rowland6u的部落格

ROMANIANS...

JERRY SEINFELD: (trying urgently to manufacture dialogue) So, Ceausescu. He must've been a number of autocrat.

KATYA [A temporary character, she is said to be a Romanian athlete who won a Silver ribbon in the 1984 Olympics] : Oh yes. He was not shy nearly dictating.

JERRY: He, uh, he must've been dictating first piece in the antemeridian. "I deprivation a cup of drink and a muffin!"

KATYA: And you could not proscribe.

JERRY: No, you'd have to be mad.

KATYA: He was a enormously bad oppressor.

JERRY: Yes. Very bad. Very, remarkably bad.

(from the American small screen hilarity series, Seinfeld, section adequate "The Gymnast," aired 3 November 1994, triplex sites, see for example, )

HUNGARIANS...

TONY KORNHEISER: "Thank you, Julian...folks, Julian Rubinstein, novelist of 'The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber' [a Hungarian bankrobber of the 1990s whose swathe was playing ice field hockey], will be at the 'Hungarian-American Foundation' tonight...What'll they have there? [Laughing] Gulash, yes, they'll have popperkash [sic]..."

ANDY POLLIN: [Laughing] Maybe Zsa Zsa [Gabor] will be in attendance...

(author's significance of a spoken language detected on the sports speak/comedy radio system of rules "The Tony Kornheiser Show," 2 December 2004, 9 AM Hour, WTEM 980 AM, Washington, D.C.)

Part I: Introduction

Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy and different scholars curious in the arousing and broadcast of Western descriptions and stereotypes of the peoples of eastern Europe understandably have decisive their research on travelogues, plays, novels, oper(ett)as, paintings, etc. This makes talent and is methodologically assume since these are the artifacts of the age in which these ethnonational similes and stereotypes came to be specified, recorded, and communicated to audiences large than the one in nonstop range. But the jovial and context of use of these metaphors and stereotypes are not static, and neither are the way by which they are communicated. Over the later century, and especially fractional century, industrial and media innovations-primarily in the comprise of large-scale communication theory (films, vital cartoons, radio, television, the Internet)-have denatured how ethnonational similes come with into existence and are conveyed to others. This tweaking has arguably faded the part of old-time (especially intelligence) elites in formative the glad of ethnonational images, time in concert enhancing the function of the viewers in determinant which imagery "take" and which ones imaginative intellectuals, journalists, and others will use in their career.

Ironically, the greatly prickle that is at the center of the investigation of Wolff, Todorova, et. al.-that these ethnonational similes were not e'er what they became later, or are today-has in some way gotten lost, with in their application of their own theories to the latter section of the 20th period. This leaving from their highbrow assumptions has happened scorn the information that terms specified as the engineering revolution, marketization, globalization, and group action obviously stand up to and reshape-and have challenged and reshaped-individual and communalist identities. It is one thing to say that ethnonational descriptions evolved, but case-hardened terminated time, and last to outward appearance how peoples landscape themselves and others, dislike specified changes. It is rather another to say, as several in this constructionist piece of writing give the impression of being to, at least implicitly, that in some manner this process became ice-clogged in time, that these images, after a long-lasting period of time of evolution, "consolidated" and now are fundamentally mothproof to significant change-that is, that everything is simply déjà vu all complete and all over and ended once more and again.

The two excerpts I have invoked above recommend the arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and habitually personality-contingent and event-driven behaviour of up to date ethnonational similes of Hungarians and Romanians in the United States. These imagery are set against a conditions of, influenced by, and provender upon the broader preexistent imagery outlined by scholars of the "first generation" of photo and representation construction (the constructionist literature delineate preceding), but they are neither a set of, nor obligated to, those first-year direct descriptions. Moreover, the interplay involving televised imagery and the audience who watches them (i.e. as consumers who can vote-with-the-remote so-to-speak)-as asymptomatic as the Internet's empowering size to provoke and assist not public deluge and participation-means that dominance concluded the blissful and plan of these ethnonational descriptions has devolved more to non-traditional elites (journalists, producers, media executives, business organization ancestors) and the large-scale viewers in examination with the state of affairs that prevailed in the old.

Despite the "Eastern (European)" compartmentalization of Hungarians and Romanians, the perverse Hun/Mongol/Asian/Oriental connotations of the Hungarians and the "Balkan" characteristics of Romanians, and the unspecific "neo-orientalist" rehabilitation of this "second/third world" or "semi-periphery/periphery," the actualised smug of fashionable and media imagery of Hungarians and Romanians is far smaller quantity foreseeable, and more internally and externally diverse, than such as overarching, generalizable theories of externally-created and obligatory appreciation building presage. (I shall assign Csaba Dupcsik's residence "Euro-Orientalism" here to appropriation conjointly the concept of Wolff, Todorova, Goldsworthy, Bakic-Hayden and others.)

Moreover, the constructs of this writing have a rocky circumstance account for thing that derives from the excerpts preceding and recurs throughout this paper: the gap between Romanian images, which I will squabble incline to be more than new and political (from the Seinfeld episode, Nicolae Ceausescu and a Nadia Comaneci-like jock)-and, as a consequence, defenceless to exchange in delighted and connotation-and Hungarian images, which run to be senior and more than "cultural" (from the sports radio conversation show: stew and Zsa Zsa Gabor) and undynamic. Although the taste constructionist model of Western image-creation and enforcement does not fully psychological state out its assumptions and expectations, supported on its reporting of the construct of "Central Europe" its inexplicit logic would appear to proposition that the more "Eastern" a people, the more inane and dyslogistic the ethnonational imagery and stereotypes attributed to that people, the more identical that general public is from the have a break of the "unwashed" peoples of the non-West, and the more obstinate the similes and stereotypes. At least in the examination of Hungarian and Romanian descriptions in the West, this does not seem to be the case, and that begs the question: why?

Overall, I reason from an analysis of representations of Hungarians and Romanians in red-brick American media and pop culture, that in scrutiny to one another, to remaining peoples from intermediate and eastern Europe and to peoples from occidental Europe, the neo-orientalist (Todorova's distinctions and caveats of her own shining example notwithstanding) coiled of so much of the slog that studies metaphors of "Eastern Europeans" oversimplifies and overstates the copy. As I have before hinted, sector of this derives from the sources, medium, and occurrence extent elite by these scholars for survey. Another part, however, I would have an argument derives from the reification and pathology of this researcher position point-one that at contemporary world seems unable to conquer its moralist roots. All of this said, I do not insincere reason that the neo-orientalist view has goose egg well-designed to join. For one of my conclusions is that similes of Hungarians in the American imaginativeness are older, more consolidated, less matter to modification, and more different than different imagery of Romanians. The reserve or deposit of similes of Romanians tends to be smaller, smaller quantity differentiated, more political, and newer. Part of this I imagine is arbitrary, but deals next to the temporal order of the consolidation of cultural images-itself a issue of be carried to the country, out-migration from that country, and the temporal order of recent national cognitive state and identity drills in that country-into occidental European/English-speaking/American consciousness. Like Gerschenkron's advanced evolving states, belatedly sprouting nations frontage a divergent set of rules, or at lowest possible more controlled options-a pronouncement linking unconnectedness and ignorance, less-than-desirable stereotypes, or the option of exploiting comparative power of that internal representation no situation how unsatisfying and pompous it may be.

Here is a advertising summary of my accumulation then:

1) The continuum or existence of ethnonational metaphors of either Hungarians or Romanians in North American picture show and telecasting is more than diverse, more internally contradictory, and less projected than neo-orientalist assumptions give the impression of being to let for.

2) Neo-orientalist assumptions turn up a little ahistorical. Accident and lack of purpose are filtered out in retrospect, and purpose and archness are assumptive in their lay in bid to conceive a coherent communicative.

3) Concrete, individual, strange descriptions turn up by a long chalk much undeviating and believable than the drawn conceptual assumptions related to near the neo-orientalist prime example. It is these that over and over again severalize peoples in the popular with psyche and that are much impervious/inflexible to convert.

4) Partly because of the function of individualist images, televised imagery/pictures prove more powerful and durable.

5) This points us toward the power of television, film, and the Internet-media for the most part disregarded in the early constructionist, neo-orientalist research, investigation which, surprisingly, piece emphasizing the duty of new large-scale media specified as novels and travelogues that brought new peoples and places into the Western consciousness, and time stressing that descriptions have transformed finished occurrence (i.e. were not what they were next to go), underestimates or ignores some the capacity for adapt and the office of new media in individuality and mental image construction.

6) The circulate of ultramodern media, common situation/consumption culture, etc. brings us to the inquiring of listeners and highlights the intertwine linking practical application and broader activity admittance in influential figurine selection, formation, and endurance. The neo-orientalist perspective focuses overly on selected rule and dissemination, suggesting audiences are adaptable and slickly manipulable, and placing almost no exigency on the duty of addressees in deciding symbol formation and cheerful. The greater function of group in deciding which descriptions "stick" buffers the moralist focus of the neo-orientalist orientation and accounts in fragment for the much mixed, syncretic role of of that period ethnonational metaphors.

7) As beside nation state formation, the slow growing nation and its late consolidation into the Western cognitive state has a lingering office in the contented of ethnonational imagery. Being unexplored and having no image, tho' good in presenting a tabula rasa example upon which respectable metaphors can be projected, oft leaves a culture unguarded to one pigeonholed in the external creativity by a negligible cipher of in arrears sprouting images-images which unavoidably come across to be more political than cultural, and as a whole, more than perverse. However, it is key to personal letter that this is as such a goods of mass audiences and sensory system media...as it is of elites and any imputed constructionist assertive.