Browsing by Author "Martonfi, Anna"

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    Beasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Brexit-era BBC Drama
    (2021) Martonfi, Anna; Havas, Julia; Gergely, Gábor
    This article interrogates the figure of the Eastern European itinerant in contemporary prestige BBC drama to draw attention to the figure’s role in the mobilisation of ideas of nationhood and foreignness in Brexit-era Britain. Demonstrated through critical analyses of vampire horror Dracula (BBC1, 2020), crime thriller Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018-), and 1950s-set medical drama Call the Midwife (BBC1, 2012-), we argue that such programmes that putatively celebrate British multiculturalism and diversity configure the Eastern European foreigner as a threat to idea(l)s of Britishness. In spite of their generic diversity, these series each deploy this figure in strikingly similar imaginaries of contagion, parasitism, backwardness, deviance and savagery, a feature left unexamined by critical and popular reception. Such treatment embeds these portrayals in discourses of white nationalism governing the relationship between core EU countries and post-socialist EU member states (Imre 2016, 110). The article argues, following Hage (2000), that this white nationalism seeks to manage national belonging by articulating the limits and rules of the national community as implicitly racialized terms of culture and space, overwriting specificities of ethnic/national background. The racialised configuration of nation expressed through the Eastern European foreigner in the examined series is connected to two underlying aspects of the BBC drama’s institutional and ideological position in the current political moment of increasing state-sanctioned nationalisms and isolationist politics across Europe and elsewhere. First, while in the Netflix era the British television industry is enmeshed in a crisis narrative that sees the BBC, Europe’s oldest and most respected public service broadcaster, in competition for digital territory with the streaming giant, Netflix carries a range of BBC programmes on its non-UK platforms under its ‘Originals’ banner. Thus, Netflix manages these programmes’ promotion of ‘Britishness’ as global cultural diversity overseas (Jenner 2018). Second, a range of this programming aligns itself with the current surge of Western intersectional feminist discourses mobilised in Anglophone prestige television by foregrounding female protagonists and authorship, the tropes of the ‘complex female character’, the female antiheroine (Buonanno 2017) and gender-inverted leading roles, as well as themes associated with discourses of contemporary popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018) such as women’s bodily autonomy, resilience, multicultural female camaraderie and queer desire. The channelling of xenophobia against the Eastern European in racialised terms through this foregrounded intersectional gender politics then updates in important ways the longstanding invisibility of Eastern Europeanness as marginalised subject position, theorised by Imre as located “somewhere in between civilization and barbarism as the West’s immediate and intermediary other” (2014, 118). Through close readings of these series, the article addresses manifestations of this representational trend in prestigious and popular BBC commodities in the streaming era. It queries how ideas around nationhood and identity politics expressed in the programmes telegraph renewed British anxieties of Eastern European infiltration, manifested in the 2016 vote to leave the EU. Further, the article highlights how this nationalism paradoxically springs from the BBC’s public service remit in the globalised streaming age.
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    Bedrock Behind the Iron Curtain: Transcultural Shifts in the Hungarian Dubbed Version of The Flintstones (1960-66)
    (Society for Animation Studies, 2019-07-24) Havas, Julia; Martonfi, Anna
    US serial animation has had varying success on Hungarian television. Due to the form’s link to comedy and reliance on voice casting, its local appeal has largely depended on dubbing production’s transcultural integration of the two. The aim of this article is to map cultural shifts in the ways US animation has travelled to the Hungarian cultural context via dubbing, raising issues around authorship and cultural hierarchies. This transcultural focus takes a longitudinal approach, charting the historic development of US animation’s Hungarian dubbing through key case studies. It examines the foundational impact of the Hungarian dubbed version of The Flintstones (1960-1966), the ways this translation informed Hungarian animation’s cultural development and prestige, as well as its longstanding effect on dubbing practices of US animation through the case study of South Park (1997-). The analysis focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of translation, vocal performance, and contested notions of authorship that these translations and performances inform. Crucially, the article examines the transcultural aspects of US animated programmes’ travel to the Hungarian context by outlining the historical backdrop of socialist and post-socialist Hungary’s dubbing production practices, including political restrictions and censorship. It argues that examining these are necessary for understanding US animation’s sociocultural role in the country; which in turn informs wider discourses around transnational media texts’ reception, the translator’s discursive role as auteur, and vocal performance’s significance for the cultural mediation of transcultural animated texts.