Anikó Imre

Gender and quality television

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 aesthetic and feminisms fundamental contribution to television studies. When these series travel outside the Anglo-American context of television studies, however, their gendered dimension is rearticulated and incorporated in local cultures in often radically different ways. After comparing definitions of televisual quality in the United States and (Western) Europe, the argument tracks the reception of the Fox series House M.D. and HBOs Sex in the City in postsocialist Eastern European cultures. While several American “quality” shows have recently broken through the local high cultural disdain for television by virtue of their cinematic aesthetic and unprecedented popularity, Houses masculine aesthetic and ideological appeal has mobilized localization strategies on a national scale. Conversely, Sex in the City, similar to other postfeminist dramas, tends to be processed in fan communities isolated from both the national public sphere and local feminist discussions. Its limited, consumerist incorporation problematizes western definitions of postfeminist media culture, which take for granted the achievements of feminism and a serious attention to popular culture.

Transnational Feminism in Film and Media

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines current cinematic and media landscapes from the perspective of transnational feminist practices and methodologies. Focusing on film, media art, and video essays, the contributors chart innovative strategies for exploring contemporary visual cultures.

Guest editors’ introduction: Transcultural mediations and transnational politics of difference

At a conference on “Feminisms and Intersectionalities,” held in May 2009 at the University of California at Riverside, Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi gave an impassioned talk that caused quite a stir in the audience. An internationally known novelist, essayist, and activist, imprisoned for years by her own government and forced into exile at different moments in her life, Saadawi addressed the topic “Undoing Academia: Creativity, Dissidence, and Feminism.” “Undo what academia does to you,” she challenged. “The language of academia is a colonial language . . . the educational system is a police system.” The intellectual habits of academia kill a critical mind, she proclaimed, asserting that there is no creativity without dissidence. Her essay “Dissidence and Creativity” argues in a similar FIGURE 1 EE Clicks (Crosscultural Encounters Series, Wrocław, Poland, 2008; Courtesy of Kamil Turowski).

Love to Hate National Celebrity and Racial Intimacy on Reality TV in the New Europe

This essay examines the love–hate relationship—overt hatred and secret love—that surrounds reality shows about Roma and other racialized celebrities in postsocialist New European nations. Taking the case study of the wildly popular yet universally despised Hungarian Gyõzike show and its national reception, it argues that the aversion to the cultural quality represented by reality TV and the aversion to the ethnoracial quality represented by the Roma and other minorities are thoroughly intertwined. Reality television has disclosed the unspoken role assigned to racial minorities to mark the whiteness of East European nations, a crucial but hardly discussed aspect of belonging to Europe. This study also demonstrates that understanding the role played by reality TV under the particular conditions of postsocialist nationalisms and media globalization requires expanding the focus of reality TV scholarship on post-welfare neoliberalism.

The Witty Seven: Late Socialist-Capitalist Satire in Hungary

This article adopts the comparative framework proposed by anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Alexander Yurchak (2010), who establish a “family resemblance” between the aesthetics and ideological contexts of contemporary Western political satire and a late socialist Russian and Eastern European mode of irony defined by overidentification with its satirized object or idea. I discuss the long-running Hungarian postsocialist satirical talk show Heti Hetes as a linchpin between late socialist and late capitalist forms of political satire. The program bears the characteristics and legacies of both and reveals unexpected similarities between public discourses otherwise radically separated into two different political systems during the Cold War. Heti Hetes provides the ground for a multilevel analysis, which accounts for the national specificities of a long legacy of political cabaret as well as the shared regional circumstances of late socialism. The broadest goal of the article is to draw up the global historical trajectory of contemporary Western television satire.

Roma Music and Transnational Homelessness

In his article on the relationship between cultural identity and diaspora, Stuart Hall compared the formation of Caribbean identities to the work of Derrida’s différance in language: Being of a certain essence is always becoming , just as, in the deconstructionist model, absolute difference is always a sliding difference, on its way to new meanings without completely erasing traces of other meanings. By the same logic, imposing a single imaginary coherence on an area as fraught with dispersal and fragmentation as the Caribbean would be impossible. Rather than shared authentic origins, it is precisely the layers of colonial ruptures and discontinuities that constitute Caribbean identities. Hall turns to the notion of play to evoke the instability and permanent unsettlement that characterises diasporic cultural identities. Besides the full palette of skin hues one encounters in the Caribbean, he argues, the complexity of this cultural play can be most powerfully experienced in Caribbean music. 1

Why Should We Study Socialist Commercials

This article looks at televisions 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.

Introduction: Popular Television in Central and Eastern Europe

T special issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television is, as far as we know, the first venue dedicated exclusively to research on popular television in Central and Eastern Europe. Assuming this is the case, we nevertheless trust that it will not be the last: A field of scholarship ences and were struck by the diversity and quality of emerging research on popular television in the region, which contrasted sharply with the comparative marginalization of the scholarship at both conferences. At the Beyond East and West conference, the focus on media systems, journalism, regulatory pracvision as an object of study in Central and Eastern Europe. Asking why two specialty conferences located in Europe—one actually in Central Europe, the other actually focused on popular television—failed to provide a proper venue can reveal several interconnected reasons why Central and Eastern European television has not yet entered fully into academic discourse. One reason behind the lack of proper venues for studying popular television in the region is the lasting ideological and disciplinary legacy of the Cold War. On the Western side of the defunct Iron Curtain, a bipolar paradigm developed in media studies that focused on how totalitarian regimes controlled propaganda-generating mass media such as television, while opposition was imagined as emanating only from dissident intellectuals, typically fiction writers and filmmakers. Television studies, which carved its disciplinary space out of mass communications in the West in the 1970s and 1980s, established its identity through the infusion of cultural studies theory, in particular a focus on the contradictory nature of popular texts under capitalism and attention to the pleasures of viewing. It worked within frameworks that were fairly specific to Copyright

Global Entertainment and the European ‘Roma Problem’

A recent issue of the Roma Rights Quarterly dedicated itself to the theme of Fortress Europe, which Claude Cahn in his editorial introduction names ‘the most visible, systemic evil in Europe today’.1 He recalls the very first issue of the journal entitled ‘Divide and Deport’, in September 1996, which examined the restrictive laws and policies aimed at or resulting in the exclusion of Roma and other ‘non-citizens’ from Austria and Germany. He identifies Central and Eastern Europe as the site of ongoing trouble, ill-prepared for the obligations to integrate EU rules and standards in the absence of laws to protect immigrants and refugees. ‘In addition,’ he continues:

The Imperial Legacies of Television within Europe

The article argues for creating a mutually beneficial connection between postcolonial and television studies in order to understand how imperial legacies have shaped contemporary television regions. What it contributes to this work, more specifically, is the beginnings of a postcolonial account of intra-European broadcast regions. As both the original center of colonialism and the site of recent global economic, social and cultural crises, Europe is a major reference point in such attempts to re-historicize “empire” in order to understand industrial and ideological configurations within present-day media regions. I zoom in on three examples to highlight the imperial layers that have informed television in Europe: industrial collaborations between East and West, the imperial vestiges of 1960s to 1970s historical adventure series, and the imperial connections that tie together forms of TV comedy across Europe. The three examples demonstrate an opportunity to bypass the obligatory nation-state framework and begin to write the region’s history of television in a postcolonial, regional, and European perspective, outlining the imperial legacies of aesthetic, infrastructural and economic factors that underscore all cultural industries in the region.