Myria Georgiou

Diasporic Media Across Europe: Multicultural Societies and the Universalism–Particularism Continuum

Europe is a cultural space of meeting, mixing and clashing; a space of sharing (and not sharing) economic, cultural and symbolic resources. Dominant ideologies of Europeanism project an image of Europe as a common and distinct cultural Home, a Home that excludes and (re-)creates Otherness when it does not fit a model of universalism and appears as competing particularism. Cultural diversity has always characterised Europe, but growing potentials for mobility and communication have led to the emergence and intensification of diverse cultural experiences and formations. In this context, the growing numbers and kinds of diasporic media have significant implications for imagining multicultural Europe and for participating (or not) in European societies and transnational communities. What is argued here is that diasporic media cultures do not emerge as projects that oppose the universalistic projects of Europe and of global communication, but that they gain from ideologies of globalisation and democratic participation as much as they gain and depend on ideologies of identity and particularism. Drawing from a cross-European mapping and three specific case studies, I try to explain why diasporic media cultures challenge both the limits of European universalism and of diasporic particularism.

Editorial Introduction: Media and Minorities in Multicultural Europe

This issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies focuses on the role of the media in an increasingly multicultural Europe. It investigates the significance of a diversity of media through an analysis of a diversity of cultures and cultural practices. It links often-small-scale specific empirical studies of particular media or minorities with big questions that go to the heart of current intellectual debates on the present and future character of fluid societies and conflicting identities. In so doing it takes media seriously. Without presuming their centrality, contributors nevertheless take as their starting-point the reasonableness of inquiring into the ways in which engagement with media—with print, broadcast, internet media—may be seen as key resources in the struggles for visibility, presence, community, influence and symbolic power which many, if not all, minority groups seek. This introductory paper identifies key questions and issues for debate, and presents an integrated summary of the papers that follow.

Crossing the Boundaries of the Ethnic Home Media Consumption and Ethnic Identity Construction in the Public Space: The Case of the Cypriot Community Centre in North London

The focus of this article is on media consumption, as it relates to ethnic identity construction. In an attempt to surpass the domination of the domestic as the singular point of reference and research in media studies, the author turns to the public. On one hand, this choice relates to the conceptualization of media consumption as a cultural process exceeding narrowly perceived media use and being implicated in processes of identity and community construction. On the other, it is an attempt to investigate how ethnic identities, initially constructed in the domestic, are challenged and reaffirmed in the public, in processes of constructing group identities and community belongings. These questions are addressed and studied ethnographically in a case study of the Cypriot Community Centre in north London. For the local Greek Cypriot community, this centre is one of the most important ethnic points of reference - both as a real place and as a symbol of a visible and thriving community. The Cypriot Community Centre is an interesting case study for studying ethnicity being reconfirmed, but also redefined in the coexistence of Greek Cypriots with Turkish Cypriots; it is a space for studying ethnic media consumption becoming a public and a communal experience.

Transnational crossroads for media and diaspora: three challenges for research

The extension of diasporic life across cultural and political spaces has challenged a number of key conceptual and methodological trends in social sciences. The diversification of cultural and political affairs within and across countries, next to the vast growth of more varied media production and consumption, have significantly altered the roles and meanings of the nation, citizenship and media culture. Consequently, the study of diaspora, culture and the media broke off the boundaries of a particular sub-field, attracting attention among media and communications scholars, sociologists of race, ethnicity and migration, historians and international relations’ experts. When in the spring of 2006 Latinos took over the streets of American cities after mobilising action around community centres, minority media and blog calls for participation in a movement for recognition and citizenship, many American politicians and social scientists were taken by surprise. Before that, a much more sudden, widespread, and on-going interest in diaspora emerged in the post-9/11 political atmosphere of tension, conflict and blaming. Events such as the London 7/7 bombings and the revelation of a plot for attacks on a number of flights in the UK in summer 2006 gave a further push to public and academic debates about diversity and migration. In just a few years, diaspora has become a keyword used widely by academics, politicians and the media. Diasporic mobilisation and ability to network with consequences for representation and political action are now more than an affair for the actors directly involved in them.

Seeking ontological security beyond the nation: the role of transnational television

This article examines the role of transnational television in supporting transnational subjects’ ontological security in a world of information, risk, interconnected spaces but fragmented social relations. The discussion draws from Silverstone’s and Giddens’s work on ontological security and modernity. It revisits Silverstone’s analysis of television as a core system for managing modern subjects’ insecurities and relocates this thesis in a transnational context. Enabling symbolic as well as physical co-presence, the space around television becomes a contradictory, yet important, frame for managing everyday anxieties shared by many migrants and diasporic subjects. This is particularly the case for people torn by anxieties associated with separation, political instability in their region of origin, and the precariousness of migrant life. With reference to empirical research with Arab audiences across Europe, the article shows that television sustains its central role, even when new media make significant advances.

Watching soap opera in the diaspora: cultural proximity or critical proximity?

Abstract This paper focused on an area of transnational Arabic television, which has attracted little scholarly attention: soap operas and their consumption among women in the Arab diaspora. Focus groups with Arab audiences in London revealed the significant role that soap operas play in sustaining a gendered critical and reflexive proximity to the Arab world. The paper shows that soap opera viewing provides female audiences in the diaspora with opportunities to reflect on their own gender identities as distant from hegemonic discourses of gender in their region of origin but as proximate to a moral set of values they associate with this same region. This was especially, but not exclusively, the case with young women born in the diaspora.

“In the End, Germany will Always Resort to Hot Pants”: Watching Europe Singing, Constructing the Stereotype

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual popular music event that attracts millions of people who consume it with enthusiasm, irony, humor, but also sometimes with anger. The contest has been increasingly dressed with numerous stereotypes about the nation, Europe, and cultural difference. This paper looks at two different groups of ESC audiences in the UK and analyzes their engagement with the event and the stereotypes around it. The first audience group consists of participants in the BBC Online Forum debates and the second group consists of committed Eurovision audience members participating in focus group discussions. Findings show that the stereotype becomes a powerful, political, yet ambivalent, tool in making sense of cultural difference.

Introduction: gender, migration and the media

Abstract Mediated representations of gender, ethnicity and migration play an increasingly important role in the way these categories are understood in the public sphere and the private realm. As media often intervene in processes of individual and institutional communication, they provide frameworks for the production and consumption of representations of these categories. Thus media – in their production, representations and consumption – need to be analysed, not only as reflections as pre-existing socio-political realities, but also as constitutive elements in the production of meanings of the self and the Other. This special issue includes a number of articles that examine the articulations of gendered ethnic identities and of gendered citizenship as these are shaped in media production, media representations and media consumption.

Between strategic nostalgia and banal nomadism: Explorations of transnational subjectivity among Arab audiences

This article discusses a bipolar and highly politicized set of positions adopted by Arab speakers in Europe, as they attempt to define the meanings and limits of their subjectivity, especially through their media consumption. The article draws from focus group research in three European capital cities: London, Madrid and Nicosia. Findings show that media consumption among Arabic-speaking audiences takes a political twist and contributes to blurring the boundaries between citizenship and identity. In trying to find a place between different cultural spaces and also between (or beyond) conflicting political spheres, participants adopt a number of strategic positions. This article focuses on two of the most often recurring ones, referred to as strategic nostalgia and banal nomadism. I argue that these positions represent discursive versions of a transnational strategy to manage presence and visibility within the tense and contradictory ideological environments they occupy.

Introduction: Exploration of Diaspora in the Context of Media Culture

This book is an attempt to understand recent changes in the grammars of diasporic politics and cultures, including the media. At its heart is the feeling that contemporary diasporas present us with profound transformation, with a shift from the traditional political formations and identities characterizing diasporic communities, to the ways we learn how to engage with the new ‘Other’, generating new grammars of experience and subjectivity. At stake are not only relationships between the transnational lives of those diasporic subjects, individual and collective, and their new ‘home’ or a shift in their access and uses of new technologies and media, but ways of being in a world dominated by contradictory and chaotic processes of globalization. The challenges those shifts pose to us compel us to rethink and re-imagine not only what we understand by contemporary diasporas but also what we understand by the role of culture and media in the experience of transnational diasporic lives. In the process, diasporas open new ways of thinking about nationalism, transnationalism, human mobility, urban communication, ethnicity, gender, identity, representation, multiculturalism, politics, and media.