Illiberal white fantasies and Netflix’s The Witcher

ABSTRACT

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 self-definitions 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Poland
• Hungary
• whiteness
• European Union
• Netflix

Acknowledgements

I thank Sylwia Szostak for generously sharing her research on The Witcher with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).