What female pop-folk celebrity in south-east Europe tells postsocialist feminist media studies about global formations of race

ABSTRACT

Feminist media studies of postsocialism are well practised at explaining how ideologies of gender and nation reinforce each other amid neoliberal capitalism on Europe’s semi-periphery. They extend this, by critiquing media marginalization of Roma, into addressing regional formations of race. Yet they rarely go on to contextualize the region’s place within “race” as a global structure of feeling, or how transnational processes of “race in translation” operate in postsocialism—as necessary as this would be to fulfil ever-more-frequent calls to combine postsocialist and post-colonial analytical lenses. Vestiges of racial exceptionalism thus still often characterize postsocialist studies despite Anikó Imre’s intervention against them more than a decade ago. This paper traces how south-east European pop-folk music’s politics of representation, “modernity” and “Balkanness” interact with aesthetics of ethnic/racial ambiguity in Western female celebrity to translate globalized, racialized tropes of exoticism into postsocialist national media cultures. By explaining how pop-folk female celebrity translates the transnational racialized aesthetics of so-called “ethnic simultaneity” into postsocialist glamour, the paper puts Imre’s intervention against racial exceptionalism into practice, expanding postsocialist feminist media studies’ conceptual tools for understanding the regional politics of ethnicity into engagement with the global politics of race.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity
• pop-folk music
• postsocialism
• race
• south-east Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Contemporary R&B,” not older “rhythm and blues.”

2. Pop-folk differs from more deliberately reconstructive neo-traditional music. Marketed as “etno”/“world music,” this targets audiences identifying themselves as “cosmopolitan,” “discerning” and “cultured” in class and taste terms (Ivan Čolović 2006).

3. Fewer studies cover post-Yugoslav pop-folk masculinities, but see Marko Dumančić and Krešimir Krolo (2017).

4. Though see Tomislav Z. Longinović (2011).

5. Serbian cultural critic Irena Šentevska (2014, 430), for instance, describes turbo-folk’s thematics, situations and female characters as symbolizing “the thirdworldization of postsocialist Eastern Europe, its reality of destruction through development.”

6. These include Islamophobic instrumentalizations of LGBT rights, and public harassment of anti-racists opposing Dutch blackface carnival traditions.

7. Studies of post-colonial Nordic whiteness provide excellent illustrations, bridging former colonial powers and nations that were subject to them: Ylva Habel (2005, 136), for instance, finds Swedish audiences shared “a common European fascination with blackness” in their reception of Josephine Baker.

8. See also studies of Russian, Soviet and East German encounters with Africa (e.g., Maxim Matusevich 2007; Quinn Slobodian 2015).

9. Male and female singers representing Mediterranean and Caucasus nations at Eurovision often perform this glamour by mediating essentialised Latinity. Most recently, Eleni Foureira (a Greek singer of Albanian descent who has taken a Greek first name and Portuguese spelling of her surname) was widely compared to Beyoncé while representing Cyprus at Eurovision 2018 with “Fuego” (Nieves Mira 2018).

10. One critique of social-media posts by three Kardashian sisters, for instance, is titled “9 times the Kardashians stole their looks from Black women” (Evette Dionne 2017).

11. UNESCO-style race-blind discourses of world cultural heritage, however, would argue that cultural fusions have always inspired creativity and that musicians have the right to borrow freely across cultural boundaries.

12. See Catherine Baker (2018, 40–2).

13. “Minea kao MC Hammer: Can’t touch this,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEUDQ6Q1D0A (November 26 2015, accessed August 11 2017).

14. The image produces an unfortunate retrospective resemblance to Rachel Doležal, the white woman who controversially claimed “transracial” identity after passing for years as African-American (Ann Phoenix 2017). Doležal’s surname is Czech, but also exists in the post-Yugoslav region; its most famous bearer is Sanja Doležal, the (unrelated) front-woman of the 1980s Croatian pop band Novi fosili.

15. Translations from Albanian courtesy of Isabel Ströhle.

16. Socialist Yugoslavia recognized South Slavs as constituent peoples (“narodi”), but Albanians (and other groups with external kin-states) only as “nationalities” (“narodnosti”), and Kosovo was not its own republic. Milošević’s 1989 revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy stripped Albanians of civil rights. Albanians are an ethnic majority within Kosovo (which came under UN administration after the 1998–9 Kosovo War and unilaterally declared independence in 2008), but their experiences as an ethnic minority within Yugoslavia were painful.

17. As a “black girl” her hair is frizzy and she is entering a club; as a “white girl” her hair is in a straight bob and she is wearing a white blouse; the “Latinas” sequence first places her in a flamenco-like red dress, then among a Shakira-like group of hip-swinging dancers.

18. Ora was born in Priština and her family settled in London in 1991; in 2008 she signed to Jay-Z’s label, Roc Nation. She often visits Kosovo, represents it as a honorary ambassador, and filmed a music video (“Shine Ya Light”) there in 2012. Lipa was born in London in 1995 a few years after her parents moved there from Kosovo, and spent her adolescence between Kosovo and Britain. Rexha was born in a Macedonian Albanian family in Brooklyn in 1989.

19. I do not seek to question the article’s broader arguments by pointing out this slip. Rather, I suggest its critique and others like it represent a social fact in contemporary transnational popular music that female celebrities operating within global, not regional, frameworks of stardom must negotiate.

20. See also Katharina Wiedlack (2018, 7–8).

21. See, however, Adriana Helbig’s discussion of the Afro-Ukrainian singer Gaitana (Helbig 2014, 92–3).

22. E.g., Strong (2017) writes that in Kosovo “[m]en would often follow [her] and scream the names of random black female celebrities.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Baker

Catherine Baker is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University of Hull, and specializes in the transnational politics of post-Cold-War media. Her publications include Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (2010), The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (2015) and Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (2018), plus articles in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Slavic Review, European Journal of International Relations and elsewhere. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]