2021 | 20 | Race and European TV Histories
This special issue on race and European television will begin the work of documenting and understanding the many ways in which television has both perpetuated and critically interrogated racialized regimes in Europe and in European countries’ ongoing relationships to their postcolonial geopolitical spheres. We have a dual goal for this issue: to break the silence and begin to describe, both retroactively and with a look to the future, television’s specific roles in visualizing, naturalizing, subverting and silencing race in Europe; and to account for the enduring reluctance to do this work in the first place.
Recent Submissions
- ArticleAn Ode to Black British Girls: Black British Feminism, Black Girl Surrealism, and Michaela Coel’s Chewing GumHope, Jeanelle Kevina (2021)This article delves into Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, examining how the cultural text builds upon Black feminist media discourse, and intimately grapples with the nuances of Black women’s sexuality while explicitly challenging misogynoir. This work illustrates how Coel is helping develop a Black British cultural aesthetic that centers Black women’s liberation, specifically from an African immigrant perspective, by using satire, all the beauty, pain, and struggles that come with #blackgirlmagic, eccentric adornments, and ‘awkward’ ostentatious characters that at times play into racist images and tropes of Black womanhood to expose the absurdity of life in an anti-Black, sexist, and xenophobic society. In sum, this article understands Coel’s work in Chewing Gum to be Black girl surrealism – the intersection of Afro-surrealism, British dark comedy, and Black feminism.
- ArticleBeasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Brexit-era BBC DramaHavas, Júlia; Mártonfi, Anna; Gergely, Gábor (2021)This article interrogates the figure of the Eastern European itinerant in contemporary prestige BBC drama to highlight the figure’s role in mobilising ideas of nationhood and foreignness in Brexit-era Britain. Our critical analyses of Dracula (BBC1, 2020), Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018-), and Call the Midwife (BBC1, 2012-) show that programming that putatively celebrates British multiculturalism and diversity configures the Eastern European foreigner as a threat to idea(l)s of Britishness, by deploying this figure in strikingly similar imaginaries of contagion, deviance, and savagery. Such treatment embeds these portrayals in discourses of white nationalism that seek to manage national belonging by articulating the limits and rules of the national community as implicitly racialized terms of culture and space.
- ArticleClaude Lanzmann’s The Four Sisters (2017) on TelevisionVice, Sue (2021)This article analyses Claude Lanzmann’s final work, The Four Sisters (2017), in the context of its being edited from the outtakes of Shoah (1985) for broadcast on the Arte television channel. It argues that the distinctive features of the film, including its form as a quartet of self-contained interviews, absence of location footage and reliance on certain kinds of shot construction and mise-en-scene, arise from this televisual production context, as well as seeming to mark an ambivalent effort on the director’s part to redress his earlier work’s focus on male testifiers.
- ArticleEditorial: Race and TV in Europe. An Overdue ConversationDasgupta, Sudeep; Imre, Anikó (2021)This special issue on race and European television will begin the work of documenting and understanding the many ways in which television has both perpetuated and critically interrogated racialized regimes in Europe and in European countries’ ongoing relationships to their postcolonial geopolitical spheres. We have a dual goal for this issue: to break the silence and begin to describe, both retroactively and with a look to the future, television’s specific roles in visualizing, naturalizing, subverting and silencing race in Europe; and to account for the enduring reluctance to do this work in the first place.
- ArticleFarmer Wants a (Swedish) Wife: White Mobilities in the Reality Romance Show Bonde Söker Fru – Jorden RuntAitaki, Georgia; Carlsson, Nina (2021)In this article we discuss discourses of white mobility in reality television, a genre whose problematic post-racial and neoliberal discourses have long been exposed. Moving beyond the widely researched Anglophone media landscapes, we interrogate the discursive construction of white mobilities in the Swedish romance reality show Bonde Söker Fru – Jorden Runt (TV4, 2019-2020) [Farmer Seeks Wife – Around the World] where Swedish North-to-South migrants working as farmers abroad seek a partner from Sweden through the assistance of reality TV. By focusing on the discursive and visual strategies through which the show perpetuates racial hierarchies, we discuss the colonial imaginaries, the absence of border policies (such as residency, employment, or integration), and the significance of individual migratory preferences in the mobility discourses. We identify three forms of white mobility – the tourist, the adventurer, and the philanthropist – and show that migration is depicted as something reversible, an adventure, and a possibility for self-development, rather than a life-long decision with high stakes.
- ArticleRoma, Race and Socially Engaged Television on the Fringes of EuropeMarinos, Martin Yoanis (2021)This article contributes to the work of scholars of Eastern Europe who insist on the relevance of race and racism to the region. The text analyzes a contemporary Bulgarian documentary TV series, called Nichia Zemia (No Man’s Land) and its representation of Roma minorities. The study traces the connections between rising inequalities, poverty, and demographic change that accompany post-socialist neoliberalism and the portrayals of Roma as an external Other, criminals and a demographic threat. The text shows the limits of the concept of ethnicity and highlights the need for a systematic analysis of the role media play in the proliferation of racism in this part of the world.
- ArticleTelling Holocaust Jokes on German Public Television: The German-Israeli Comedian Shahak Shapira and His Satirical Show on Jews, Antisemites and the RestLanger, Armin (2021)Since 2015, Israeli-born German artist Shahak Shapira has initiated several satirical campaigns targeting antisemitism and racism in Germany and the country’s relation to the Holocaust. These interventions set Shapira’s career in motion, and in 2019 he landed a slot on the ZDF public broadcasting channel for the talk show Shapira Shapira. The show mocked antisemitism and far-right movements in Germany and reminded the viewers of the country’s history with Jews. His jokes about concentration camps and their contemporary perceptions proved to be especially effective. This article shows how Shahak Shapira and his show challenged the official narratives about Jews, antisemitism and the Holocaust. It argues that Shapira’s jokes might empower Jews and foster Holocaust awareness among the general public in Germany.
- ArticleThe Emergence and Persistence of Racialised Stereotypes on Dutch Television: Tracing the History of Representation of Muslim Immigrants along the Archival GrainMeuzelaar, Andrea (2021)Today, stereotypical and racialised imaginations of Muslims are pervasive on Dutch television. This article traces the history of Dutch television coverage of Muslim immigrants through the lens of the archive of Sound and Vision. It demonstrates that during their symbolic transformation from ‘guest workers’ to ‘ethnic minorities’ to ‘allochtonen’ and ‘Muslims’, television’s visual repertoire of Muslim immigrants has become increasingly racially inscribed. Finally, it argues that the archive of Sound and Vision has played a performative role in the emergence and persistence of racialised stock stereotypes of Muslim immigrants.
- ArticleYour Race Sounds Familiar?: Blackface, Cross-Racial/Cross-Gender Drag and the Your Face Sounds Familiar Franchise (2013–) on Post-Yugoslav TelevisionBaker, Catherine (2021)Your Face Sounds Familiar, a celebrity talent television format developed by the Dutch production company Endemol and first broadcast in Spain in 2011, has entertained audiences in more than forty countries with the sight of well-known professional musicians impersonating foreign and domestic stars through cross-gender drag and, on many national editions, cross-racial drag, with results that would widely be regarded as offensive blackface where this has already been extensively challenged as racist in public. In central/south-east Europe, however, blackface is sometimes justified by arguing that it cannot be a racist practice because these countries have not had the UK and USA’s history of colonialism and racial oppression. Through a study of the Croatian edition Tvoje lice zvuči poznato (2014–), where until 2020 blackface had rarely been publicly challenged, this paper explores how far a critical race studies lens towards blackface can also be applied there.