‘Eastern European’ – a Changing Label/Term in a Changing Context?*
Q and A Dialogue of the Members of the Contact Zones Research Group (download pdf)
Teri Szűcs
szucs.teri1@gmail.com
Part 1
Q:
‘East’ and ‘West’ are dynamically changing geo-political and geo-cultural categories that undergo constant redefinition and re-contextualization. One recent shift in the current geopolitical discourse involving these terms can well be illustrated with the so called ‘Eastern Opening’ – the political and economic program of the Hungarian government that promises in its name to supplement the Western orientation of the country – or, in the light of the current political rhetoric: to replace it with an outreach towards territories beyond the Eastern borders of Europe.
How does the usage of the term ‘Eastern European’ reflect these attempts of rewriting the relational terms of ‘East’ and ‘West’? How do we understand nowadays the category of ‘Eastern European art’? Does this term convey certain (new or enduring) values? Do we use the label ‘Eastern European’ (as in Eastern European individual / researcher / intellectual / artist etc.) to define a category of intersecting identities? In the current geopolitical-geocultural context, what are the implications of this term?
A:
László Strausz
Postcolonial, as a Remedy for Cold War Narratives
As a researcher with an interest in the screen media texts that construct and simultaneously document the social transformations in Eastern Europe, the significance of the postcolonial paradigm for me mostly consists in the unwillingness to accept the limiting binaries of the still circulating Cold War narratives. In this context, I refer to Cold War narratives as discursive technologies that maintain the fundamental bipolarity (as the division of us and them) in the political arena for imminent benefit. The rhetoric is rooted, among other sources, in the divisive tradition employed globally during the Cold War era, and picked up by postsocialist political elites. It is probably the familiarity of this rhetoric for still large segments of the Eastern European population that allows current political elites to deploy it for easy identity-constructing purposes. The generally hollow categories of the party-political left and the party-political right live on through these discourses, which also activate mnemonic processes to validate their own raison d’être.
My immediate interest in these processes stems from the ways in which contemporary Romanian cinema refuses to accept these depictions of state socialism by critically relating to these simplifying commemorative processes. The mono-logic of the Romanian, but more generally the Eastern European canon of the past in this sense continues Cold War narratives by reversing them. While during the post-war era the state socialist regimes depicted Western capitalism as exploitative and socially backward and the state socialist countries as the forces of progression, the post-1989 era simply turned this binary around: “instead of being debated, understood, and accepted, the past was simply recodified. The unintended result of this reading is the persistence of a collective representation of the past that is hardly able to absorb the multifarious memories of Romanian communism” (Petrescu, Cristina, and Dragoș Petrescu: 2014. “The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism.” Remembering Communism. Edited by Maria Todorova. Budapest: CEU Press, 68). Among many other possible ways of deconstructing the monolithic image of the past, one can point at various in-between roles that lay beyond the oversimplified oppressor–oppressed binary (tactics such as pragmatic avoidance of the political, or utilitarian collaboration) or the heterogeneity of the phases within the history of the Ceaușescu regime, during which the standards of living and the level of political repression fluctuated significantly (Petrescu, Dragoș: “Selective Memories of Communism: Remembering Ceaușescu’s “Socialism” in post-1989 Romania.” Gebrochene Kontinuitäten: Transnationalität in den Erinnerungskulturen Ostmitteleuropas in 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Agnieszka Gasior, Agnieszka Halemba, and Stephan Troebst. 305–321. Vienna: Böhlau., 305). In my monograph (Strausz, László: 2017. Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen. London: Palgrave-Macmillan) I argue that new Romanian Cinema’s imaginations of the past do exactly this: they challenge and complicate the monolithic account of the past. One of the fundamental texts of postcolonial theory, Homi K. Bhabha’s The Commitment to Theory describes the hybridity of voices in the production of meaning. He says that “[i]t is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity” (Bhabha, Homi K.: 1994. “The Commitment to Theory.” In. The Location of Culture. 19–39. London: Routledge, 37).
This articulation before the empirical holds central significance. It shows that even prior to our considerations of the above mentioned historical strategies of avoidance and utilitarian collaboration, or the levelling blanket statements on state socialism’s homogenously repressive nature, the enunciative speaking position that construct these narratives need to be mapped as acts that cause changes in the world. Once the mobility of these positions is confronted, we start to discern a space where hybrid, ambiguous and often contradictory accounts of social change will have the capacity to complicate the reductive, populist and reactionary narratives that threaten to overtake the contemporary political arena globally.
Hajnal Király
What Lies Beyond the Hills?
During a 2013 conference in the UK, I came across a rather simplifying promotional image of Cristian Mungiu’s then newest film, Beyond the Hills, freshly released in that country. Partly due to the one of the most mediatised stills of the film, the “bed scene” between the two, showing Voichita giving a massage to Alina, in the otherwise acclaiming critiques, the relationship between the two was too hastily labelled as lesbian. As the critic of The Guardian formulated: “It transpires that the two women, now in their mid-20s, were room-mates in an orphanage and had a lesbian relationship.” While admitting that there is a latent sexualised “body memory” at work in the case of Alina, I found surprising the attitude of the Western laic and professional public evidently blind at the complexity and figurative value of that very relationship. Intriguingly, the same West European media, that after the fall of the communist regime in Romania widely mediatised the shocking state of the orphanages in that country, failed to recognise the elementary, desperate need for intimacy of those ridden of family and any supporting relationships, represented by Mungiu’s story. The work-related massive migration starting from the 90s and intensifying after the adherence of the country to the EU has initiated a new wave of the cinematic trope “the orphans of the East”, analysed by Constantin Pârvulescu in a post-war context in his book with the same title. There is a whole series of Romanian films dealing with the catastrophic effects of emotional deprivation on the generation growing up without a mother, a father or an entire family. As it often happens, art is ahead of scientific or sociological research or statistics in modelling a striking social phenomenon, thematised, for example, in Bogdan Apetri’s Periferic (2010), Cătălin Mitulescu’s Loverboy (2011) and Florin Șerban’s If I Want to Whistle I Whistle (2011).
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the conference I attended, entitled The Body in Eastern European and Russian Cinema, organised in Greenwich, UK, was one of the first efforts to decipher the troubled East European body and the signification of its cinematic representations. One of the main revelations of that conference was, for me, that the well-known western concepts and theories on the political, sexual body are not fully applicable to Eastern European films. In my research activity that followed this conference, I found myself “adjusting” these categories to resisting Romanian and Hungarian examples. One of my main findings is that in these films gender issues and sexual identities can never be viewed alone, but they are strongly and figuratively related to ethnic and national identities. The use of language in Beyond the Hills, for example – an Eastern Romanian, more archaic dialect – cannot be separated of its submissive, feminine aspects when facing a shabby, but still powerful patriarchal authority. The same connection between sexual and ethnic identity, related to power or its absence, respectively, can be identified in contemporary Hungarian films of Szabolcs Hajdu or Kornél Mundruczó, for example. But while Romanian films seem to balance successfully between a Western expectation and Eastern need for expression, fulfilling the stylistic and thematic standards of well ranked festivals, while developing an original, distinctive style, Hungarian films appear as more compromising with a rigorous modernist style and generalizing topics. This implies, from my part as a researcher, a complex analysis involving not only a comparison between the two cinemas, but also an examination of their relationship to the Western paradigms, separately and together, as it appears in co-productions. I contend that taking this insider-outsider’s position remains the only authentic way to reveal what really happens beyond the hills.
Zsolt Gyenge
Eastern Europe as a Self-Promotion Label in Intellectual Marketing
What interests me regarding this issue is not related to the political rhetoric of the Hungarian government, as in that case we are dealing with an autocratic leadership using the most blatant means of propaganda to distort any meaning tied to some concepts, and thus there is no theoretically or conceptually grounded base behind their use of terms.
So I will tackle the last part of the question, which in my interpretation interrogates the intellectual/academic/cultural use of the label Eastern European. What I see here is a strange struggle for finding an identity between the local and the global level of the discourse, a struggle that is not so much concerned with a real quest for identity, but much more with a need to find a relevant, more or less exclusive, and if possible, lucrative space within the cultural or/and academic field.
In my view the use of this label is on the one hand connected to the self-exoticising strategy of “small” nations (cf. the label “small cinemas” for example), who – in order to be observed and considered interesting on a global scale – need to emphasise their specificity, their difference. This approach presents the person coming from such a country or culture as being an expert on it only thanks to his or her origin, field-knowledge and linguistic proficiency, and thus – in the case of academics, artists or professionals – makes him or her a valid representative of the issues related to that cultural sphere. Being Czech, Hungarian, Malaysian or Columbian immediately makes you a specialist of these countries the minute you step outside of their borders.
However, and this is the other side of the issue, in the case of some really small nations, like in the case of most Eastern European countries, the national label refers to a too small entity to be efficiently marketable within a global discourse. So this is where Eastern Europe as a label comes in: it still emphasises the difference (this is what the adjective stands for), but it refers to a much greater entity that may seem more attractive to global audiences. Instead of talking of Romanian specificities for example, one can become the exponent of a region of around 10 to 15 countries (depending on definition), a region which due to its political status in the second half of the 20th century is capable to raise the interest of a wider set of people. What makes this discourse really schizophrenic is the need for its representative to simultaneously present a rhetoric of specificity and similarity: the specificity of the “East” compared to the “West”, and the similarity of different cultures, countries and nations within Eastern Europe.
I think the criticism of the heightened focus on the (almost documentary) representation of roots in the works of artists originating from exotic regions, exposed by Nicolas Bourriaud in his book The Radicant, refers to the same phenomenon. This is how self-promotion within the artistic and intellectual milieu works when the “Eastern European” label is at work. And this is in a certain sense also the ground upon which our research project is based.
Bence Kránicz
Apocalyptic Sensuality
Not long ago I talked to Zoltán Németh, a Hungarian poet and academic, who was born in Slovakia, and lives in Warsaw. I asked him what the term ’Central Europe’ means in 2017 – does it mean anything at all? I think his answer tells more about Eastern Europe than Central Europe, which seems like a historic, almost anachronistic term to me. But Eastern Europe is very much an existing place, social context and, ultimately, a state of mind. It might be the geographical equivalent of being in-between: societies between dictatorship and democracy, hesitating between the two without fully understanding either of them.
This gave me the idea to focus on contemporary Hungarian works of art which try to comprehend the ’Eastern European experience’ in a sensual way instead of theorizing it. Regarding spatial relations, sensuality goes both ways: creating empty spaces, voids might lead to a similar sensual experience as populating the narrative space with characters, colours, smells and tastes. One points to the destruction of space, the other points to the destruction of perception. Both might reflect an authentic, if indeed apocalyptic, experience of being Eastern European in 2017. So far I was reading contemporary Hungarian authors of the ‘new posthumanism’ through this lens, mainly Imre Bartók, Márió Nemes Z., the aforementioned Zoltán Németh or Zoltán Komor, and tried to place certain Hungarian films in this framework, notably Frozen May by Péter Lichter or Jupiter’s Moon by Kornél Mundruczó. This train of thought is closer to groping than to research, but a new representation of Eastern Europe might be waiting at the end of the line.
Zsolt Győri
Ambiguous Usages
“Eastern European” is commonly used to refer to the region formerly known as the Soviet Block. As a marker of identity it alludes to shared social-political experience and legacy: a synonym of post-communist. As a spatial entity Eastern European in scholarship usually excludes Russia (and member states of the former Soviet Union under strong Russian influence), which is a separate geopolitical entity, despite recent attempts to extend its influence and assert its economic dominance (its possession of highly valued natural resources) over former E-Block countries, the Baltic states, and Ukraine. The Hungarian government’s geopolitical doctrine of the “Eastern Opening” also assumes the separateness of Eastern Europe from both Russia and Western Europe. In fact, it hopes to disturb what it perceives as a hegemonic relationship with historical Western Europe and the institutions of the European Union
In the present and especially in Hungary the term “Eastern European” carries connotations beyond the spatial designation and acknowledges changing geopolitical orientations, the questioning of the paradigm established in the wake of the collapse of state-socialist systems, that perceived of Eastern Europe as a contact zone, an intermediary region between East and West, between past and present. I believe the benefits and the shortcomings of this paradigm are the result of a multi-stage economic convergence, a type of unequal development and advancement as a consequence of which some countries and regions have attracted more investment and funding than others. The anti-European rhetoric of the “Eastern Opening” is premised on the assumption that the convergence process is achieved to the advantage of neoliberal economic interest groups. While this political argument might be valid to a certain extent, it is hardly more than propagandistic strategy and fails to address core issues. In my view factors that contribute to these inequalities are both historical (a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, territorial accessions, Soviet influence, socialist industrialization, just to name a few) and the results of natural social phenomena (e.g. urbanization, unemployment, inland migration, depopulation). The scapegoating of EU principles and institutions arises from the ambiguities multi-stage social modernization poses and, at the same time, is a deviation from the complex and painful task of addressing these challenges.
“Eastern European” also refers to a region populated by different nationalities, religious and ethnic groups. As such the term is somewhat blind to these identity markers, yet ascribes a unique quality to its inhabitants. These qualities are not easily identified by populations in their local environment, nevertheless become more apparent in a foreign environment. In addition, the term is also used in a derogative sense, in the stereotyping and stigmatizing discourses of Western popular imaginations, often fuelled by the tabloid media. The colonial past of countries like Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and – to a lesser extent – Germany served as a fertile ground to construct under this term the image of the thrifty, parasitic, uncultured, unskilled person who is aggressive when drinking. In this anti-immigration discourse, reminiscent of previous colonial attitudes, “Eastern European” designates inferiority and hopes to generate shame in people who should think of themselves as bad copies of citizens native to Western Europe. Often such scapegoating generates solidarity among members of diasporas and citizens of Eastern European countries; more often, however, it gives rise to nationalism.
In view of the above, “Eastern European” is an inconclusive term with rich and often contradictory meanings. Interestingly, it is those (like myself) who have nothing against being identified as Eastern European that largely contribute to the ambiguity of the term. In order not to use it as a label, these people invest into it personal readings and adopt it to befit individual identity politics. The ambiguity of “Eastern European”, thus, arises from being a highly reflexive term, moulded through use.