Remapping Anxieties: Transnational Flows in Recent Media, Film, and Art

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Too often, media analysis of Eastern Europe occurs within a national 
framework, leaving the influence of transnational flows within and
 beyond the region under-explored. This roundtable examines how
 cross-border cultural exchanges post-89 variously constitute, reflect,
 and counteract broader post-socialist economic, socio-political and
 cultural anxieties. We discuss media artefacts of the last decade
produced in Hungary, former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania to critically reflect on the rise of far-right and neoliberal ideologies 
in the region, while situating these shifts within a larger global 
context. Rather than thinking through our examples as isolated 
phenomena of the present-day, we place them within long-standing 
tropes externally and internally applied to the region, including 
narratives that imagine Eastern Europe as Europe's internal Other, and 
as a bulwark of white, Christian civilisation. We also explore 
contemporary media objects that reflect on state-socialist expressions 
of solidarity towards the Global South to ask how global solidarities 
might be reinvigorated today. Our discussion looks at a wide range of audio-visual materials, including fiction films, mainstream media sources, and contemporary exhibition installations to ask how contemporary media and its circulation specifically enacts or subverts Eastern Europe's liminality in an increasingly interconnected global environment. A roundtable engaging media's textual elements as well as the broader contexts that
 inform them will engender a productive conversation with regards to
 post-communist audiovisual landscapes that negotiate the region’s
 transnational identities and perpetual status of in-betweenness.

Sub Unit

• Cinema/Television/Electronic Media

Chair

• Maria Zalewska, U of Southern California

Roundtable Members

• Masha Shpolberg, U of North Carolina--Wilmington

• Sonja Simonyi, Independent Scholar

• Eszter Zimanyi, U of Southern California

Session Manager

• Dylan Mohr, U of Minnesota