turned out that the country had been too unknown for most viewers to be tarnished. Since the film generated curiosity and boosted the tourist industry, the Kazakh state eventually ended up playing along and reluctantly incorporated the Borat character as a publicity figure in the service of its own state-branding strategy. At the same time, the images of a cow in the living room, toothless men, muddy streets, incestuous families and rampant anti-Semitism, confirmed Cold War stereotypes of a primitive Eastern Europe and attached these to Romania for comic purposes. The noise of post-Borat protest by misled and undercompensated local Romanian extras was drowned out by the film’s own publicity campaign and critical reception, which revolved around the US as the film’s real target of mockery. The producers’ blithe use of rural Romania also effaced the fact that the locals in the film were Gypsies, who themselves suffer violent discrimination from the government and much of the Romanian population. Borat subsequently became a reference point for a number of television reality shows, which looked for and found in Romania the same cluster of poverty, medieval mysticism, and the irreparable, imposing shadow of communist dictatorship.

#2 — No Reservations
The Romanian episode of the Travel Channel’s popular travel-food series No Reservations, which aired on February 25, 2008, became notorious among viewers as the “worst episode ever.” While the host, Anthony Bourdain, is known for his disregard for political correctness, this particular episode is punctuated throughout by his satirical grumbles in both voice-over and on-screen dialogues. The show opens with his companion-sidekick, Russian Zamir biting into a never-ending sausage, greetings locals as “comrades.” Over the images of dark and foreboding mountains, Bourdain’s voice-over introduces Romania “and its mythical region of Transylvania” as a “grey and distant place,” which lies “deep in the heart of Eastern Europe.” Standing in a Bucharest street, he adds, “There were some creepy communists here. I like that too, you know.” His tasting tour includes two stops: One is Bucharest, where he and Zamir shake their heads at Ceausescu’s megalomaniac constructions and listen, bemused, to a local witness’s account of the revolutionary events that led to the dictator’s demise. The other one is rural Transylvania, where they shake their heads at local efforts to turn Dracula into a tourist theme and mock the Dacia, “Romania’s national car,” “a strangely unbalanced structure on tiny wheels.”

#3 — Top Gear
BBC 2’s most watched show, broadcast in over 100 countries, traveled to Romania in November of 2009 to try out the hosts’ choice of cars for the episode. Jeremy Clark and his two regular companions drove an Aston Martin DBS Volante, a Ferrari California and a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder down the Transfagarasan Highway, a road built by Nicolae Ceausescu. Their adventures in “Borat country,” as they called Romania, included a stop in Bucharest’s Revolutionary Square to marvel at Ceausescu’s enormous former residence, the House of the People, and in a Gypsy village, where they were successfully stormed by curious Roma children, made fun of the Dacia, and got stuck on a narrow bridge in an unpaved, one-lane road. “Coming here in a car that cost £168,000, is a bit like turning up in the Sudan in a suit made entirely out of food,” as Clarkson commented light-heartedly, and without a hint of self-criticism.

#4 — Whopper Virgins and Folgers Commercials
Perhaps the most widely circulating and thus most damaging instance of the “primitive Romania” brand are two commercials that first aired on December 8, 2008. In the first one, a wintry Victorian tableau of a poor village dwelling hidden among dark mountains, identified as “Romania,” comes to life when an American Aid worker receives a package containing a precious jar of Folgers coffee. The locals gather around him, staring in amazement as he prepares his coffee in a makeshift cheesecloth coffee filter, anticipating their lives to be brightened by Folgers. In the other ad, “Romanian” villagers, dressed in folk costumes, taste-test Burger King whoppers “for the first time.” As the mayor of Budesti, where the ad was filmed, explains, although he had refused to get involved in giving the producers permission for their “experiment,” they ignored him and proceeded to do a “casting” call for a “documentary” at a local restaurant, where they paid willing participants about $40 “just for tasting some food.” The portrayal of Romania as a forgotten land full of “Whopper virgins” is so blatant in these ads that it even inspired a Saturday Night Live spoof on January 10, 2009. However, SNL’s “the making of the ad” skit, based on the Whopper Virgins campaign’s own online docu-mercial teasers, turned out to be yet another parody of local Romanians so backward that they are unable to hold a cheeseburger properly, or try to run off with it “to feed their whole village.”

These examples identify Romania, more than any other postsocialist country, as a site of dark television and movie tourism, the last vestige of grit and shock on which Western media producers and audiences can draw to reinvent the horrors of the Cold War as commercial docu-kitsch, which, at the same time, is the authentic condition of a strange, primitive people descended from a vampire count. The arrogance of such representations is in disavowing their own roles in forcing locals to perform the pitiful primitive to attract international attention and revenue. As in the aftermath of Borat, Romanians’ outraged, and, in some cases, traumatized reactions to such representations rarely left Romania. The feelings of betrayal that the shows and ads caused or the state’s letters of complaint to the respective production companies hardly made international news. Clearly, despite the optimism around nation-branding as a practice and field of research, the neoliberal marketplace does not automatically open up opportunities for all states and peoples to rebrand themselves in a positive light and ignores the branding power embedded in seemingly trivial media representations.

Image Credits:

1. The Romanian Flag
2. Happy Times Borat
3. Anthony Bourdain
4. The Top Gear Crew

Please feel free to comment.

Tiger Woods let us down, too. After Letterman, Woods “turned out to be human after all,” according to one set of TV and blogosphere comments. One special twist in the self-identified “Cablinasian” golf star’s scandal is that he had extramarital affairs mostly with white women. This ostentatious crossing of the color line reignited suspicion about Woods’s racial identification, particularly among African-Americans already irked by his marriage to a blonde Swedish woman. Some of the commentary set him in opposition with President Barack Obama, whose racial and citizenship status has been offset by his marriage to a black woman.

Such recent controversies around multi-racial celebrities are reminders that the “post-racial” age is no more color-blind than Steven Colbert’s mock persona, despite so many television shows’ calls for us to get over race.1. In the face of neoliberal consumer capitalism’s flexible articulations of race and citizenship, the anxiety about President Obama’s and Tiger Woods’s conjoined racial and national hybridity, among those on the right and left alike, highlights the continuing importance of the intra-national color line to defining the American nation.

It would be worth tracking how the particular national intimacy marked out by race in America influences other national cultures, given the US’s dominance of national news and media entertainment worldwide. Here I only have space for a comparative snapshot of how the globalization of television celebrity has modified post-Wall European lines of race and citizenship. In the core European Union countries, the nationalization of race and racialization of nation tend to be aligned with historical imperial legacies, which include the post-war guest worker programs. For instance, racialized minority stars, while they tend to identify analogically with African-American celebrities, are likely to be Moroccan in the Netherlands, Turkish in Denmark and Germany, Pakistani or Indian in Britain, and Algerian in France.

However, the “New Europe,” the site of the recent eastward European Union expansion, has a scant history of contact with formerly colonized, non-white peoples. In the absence of the region’s direct participation in imperial ventures, the Roma, or Gypsies, have been considered the only ethnic minority against which nations have defined themselves as white. But during recent years the landscape has become too complex to sustain the myth of whiteness. The influences cannot be reduced to hip hop, basketball, Halle Berry and Will Smith. The postsocialist opening of national borders and the media to the flow of diverse images and people has exposed and undermined the region’s unspoken claim to an exception to racial diversity and, by implication, to racism. Newly introduced reality television formats hold up an especially merciless mirror to national viewers, which discloses the tenuous role assigned to the Roma to mark and safeguard the whiteness of the nation from the inside and the need for fortifying the nation’s racial boundaries.

The recent appearance of black African celebrities on national media, particularly reality television, serves precisely this purpose. Two such celebrities are Victor Yila, from the Republic of Congo and a long-time resident in Romania, an engineer, athlete and musician, and Lapite Oludayo, a Nigerian singer and media personality in Hungary. Both men function in the entertainment media to embody a racial category that is even lower than that of Gypsies, by virtue of their darker skin and foreign accents. On a variety of reality programs they perform, with apparent willingness, the stereotype of the primitive “native” familiar from imperial adventure tales.

On the Romanian show Satra (“Gypsy Life,” Kanal D, 2009-), most closely related to The Simple Life (Fox, 2003), a few Romanian celebrities go to live with a Gypsy family for a day. The point is to show off not so much the visitors’ inadequacy to live the hard Gypsy life as the Roma’s stereotypical backwardness. The celebrities stage various makeover fantasies for the Roma and inevitably want to save their women. This choreography is only interrupted by the appearance of Victor Yila. Unlike the white guests, he is expected to get up earlier and work harder than the Roma. As an African “native,” he is asked not only to make a fire but also dance around it “the way they do in the Congo.” The Roma, whose “blackness” suddenly pales next to Yila’s African skin, revert to the internalized white norms of conduct typically used to discriminate against them: they marvel at the exotic appearance of the “primitive” foreigner and wipe their cheeks in disgust when he kisses them.

Nigerian Lapita Oludayo, or by his popular name, Fekete (“Black”) Pako, plays a similar black buffoon on Hungarian television. In an episode of the local version of the British format I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, set in the Argentinian rainforest, he is made to introduce himself as the native son of the jungle, at home among animals. When it transpires that he is afraid of snakes, he is forced to feel around for hidden objects among slimy creatures in a dark cave. The more desperate his panic becomes the more wholeheartedly the two moderators laugh outside. According to an English-language Budapest weekly, Pako is the Hungarian nation’s “village idiot,” a “hapless comic superhero” who bounces back from every new humiliation. Most of these comic humiliations exploit his racial and linguistic foreignness at the same time. In one notorious faux interview, he was tricked into spouting fascist anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy statements and then banned from the two leading commercial channels, RTL Klub and TV2 as a result. In another, he is posed an intentionally incomprehensible question and made to feel dumb when trying to answer it in order to save face. Much like Yila, his African blackness is often juxtaposed with that of Roma celebrities. Instead of the latter’s indeterminate characteristics, however, these foreign black celebrities visualize a more firm and absolute racial and linguistic outside the nation in order to affirm homogeneity on the inside.

But why is it the celebrity culture fostered by entertainment television, particularly reality television, that provides the political arena for this renegotiation about the nation’s whiteness? Reality programs are generally dismissed as the trashiest form of culture by Eurocentric critical elites. But the refusal to take such programs seriously, the fact that they are not subjected to the usual self-censorship of state-controlled political and media venues, makes them all the more raw and unabashed outlets for various tensions. Shows about non-white celebrities constitute an unmistakable synergy between the objectionable racial quality of their protagonists and the objectionable cultural quality of reality TV. They visualize the intimate connection between these two converging kinds of illegitimacy within the national public sphere.

Ultimately, the core EU countries’ retreat behind the new walls of Fortress Europe from the flood of labor-seekers, migrants and exiles from the East confronted Easterners with their own effective second-class status and racialization — the realization that in the eyes of the West, they have never been better than, or even different from, the Roma. Does the voluntary, crude performance of various racisms indicate an awareness on the participants’ and audiences’ part that that these are orientalist and imperialist constructions, which are to be mocked? Or is this a performance of these deep-seated and widely-held beliefs to compensate for what are widely seen as EU and US-imposed standards of political correctness?

It is sure that, unlike in the West, in the absence of a history of colonization and imperialism to atone for, there is no collective historical awareness of racism here. There is no subsequent white guilt and a compulsion to provide – at least surrogate – charity for televisual victims of racism. It seems that white guilt might be a luxury in itself in a transnational network of neoliberal capital, where citizens of more powerful states are expected to pay a premium for their economic and military superiority by performing charity and white middle-class self-blame on reality TV.

Image Credits:

1. Victor Yila
2. Lapite Oludayo aka Fekete Pako
3. I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here

Please feel free to comment.

1. See, for instance, Lisa Nakamura’s, Laurie Beth Clark’s and Michael Peterson’s article on HBO’s vampire politics in issue 11.3

Summer is a time of outdoor fun. Kids are finally released from their ruthless school and after-school schedules, and are free to run, swim, bike and hike all day. For working parents, however, high temperatures also tend to bring high anxiety. In reality, particularly in climates where it is just too darn hot to be outside between 10 and 5, kids are released to the world of Nintendo, Nickelodeon and Disney, where every air-conditioned summer morning is Saturday morning.

At the end of yet another long summer spent in the company of Spongebob and friends, the latest explosive blockbuster superheroes, and ever-proliferating Pokémon, I’ve decided to wear my parental hat over my scholarly hat for this column and compare my children’s television use with what I knew as a child. When it comes to guiding children in the contemporary media environment, searching one’s memories often appears to be not only an inevitable exercise but often the most reliable one. I am acutely aware of the risk of comparing then and now, them and my memory of me. Therefore, I will stop short of drawing any general ethical conclusions. Instead, what follows is largely a shameless indulgence in nostalgia, whose main purpose is to incite curiosity towards an almost-extinct children’s media culture that has barely been known outside of socialist Eastern Europe.

Socialist television of the 1970s was generally boring, censored and propagandistic, apart from some ritual, much-anticipated national variety and talent shows and the occasional US or Western European imports (The Flintstones, Charlie’s Angels, Bugs Bunny) deemed safe enough for the health of socialist citizens. Until the mid-1980s, when satellite and cable began to undermine the monopoly of state broadcasters, most viewers’ choices came down to turning the TV on or off. Children’s programming, however, was largely exempt from overt ideologies, apart from a general educational purpose and aesthetic quality. The latter was guaranteed by the fact that much of regional children’s animation was produced by artists banned from “serious” adult filmmaking. Kids’ TV was all PBS, for all ages. Animated films and television series, many of which were free of dialogue, were also easy to circulated within the bloc and thus constituted a shared transnational cultural register for children growing up in different parts of the Soviet empire.

The array of beloved characters and series is dazzling. I have chosen one of the most popular and enduring shows to highlight some of the features of this lost children’s television era: Krtek. While ethnographic studies of children’s media habits in 1970s-80s communist countries are not available, I have yet to talk to an East European over five who is not familiar with Krtek, the little mole, created by Czech animator Zdenek Miler in 1956, with an uninterrupted production of episodes from 1963 to 2000. The protagonist won himself enormous popularity in most East European countries, as well as Germany, Austria, and China. “Krtek” yields over 800 hits on YouTube; and a simple Google search turns up fan sites in German, Japanese, and most East European languages. Thanks to the regional Minimax network, along with the ancillary marketing of stuffed animals, books, DVDs, posters, toys and T-shirts, one bumps into Krtek virtually everywhere in the region.

It is hard to imagine a successful animated character on American children’s screens as unspectacular as The Little Mole and his friends, Rabbit and Hedgehog. These cartoons are characteristically economical, in aesthetics and content alike. Zdenek wanted his Krtek tales to cross borders with ease. For this reason, after the first, narrated episode, in subsequent ones he eclipsed dialogue altogether, including only exclamations and other noises. The simple stop-motion, hand-drawn cartoons call for an old-fashioned spectatorial sensibility and evoke a slower, smaller, more contemplative world. The characters’ power does not come from smart talk, physical abilities, frenzied Pixar motion or simple “cuteness.” Rather, one roots for them because of their ability to survive despite the odds. Their little lives in the shadows of greater enemies, such as people and machines, are precarious. But they appreciate the smallest pleasures, taking disappointment with patience and good humor. They are not troubled by oversized ambitions, the perpetual promise of growing big or making it big. Unlike Disney or most other American cartoons, which usually single out a character as the center of identification and afford it the dominant point of view, Krtek is more of a narrative tool to deliver an allegorical message about the community.

In the first and probably most memorable episode, “Jak krtek ke kalhotkám přišel” (”How the Mole Got His Pants”) released in 1956, the Little Mole, setting the horizon of the socialist citizen’s wishes appropriately humble, yearns for overalls with big pockets. The entire forest comes to his aid, each animal lending useful skills that turn flax into fabric, which is then cut and sewn into an attractive pair of overalls. I will never forget how impressed and satisfied I felt to see Krtek parade around in his entirely home-produced clothes. The episode provides a characteristic and, in retrospect, ironic lesson in sustainability, given the zeal with which public opinion and, to some extent, policy in the United States has recently begun to urge a shift to sustainable means of production and consumption, imposing this newly-found wisdom on the newly “wasteful” Third World.

Other episodes are even more openly critical of Stalinist bureaucratic modernity and mass consumerism alike, prefiguring the current global worry about the ecological impact of mass consumerism. The episode Mole in the Dream evokes the dystopia of the loss of electricity. A man survives the winter in his snowed-in house only with the help of the unbreakable endurance and spirit of the Mole and his little friends, the real East Europeans.

Mole in the City foreshadows environmental disaster: It begins with an army of machines relentlessly leveling the entire forest to make room for a row of soulless, identical housing blocks. All is left is a tree stump, on which Mole, Rabbit and Hedgehog huddle together. The bureaucrats try to compensate for the animals’ loss by assigning them an inflatable forest in an office. The three friends happily settle even for this until they accidentally puncture it. Like the actual people of Eastern Europe, have to make the best of grotesquely inadequate living conditions.

The child-adult viewer of these fairy tales is expected to identify with the displaced and oppressed, small, underground animal’s point of view. Monsters – from bulldozers to bureaucrats — are represented as purely external, alien, imposed. This is different from the point of view constructed by most American post-preschool children’s programming, which actively invite identification with the powerful at the same time as they often evoke a sense of ecological horror and guilt over causing extinction – an ambivalent viewpoint inscribed into American children’s positions within the global economy.

I introduced this rumination as an innocent trip down memory lane. I realize now that it is also a memorial to the Little Mole. As such, it does imply an ethical call to remember the particular children’s culture from which he sprung, which – unlike communist health care – wasn’t so bad after all. While there is clearly no going back, it might even allow us to imagine the possibility of a children’s media economy that is not entirely consumerist and advertisement-driven.

Image Credits:
1. Krtek the Mole
2. Krtek the doll
3. Krtek the Mole
4. Krtek and his friends

Please feel free to comment.

The image above comes from an online ad for the “Guy-Substitute Pillow”. The ad promises that the product provides the closest approximation of an absent man’s arm around a single woman; and she does not even have to endure the snoring! It comes in various colors and fabrics and is easy to order online for a mere $15 or so. I first found the ad on the largest Hungarian fan site for Sex and the City. The HBO show has been at the center of discussions about popular television and (post)feminism, along with other recent quality dramas that revolve around strong, independent women, such as Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives or Gossip Girl. In fact, Sex and the City has been called “a key cultural paradigm through which discussions of femininity, singlehood and urban life are carried out.”1 The appearance of independent, often single women in movies and smart quality television dramas has been associated with (post)feminist political empowerment by advertisers, television producers, popular critics and even some academic feminists. Many argue, however, that such empowerment is tempered or undermined by the elitist consumer agency these programs promote. While assessments of postfeminist agency drawn from pop cultural consumption vary from radical skepticism2 through ambivalence (Negra) to affirmation,3 few would disagree that, at the very least, the shift begun by American and British movies and TV shows in the 1990s mix academic and popular strands of feminism. In other words, postfeminism is firmly grounded in and constituted through popular television dramas that perform positive work for young women, who can enjoy their mothers’ feminist achievements but no longer need to pit femininity and feminism against each other.4

Thanks to the global proliferation of American popular culture, particularly television programming, postfeminist ideas and representations now reach much larger populations than did earlier shows that inspired feminist mothers, from I Love Lucy through Maude to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In postsocialist Eastern and Southern European countries, the formal disappearance of censorship and the absence of economic and political resources with which to resist the European and global push to deregulate resulted in a flood of primarily US television imports in the past 20 years. Postfeminist ideas and images are being disseminated within local national cultures of a defensive patriarchal bent, which have long nurtured a great deal of hostility to feminism. In the Hungarian and, by extension, postsocialist, context, popular postfeminism, imported along with postfeminist television drama, is translated in ways filtered through the local nationalisms of emasculated, peripheral states. Metaphorically speaking, feminist empowerment is limited to a single woman’s financial ability to purchase the guy-substitute pillow when the real thing is not available. While the single woman has emerged in the region in the past two decades, she is hardly a celebrated model of female independence. Rather, she is defined by the absence of strong manly arms that the pillow makes almost sarcastically visible. She tends to be seen as an overworked victim of global capitalism, who has no time to build meaningful relationships with men, which would lead to a fulfilling life as a mother.

As a result, the female-centered storylines of Sex and the City and similar programs automatically reduce them to the position of chick shows, the equivalents of superficial female chatter and glossy women’s magazines, not worthy of serious critical consideration. This is so despite the fact that, while these programs are not carried by national broadcasters, they are very popular locally and possess all the emerging criteria for “quality television”: unique creator-visions, multi-layered storylines and characters, realism, and engaging plots that break taboos and address crucial social issues. Their only significant difference from quality programs that do warrant at least some serious discussion by local critics, such as The Sopranos, House and 24, is their lack of masculine pedigree, most evident in the relative marginality of husband, brother and father characters. As a result, postfeminist quality shows tend to be processed among embarrassed fans in online closets, isolated from discourses that concern the national public sphere.

Reconciling femininity and feminism on a postfeminist terrain is conditioned on a previous discourse of anti-feminine feminism, which was subsequently repudiated in the West as a problematic construct that limits women’s agency. In the East European absence of historical layers of feminism, traditional femininity becomes an excuse not to have feminism at all. It confirms the nationalistic status quo: an essentialist hierarchy between the sexes. In the US and other Western countries, academic feminists have had to acknowledge the fact that popular culture has become a powerful conveyor of (watered-down or even distorted) feminist ideas. However, without a trajectory of academic or activist feminism, East European women, for the most part, are stuck with watered-down, commercialized feminist ideas, which limit agency to good fashion sense. The campy, queer readings of these shows, which are common in English-language reflections, are absent even in the fan commentary, where the programs are re-channeled in a strictly heteronormative discourse.

This is why Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat, in an article that looks at the reception of Ally McBeal among Slovenian women, goes as far as claiming an affinity between postsocialism and postfeminism.5 A strictly consumerist femininity, deprived of feminism’s activist potential, is currently employed to re-legitimate a strict patriarchal nationalism, which is increasingly entangled in a neoliberal culture of consumerism. Feminine desires, encouraged by both consumerist and nationalistic discourses, block, rather than support, feminist desires. In Hungary, postfeminism, much like feminism, crops up in two different kinds of contexts: In the national print and electronic media, one encounters almost exclusively uninformed, distorted, and dismissive views. Postfeminism has been introduced in the mainstream press through the publications of a male critic, Miklós Csejk, who unproblematically calls himself a (post)feminist. His generalized and authoritative pronouncements, offered with an educational air, rely on scanty and questionable sources apparently derived from the French context. He identifies postfeminism precisely in the conservative fashion in which it has been taken up by the anti-feminist backlash in the US since the 1980s. His postfeminism hovers in the abstract, without any historical or geographical anchoring, as if it has by now taken care of all female and feminist concerns everywhere in the world.

The other public context in which postfeminism appears, besides the few new academic gender studies hubs, are self-identified feminist blogs and discussion spaces. Unlike Csejk, however, such discussions do not tend to reference popular culture, most likely out of an understandable fear on the part of the authors over not being taken seriously if they associate themselves with television and other feminized cultural forms. Instead, the discussions revolve around issues of policy, politics and, occasionally, theory. Unlike in Britain or the United States, postsocialist discussions of feminism are isolated from the fan venues formed around Sex and the City and similar programs. Feminists try to claim legitimate space by adopting the high-cultural stance and rational discourse of the national public sphere; whereas “regular” women-viewers’ thoughts and pleasures remain depoliticized and outside the public sphere.

It seems that the missing link between emerging postsocialist feminist groups, who are forced to play the boys’ game and distance themselves from popular representations, and decidedly non-feminist or anti-feminist viewers, whose identities are profoundly affected by the pleasures of postfeminist popular media, is the transcultural study of television. With Vidmar-Horvat, I want to suggest that postfeminism should be used less as a taxonomy of Western discourses around feminism than a global meeting point of cultural discourses around femininity. The growing global popularity and social importance of television provides an excellent opportunity to show that the traditional paternalistic treatment of media audiences and their tastes betrays a nationalistic insecurity. Tracking programs beyond the Anglo-American cultural sphere also makes it possible to broaden and re-activate the gendered roots of television scholarship on a transnational scale.

Image Credits:

1. Boyfriend Pillow
2. Sex and the City
3. Ally McBeal

Please feel free to comment.

1. Negra, Diane (2004) ‘”Quality postfeminism?”’ Genders 39, http://www.genders.org/g39/g39_negra.html
2. See Angela McRobbie, “Young women and consumer culture – An intervention.” Cultural Studies 22, no. 5 (2008): 531-550
3. See, for instance, Amanda Lotz, (2001) “Postfeminist television criticism: rehabilitating critical terms and identifying postfeminist attributes,” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 105-120.
4. Moseley, Rachel and Jacinda Read (2002) ‘”Having it Ally”: popular television (post)feminism,” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 231-249.
5. Vidmar-Horvat, Ksenija (2005) “The globalization of gender: Ally McBeal in post-socialist Slovenia,” European Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 239-255.

Roma Celebrity
When most of us hear the word, “Gypsy,” we imagine the fortune-teller, musician-dancer, pickpocket, and other stereotypes gathered from centuries of popular literature, movies and travel gossip. Real, contemporary Gypsies, or the Roma, tend to appear in two kinds of contexts, both of which are less than glamorous: as the poorest and most deprived European minority, the Roma are the subject of countless European Union, state and local policy regulations, as well as ethnographic research and documentary films. The majority of the Roma, most of whom live in the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe, have clearly been the losers of the post-Cold War transformations, caught in a vicious cycle of poor educational and job opportunities and violent social exclusion. Perpetual scapegoats for the region’s marginality within Europe and for its recurring crises of national sovereignty, the Roma have only been tolerated as musical entertainers for centuries. However, in the postsocialist era, entertainment has taken on increased cultural and political value. In the new, expanding and globalizing media environment, many young Roma entertainers have been well-positioned to become media stars.

The emergence of Roma stars raises questions that are familiar from debates about the politics of ethnic representation in the United States. First of all, how does the rise of Roma media stardom mediate between the poor, despised Roma minority and the prejudiced non-Roma national majority? A critical engagement with Roma media stardom is hindered by the fact that, in the post-Soviet region, the politics of representation is a fairly novel and imported concept, which is embedded in widespread anti-Americanism and a suspicion about political correctness. I offer a few brief test cases that foreground the ambivalent politics of nationalism and Roma media celebrity in the New Europe.

The Blacks of Europe
While this title has been claimed by the Irish (perhaps most memorably by the working-class soul band in Alan Parker’s 1991 film The Commitments), the recent proliferation of Roma hip-hop bands reveals a new wave of analogies between Roma and African-American and Afro-Caribbean identities. The infiltration of Eastern Europe by world music, particularly by MTV, immediately shored up Roma musical talent. In the most radical cases, the Roma ghetto, the very space of the urban ethnic underclass and Roma segregation, turned into the site of profitable entertainment. A term loaded with traumatic historical connotations, “ghetto” immediately evokes the Roma Holocaust, an often-neglected effect of Nazi persecution during World War II. The post-Wall establishment of Roma camps in Western Europe and instances of violent segregation in the East recently revived the concept.

At the same time, Budapest’s Roma ghetto, the notorious 8th district, turned into “the local Harlem” virtually overnight. Roma rap bands from the neighborhood, such as Fekete Vonat (“Black Train”), became popular in the late 1990s. They employed the hybrid sounds and languages of global music and turned the poor district into a metaphorical space of budding Roma identity politics. The 2004, self-described “animated ghetto film,” Nyócker, (The District, d. Aron Gauder), further eroticized Budapest’s Roma ghetto, this time on the international festival scene. The film includes a number of hit numbers by Roma musicians, one of whom, L.L. Junior, plays the lead character. Other success stories include Czech Roma bands Syndrom Snopp, led by the Roma rapper Cerny pes (“Black Dog”) and Gipsy.cz, led by rapper “Gipsy” (Radoslav Banga). The latter’s 2006 song, Romano Hip Hop, made it onto the World Music Charts’s European Top Ten and was widely distributed in Europe.

The local versions of Pop Idol have provided many Roma musicians with instant nationwide exposure. Roma singer Vlastimil Horvath won the 2005 season of SuperStar in the Czech Republic, in the same year as Caramel, a.k.a. Ferenc Molnár, won Megasztár in Hungary. While their ethnicity was at the center of public debates about whether the rise of Roma stars will elevate the status of the entire minority, the singers themselves have been eager to renounce the burden of representation. Their reluctance is understandable in light of the minefields that Roma entertainers have to negotiate, easily exploited as they are by both commercial media and state politicians for the economic and political capital they represent.

Embracing selected, “model” representatives of the minority has long been the state’s strategy. It has been revived in post-socialist states’ and their media’s management of Roma pop stars, often to demonstrate progressive ethnic policies within the European Union. For instance, Ibolya Oláh, who finished close second in the 2004 season of Megasztár, represented Hungarian culture in the European Parliament in Brussels, where she performed a patriotic song in 2005. Perhaps nowhere are the ambivalences about the politics of Gypsy stardom more evident than in Czech Television’s, the state broadcaster’s, choice of Romano Hip Hop to represent the Czech Republic in the 2009 Eurovision contest after the miserable failures of more traditional Czech musicians in earlier years. This has occurred at a time when the economic crisis has predictably prompted renewed anti-Roma violence in the country. Lead singer “Gipsy” himself has claimed he represents the Czech nation as much as the Roma around Europe, but the conflict between these two affiliations is evident. While he compares the national political potential of his Eurovision performance to the election of Barack Obama for president, he also hopes to mobilize the transnational Gypsy vote to make those “Nazis” back home “shut up.”1

Eurovision star Aziz

Reality Roma
Commercial television networks, which are more recent arrivals in the post-Soviet media scene, have also been eager to cash in on Roma star power, particularly in reality programming. The Roma regularly appear on exploitative talk shows as representatives of the poor, uneducated underclass. But as stars, they take on a larger role as representatives of the nation, rather than simply the minority. A most successful case in point is Bulgarian chalga (Bulgarian pop-folk) singer Azis, or Vasil Troyanov Boyanov, one of the most memorable contenders of Eurovision 2006. Azis is a gay Roma drag queen with a bleached beard and moustache, who often performs heterosexual roles on stage and in his music videos. He is a superstar with a trans-Balkan appeal, who is equally popular among gay and straight, Roma and non-Roma audiences, and whose career highlights have included running for Parliament as a representative of the Evroroma (Euroroma) party in 2005 and a well-publicized participation in the Bulgarian VIP Big Brother, alongside his husband.

The most recent development, celebrity docusoaps about Roma musicians, have earned a much more mixed reception. Vali Vijeile, or, by his original name, Valentin Rusu, is a popular Romanian manele (another regional pop-folk style) singer. His primetime docusoap, Aventurile familiei Vijelie (”The Adventures of the Vijelie Family” 2005- ), is produced by Prima TV, one of the first commercial channels in Romania. The Győzike show (2005- ) is aired by Hungary’s most successful commercial channel, RTL Klub, in primetime, and revolves around Roma pop singer Győző Gáspár and his family. Modeled after The Osbournes, both programs have been massive audience successes and universally ridiculed targets of criticism at the same time.2 From overtly racist rants to highbrow disdain, the emotions that have poured into public discussion in response to these shows reveal profound anxieties about what constitutes the national family and its allegorical extension, the postsocialist nation. The love-hate, or, rather, love-to-hate relationship that audiences express toward these shows indicates that Roma celebrity exposes the decline of long-held distinctions between high and popular culture, the national majority and the Roma, as well as national and global cultures in the New Europe. At the same time, the Roma remain suspended in political ambivalence on the shared turf between transnational media corporations and the nation-state, poised between empowerment and exploitation by both sides.

1. Gipsy.cz from Czech Republic
2. Gyozike and Family
3. Eurovision star Aziz
4. Popular folk singer and docusoap star, Vali Vijelie

Please feel free to comment.

1. A Roma Vision for Eurovision.” Transitions Online: The Arts. by TOL. May 12, 2009.
   http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/printf.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=321&NrSection=3&NrArticle=20565&ST1=ad&ST_T1=job&ST_AS1=1&ST2=body&ST_T2=letter&ST_AS2=1&ST3=text&ST_T3=aatol&ST_PS3=1&ST_AS3=1&ST_max=3.
2. In early May 2009, Győzike earned an audience share average rating of 50.2% among adults 18-49 years of age. http://www.est.hu/cikk/47650/szenzacio_gyozike_lekorozte_a_baratokat/ro409.