Finding my place in queer cultural history through the ‘post-Cold-War’ period

This post originally appeared at History Matters on 14 August 2017.

I’ve been researching the 1990s since the beginning of my academic career, when I wrote my PhD on popular music and national identity in Croatia after the break-up of Yugoslavia. (This was published in 2010 as my first book, Sounds of the Borderland.) As a queer writer and academic who was born in the early 1980s, I’m also someone whose consciousness and identity were shaped by the queer cultural politics of the 1990s – or by the lengths I went to in trying to distance myself from them.

Some queer historians become historians to investigate a personal past. My experience was the opposite, or so I thought: sometimes, while reading archived Croatian newspapers and magazines from 1990 to what was then the present during my PhD, I’d note abstractly that an issue’s cover date in 1996 or 1997 coincided with a personally significant day, or realise that, if I’d been the same age and Croatian, this or that pop video instead of this or that performance on Top of the Pops might have played a part in the protracted process of me trying to prove that, even though I kept noticing androgynous-looking women, I wasn’t queer.

At the same time, on a macro level, I’ve always believed that the histories of the Yugoslav region and the society where I live are much more connected than most British public discourse in the 1990s about the former Yugoslavia would suggest. During the Yugoslav wars, Cold War east–west geopolitics overhung older, semi-orientalised tropes about ‘the Balkans’ in the minds of many commentators who implied that Britain and the Balkans travelled at two separate historical speeds.

The more expansive and transnational view of the 1990s as cultural history that I take now has as much to do with Britain as the Balkans, and sometimes more. The period we can now name as ‘the post-Cold-War’ was defined by changing ideas about conflict and security, and how gender might determine who participates in conflict in what ways, who ought to protect whom, and who threatens whom. Also important were narratives of capitalism and progress that held out the hope of prosperity to many more young (and older) people than felt it in the 1980s or feel it today; rapid changes in the technologies through which people experienced popular culture and communicated with each other (it is already an imaginative leap for a student in their late teens to put themselves in the trainers of a young person the same age organising a night out in 1991); and also by the visibility and ambiguous position of queer identities in media and society. This, it turns out, is where I come in.

The project I conceived a year or two ago on how representations of the Yugoslav wars fed back into Western cultural imaginations of conflict, and how Western cultural imaginations of conflict also circulated through the Yugoslav region, needed me to start defining what did distinguish the 1990s or the ‘post-Cold-War’ as a period.

Meanwhile, the conceptual contribution I wanted it to make – what can cultural historians and scholars interested in the aesthetics of international politics learn from feminist and queer media studies? – sent me back to scholarship in feminist film theory and in cultural memory that was being written during the 1990s and was being produced within the very historical context I was trying to understand. Meanwhile, as a researcher embedded in 2016, I was becoming ever more conscious of how easily queer visibilities in the past and present can be erased, and starting to explore the 1990s’ and 2000s’ interlinked transformations of media technology, imaginations of conflict, and queer politics creatively in ways that even began pointing to new linkages in my academic work.)

Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing (on women’s identification with Forties and Fifties women film stars) or equally Graham Dawson’s Soldier Heroes (on boys’ identification with military and imperial heroes through adventure play) both came out in 1994. Both books have passages that read like darts of recognition; both books have passages that my own embodied knowledge leaves me annotating, ‘What about masculinities?’ or ‘Can’t this happen with women?’

Together, they help me pursue a hunch that the dynamics of identification that can make people so invested in the characters and narratives of popular culture and the dynamics of emotional attachment to the nation that states and militaries depend on, have a lot in common with each other.

A thread of articles and book chapters in feminist and lesbian ‘gaze’ theory (which inform how I understand identification with the nation and with militarism) came out between 1994 and 1997: work by scholars like Caroline Evans and Reina Lewis on identification, desire and spectatorship (theorising things like what the pleasures of looking at fashion spreads in the British lesbian magazine Diva might have been for lesbians in the mid-90s).

In other words, in the mid 1990s, people were already writing about and answering questions that had been confusing me for years at exactly the same time – when I still had no idea they could even be spoken, let alone asked with academic authority. (I still wouldn’t even have dared touch a copy of Diva at the newsagent, in 1997, in case it meant I was a lesbian…)

And yet the first encounter with Croatian popular music that I remember, through the Eurovision Song Contest, is already entangled with my own history of queer spectatorship and not-coming-out. I would have seen Croatian entries in the 1994 and 1995 Eurovisions, but the first one I remember seeing is Maja Blagdan’s performance of ‘Sveta ljubav’ in 1996, for reasons that would have been quite obvious to me at the time.

(Not having had the foresight to press ‘record’ at the start of the song on the video tape where I used to collect highlights of Top of the Pops, I expected with disappointment never to see again, until a viewer who had written to the BBC about Terry Wogan speaking over the singing meant they played thirty seconds of it a few weeks later on Points of View.)

Blagdan went on to be one of the first Croatian singers I wanted to find out more about, and so the trajectory towards me becoming able to write a book that a BASEES prize panel judged ‘exceptional in both its originality and its careful research’, a book which has helped to inspire younger researchers to develop their own projects on post-Yugoslav nationalism, music, media, or sport, doesn’t just involve me as a historical subject trying to understand how a new nation like Croatia could suddenly appear out of what had seemed to be an old one like Yugoslavia. It also involves me as a queer viewer and teenager at a very specific moment, when lesbian visibility coexisted with an intense cultural anxiety over women as agents of the gaze towards other women.

Historicising the theoretical work I wanted to use for one project, in other words, has already pointed me towards another: what was the relationship between queer women and popular culture in the 1990s? This feels all the more urgent, not just because it belongs to a Very Contemporary History that’s already different from the present, but also because it denotes a past I managed to simultaneously live through and push aside.

 

Expanding the ‘mental phone book’: unconscious bias and diversity in conference panels and edited volumes

This post originally appeared at the NYU Jordan Center blog on 3 August 2017.

Thanks to the feminist researcher and artist Saara Särmä, the blogging platform Tumblr, and some carefully-placed roundels of David Hasselhoff, the all-too-common sight of a panel or table of contents consisting entirely of male experts has had a convenient rejoinder since Särmä’s digital activism went viral in 2015: ‘Congrats – you have an all male panel!’

Särmä’s companion project, ‘Congrats – you have an all white panel!’, uses another legend of Eighties action cinema, Mr T, to call out events where – even on topics such as how to build a more democratic Europe – the picture of intellectual authority and expertise that organisers have created through their choice of speakers does not include any speakers of colour.

(Curiously – or not – the ‘All White Panels’ Tumblr gained much less traction with mainstream media such as the BBC, Time and The Guardian that helped #allmalepanels become a meme, even though Särmä had been speaking about both projects at once.)

As an academic who strives to put my first area specialism (the Yugoslav region) in a transnational and global context, and to understand how cultural imaginations of ideas like ‘conflict’ or ‘Europe’ are translated across national borders, I am frequently in the position of organising conference panels, selecting contributors for workshops, or choosing chapters for edited collections – including the volume on Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR I published in 2017 – so that a team of researchers can offer more perspectives on a problem than any one expert could alone.

In fact, this is part of the work of academia I enjoy most: creating dialogues between people working on different disciplines or areas who might not have met each other, and being able to work with junior scholars launching exciting new research at the same time as senior scholars whose thinking has helped to shape mine.

But when editors operate entirely according to the shape of the field that they already take for granted, we are at risk of perpetuating the same structural inequalities that anyone with a commitment to diversity in their field would say that they are fighting against – as the journalist Stephanie Boland recently explained in comments that are as relevant to workshop organisers and volume editors as they are to editors commissioning for the press.

Boland, the Head of Digital at Prospect magazine in the UK, points out that even when editors are keen in theory to diversify their pool of contributors, unconscious bias in the heat of the moment – compounded by the factors that make the media a disproportionately middle-class and white industry – often makes them fail to live up to their own aspirations:

In the past, I’ve been in commissioning meetings where there is every good intention to end up with a diverse table of contents.

Nobody really WANTS an all-male features list – usually, there’s a bit of hand-wringing if one goes to press

But most places commission by topic more than by writer. If there’s a feature idea floating about, they go through their mental phone book

And because white people/men are more prominent in the media, and most people have some unconscious bias, the names that come up… well, you get the picture.

Waiting until the editorial meeting to correct bias doesn’t work. You’ve got to sort out our inner Rolodex.

Once you’re looking at your flatplan/book chapters/speakers list/conference program and going ‘argh, we need a woman’—you’ve already lost

Putting together a table of contents for an edited volume, or choosing who to invite to a conference panel submission, very often starts with the same kind of mental phone book.

On specialist topics, such as the work on the aesthetic and embodied practices of ‘militarization’ that is emerging as a research area in feminist security studies and International Relations, I could easily ask myself ‘Who do I know that studies X?’ and write down five or ten names that, in this case, would all belong to white women.

I would at least have avoided an #allmalepanel – but would have created yet another all white one, moreover on a topic (the normalization of ideologies behind state violence) where the situated knowledge of people who experience racism and Islamophobia is essential for understanding the politics of emotion (as Sara Ahmed names them) behind nationalism and state power.

As my own career progresses, and as I become someone with the capacity to propose and publish collections of academic work – so that I am starting to shape and define fields of inquiry, rather than just participating in them – there are topics where I start to feel as if I know ‘everyone’ in a field: we have met at conferences or shared tables of contents in other volumes, we belong to the same mailing lists or Facebook groups.

For a new volume or panel now, even where I am close enough to the centre of a topic’s academic network that I might ‘know everyone’, I want to commit myself to at least 20 per cent of the participants I choose – the equivalent of at least one panellist on a panel of five – being people I have never worked with before (and that target figure should go up, not down).

This is all the more important when the opportunity is part of an ongoing collaboration, where many participants will already have presented to each other before: diversifying the range of who is involved helps to ensure that the conversation emerging through the panel or volume will move beyond its past iterations, along new directions – thus advancing the quality of the research.

The unfortunate but necessary cost, of course, is that an editor or panel organiser cannot involve every participant from their immediate, instinctive ‘mental phone book’ every time.

Even with strategies like these, however, too many of the contributor lists for panels, volumes and issues I have organised have been all white. The two annual conventions I am most likely to attend are the Association for Slavonic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the International Studies Association. An ISA member could feasibly pledge not to appear on or organise an all-white panel in the same way that thousands of speakers in academia, business and technology have pledged not to appear on all-male panels. At ASEEES, the discipline contains so few people of colour – a situation that the Association for Diversity in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies is working to change – that, if participants made a similar pledge, far fewer panels could even be organised.

Beyond the levels of racial diversity in particular academic disciplines, moreover, other factors affect all my networks and have led to me organising all-white panels when I had tried to commit not to do so (including two panels at the ISA convention this year): the high costs of conference travel disproportionately affect people of colour, who – as a result of structural racism in academia – are more likely to be in low-paid and precarious work, and less likely to have the funds or time to travel.

The current US administration’s Islamophobic travel ban, which (first announced in January 2017) directly impedes scholars from the affected countries entering the USA and has persuaded many others, especially Muslims, not to travel, also contributed to the whiteness of our ISA panels, since after the ban was announced one participant (a South Asian woman) made the difficult decision not to attend.

At call-for-papers stage, at least, I could have chosen not to submit a panel I had organised if it turned out all white. So as not to disappoint other panellists, and because I have been excited about the opportunity to meet my colleagues, I have not yet made this choice: but, as a result, an all-white panel of mine has been selected when another panel, which might have contained more scholars of colour, therefore was not. I am still complicit in the panels’ whiteness even though I am pleased they went ahead.

Fewer structural constraints affect participation in edited volumes. Four years after beginning to plan Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR, there are still contributors I have never met, and while we did organise some related panels based on the volume (including at ASEEES 2016), developing the chapters never required the participants to gather together.

Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR involved authors based in Serbia, Germany, Britain, the USA, Canada and Hungary, and contributors who grew up in several other countries but now work abroad: and yet its table of contents, like almost every volume in Slavic and east European studies, is still all white.

If I were inviting and selecting chapters for a similar volume now, rather than in 2013, not only would there be more active researchers from underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities to approach, but I would have the benefit of four more years expanding my own mental phone book by reading outside what I initially thought of as ‘my area’ to try to answer how topics I had previously worked on (such as post-Yugoslav popular music, or the micropolitics of peacekeeping in Bosnia) had been structured by the global dynamics of race.

The effects of racism and unexamined whiteness in Slavic and East European Studies affect who chooses to enter or remain in this discipline in the first place: one panel or volume will not resolve this inequality on its own, but every panel or volume will make its contribution to the picture of diversity in the discipline that a researcher of colour forms, as they decide through their own impressions of the discipline whether it is likely to welcome them.

Editors and panel organisers in Slavic and East European studies are more likely to be conscious of ethnicity and nationality as an element of diversity than they are of race. Many specialist readers will already mentally note the balance of eastern European and non-eastern European contributors in a project, above all in gender studies, where east European scholars have often used analogies with postcolonial feminism to show how the Anglophone West has made ‘postsocialist’ Europe a periphery. Even the location where an author currently works – in the centre or the periphery of the global economy of academic knowledge production? – has a bearing, as Madina Tlostanova shows, on the politics of where intellectual authority is perceived as travelling ‘from’ and ‘to’.

(The idea of ‘coming from’ or ‘not coming from’ the region someone studies is of course a spectrum not a fence, complicated by infinite degrees of diasporic, familial and social entanglement – although some researchers, like me, are definitely not from eastern Europe no matter how one defines belonging.)

Without planning well in advance how to widen the pool of contributors I might involve in a project – and being open to the possibility that the boundaries of my theme might change as a more diverse group of contributors brings more diverse worldviews and politics to the original line of inquiry I perceived – I am much more likely as an editor to fall back on ‘unconscious’ bias and miss an opportunity to reach a better understanding of my topic as well as supporting the diversity of my field.

But the discipline will need as strong an institutional commitment to racial diversity as it has made to gender equality, and far more understanding from white scholars of all nationalities of the obstacles that scholars of colour face in Slavic and East European Studies research, to make the all white panel as uncommon as the all male panel at ASEEES.

Introducing my next academic book: Race and the Yugoslav Region

Until the middle of last year I wasn’t expecting to be announcing this as my next academic book project, but now it is: Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? is under contract with Manchester University Press’s ‘Theory for a Global Age‘ series, will be going into copy-editing in the next few months, and ought to be due out at some point in 2018.

Six months after publication, as things stand, MUP will also make the book Open Access – like the others in the series – which will make it more accessible than anything I’ve published before to students, activists and scholars in and from the region (and elsewhere).

Race and the Yugoslav Region is the first of the projects I was working on during 2016 – a year that often felt as if, in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s words, I was ‘writing like you’re running out of time – to see print, but not I hope the last. Ultimately, it’s the outcome of my own confusion at my first home discipline of south-east European studies not seeming to offer a script for understanding the representations of race, blackness and whiteness I encountered during my PhD on popular music and national identity in Croatia in the same way that constructions of ‘westernness’ versus ‘easternness’, or ‘Europe’ versus ‘the Balkans’, did have an entire framework of academic literature to explain them.

Moreover, that framework had come from postcolonial studies in the first place, through the foundational work of Milica Bakić-Hayden and Maria Todorova and their engagements with (and against) Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism (producing the idea of ‘balkanism’) – and yet I could get away with bracketing race and the global legacies of colonialism to one side when writing about collective identity, in a way I’m deeply dissatisfied with after coming to understand that whiteness let me bracket them off and not have to engage with them, because ‘the Yugoslav region hadn’t had its own empire, after all…’

It didn’t: but many imperial projects have passed through it, and people from the region as travellers or settlers have been implicated in yet more, though their positions in structures of imperial and colonial power have often been as contingent and ambiguous as the global structural position of this peripheralised region of Europe itself.

Yet if the international marginalisation of the Balkans and the fact that the Yugoslav region did not become a destination for mass postcolonial migration of people of colour meant that ‘race’ – in contrast to ‘ethnicity’ or ‘religion’ – didn’t have to be on the agenda for understanding the region’s experiences, studies of the global legacies of race or ‘race in translation’ (the title of an inspiring book by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam) also tend to leave surprising gaps when it comes to incorporating state socialist and postsocialist Europe into their globe.

Without these connections, however, we don’t have the transnational and global historical context that we need in order to think ‘between the posts’, as Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery put it in an essential article for Comparative Studies in Society and History that demonstrated postsocialism and postcoloniality needed to be drawn together as ways of thinking about the recent past, present and future, not kept apart.

Neither postsocialism or postcolonialism, Chari and Verdery argued, are just themes for understanding a certain region of the world: we should be asking about the effects of the collapse of state socialism as a ruling ideology in Europe beyond the places that were state socialist; we should be asking about the consequences of colonialism and decolonisation beyond the countries that had empires or were colonised by them.

But to do that requires understanding how – and simply talking about how – the Yugoslav region and its people have fitted into the global history of race, and of the colonial projects which spread ‘race’ as a structure of oppression around the globe so that it could be translated into many racisms through the filter of different societies’ own cultural narratives and social divides.

(I’ve blogged about this before in articles like this one on the politics of race behind post-Yugoslav states’ and citizens’ responses to the refugee crisis in 2015, or this one on reconciling the themes of south-east European studies with the premises of postcolonial history and international relations, not to mention on Eurovision and European multiculturalism here…)

Scholars of Black history in Germany, of postcoloniality and whiteness in the Nordic region, and of the meanings of ‘race’ or transnational connections with Africa in socialist and postsocialist Russia and Ukraine have all been able to put ‘race’ at the centre of their enquiry in a way that is also possible for the Yugoslav region – and would have been possible even during my PhD if the work of authors who were already writing on global ‘raciality’ and whiteness in eastern Europe (like Anikó Imre on ‘postcolonial whiteness‘ and media representations of Roma, or Miglena Todorova on translations of American, European and Soviet formations of ‘race’ through Bulgaria) had changed the course of debate in south-east European studies like the ‘balkanism’ studies had in the 1990s.

By the time I was teaching for a year at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where I’d done my PhD, in 2011-12, I was starting to express my sense of what was missing from south-east European studies as ‘What would this field look like if its formative theory had been based on Gilroy’ – author of The Black Atlantic – ‘as well as Said?’

As a researcher, meanwhile, the point I could no longer avoid thinking about where the Yugoslav region belonged in the global politics of ‘race’ and whiteness was when researching the micropolitics of international/local encounters in peacekeeping needed me to contend with the idea – expressed by authors like Sherene Razack – that peacekeeping itself is a racialised project, showing far more continuity with colonialism than liberals like to think.

Razack, in her work on Canadian peacekeeping in Somalia, argued that peacekeeping ‘maintains a colour line between a family of white nations constructed as civilized and a third world constructed as a dark threat’ – but here, too, where would the Yugoslav region fit, in a part of the world which has traditionally seemed (as Maria Todorova, author of Imagining the Balkans, put it) ‘historically white’?

I wrote what I now realise was the very first outline for Race and the Yugoslav Region in June 2013, on the back of a programme at a workshop on ‘The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia’, during a presentation by Julija Sardelić on Romani minorities and post-Yugoslav citizenship. The bullet-pointed list began:

• Socialist/Communist ideas about race – what were they? What legacies? Did practice match theory?
• Histories of thought about race in south-east Europe generally
• Histories of people of colour in SEE – settlement, travel etc
• Race and the Non Aligned Movement
• Where do the Roma fit in

and carried on thinking about the region in the kinds of contexts that feminist and postcolonial security studies scholars had been using throughout the International Studies Association and International Feminist Journal of Politics conferences in April and May:

• Border security and (regular and irregular) migration
• […] Portability of postcolonial theory – if SEE or part of it is being thought of / has been thought of as the subaltern, can it actually get away with that?
• Was there SEE complicity in the racial oppression of European colonialism
• And what about SEE participation in the slave trade
• SEE complicity in racialised narratives of the War on Terror; participation in detention and rendition of Muslims suspected of terrorism
• How far is SEE as a site of international intervention, humanitarian relief, peacebuilding etc actually comparable to sites in the Global South? Did the whiteness of Croatians, Bosnians and Kosovars actually make these interventions and their politics of rescue fundamentally different in some way from interventions in (above all) Africa?
• Peacekeepers and interveners of colour in SEE

It wove through questions from current politics and my own previous research that I still didn’t feel equipped to answer, even though I was beginning to know how to ask them:

• Race and the far right (especially in light of those transnational Islamophobic European right-wing groups that keep going on about the ‘Gates of Vienna’…)
• Position of BiH in post-9/11 discourses about the West and Islam
• Popular culture/popular music
• Production, appreciation and reception of ‘world music’
• Do we need to talk about cultural appropriation? By whom? Of whose culture(s)?

and finished with the politics of knowledge in south-east European studies itself:

• Methods issues: encounters with race and racism in field research
• The politics of race within research and teaching on SEE

I wasn’t able to found the research network I wanted to bring together to start answering these questions from multiple perspectives at the same time, but I did use an invitation to a Russian and Slavonic Studies research seminar at Nottingham two years later to pose some of these problems together in a presentation that, to jar the audience into seeing the region differently, I titled ‘The Black Adriatic?’ in allusion to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.

(I haven’t carried that title over to the book, for two reasons: most importantly, as the title of a book that could have a direct impact on my personal and financial success, I felt it would be an appropriation of Gilroy’s scholarship and the Black intellectual traditions he rests on for a white woman to take it up from him; and secondly, by the time I was proposing Race and the Yugoslav Region, the series it would join had already published Robbie Shilliam’s excellent The Black Pacific, on how the African diaspora’s struggles for liberation have resonated through the South Pacific.)

By the time I led a workshop based on it at Central European University a year after that – and because of the insight, sensitivity and solidarity with which the CEU graduate students and faculty talked from the perspective of their own research – my working document had become around 20,000 words of notes – and the single article I thought I could write to get my main point across would have had to be at least three articles for three different journals to keep everything I wanted to include together.

At the same time, I knew that I didn’t have either the source material or, really, the right intellectual and personal position to write a long historical monograph on race and the Yugoslav region that would become the authoritative work. Race and the Yugoslav Region is a short book, like the others in its series, which I hoped was achieving similar aims to what the series editor Gurminder Bhambra had called for in her own Connected Sociologies: in this case, to move beyond analogies of how the marginalisation of the Balkans might be similar to marginalisations based on ‘race’, into a mode of connection where the Yugoslav region, as well as the rest of the globe, is demonstrably part of the world that colonialism, slavery and racisms made, not outside it.

Race and the Yugoslav Region has one author’s name on the cover, but if not for other people’s writing – especially the scholarship of east European women and women of colour – would not have existed at all. The two largest intellectual debts I owe are to Flavia Dzodan and Zara Bain, both of whom I got to know as writers because of online feminism and activism – I would have encountered their work differently, or more likely not at all, in a less networked world.

Whereas ‘Europe’, in the study of postsocialism, represents the longed-for symbol of modernity and progress, the ‘Europe’ of Dzodan’s writing was and is a system of whiteness and ongoing colonial violence that, through the militarisation of the European Union’s land and sea borders, was directly implicating the ‘Western Balkans’ even if it had not done so before.

Bain, meanwhile, is a philosopher and disability activist whose research on the critical race theory of Charles Mills, once we started talking about it on Twitter, made me understand one of Mills’s key arguments and made me begin to see a hinge for joining south-east European studies’ translation of postcolonial thought with the global history of ‘race’ and racisms.

Mills argues, in The Racial Contract, that ‘race’ is a ‘moral cartography’ that divides the world into civilised and modern spaces, populated by and belonging to people of white European descent, and the ‘wild and racialized’ rest of the world, where people, territory, histories, cultures and knowledges are marked as permanently subordinated, exploitable and disposable.

Mills is talking about spatialised hierarchies of modernity and primitivism – and so is south-east European studies, where Imagining the Balkans or Bakić-Hayden’s work on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting Orientalisms’ are among the core texts every postgraduate will read.

Alongside Mills and the literature on ‘global formations of race’ (Michael Omi and Howard Winant) or ‘race in translation’ (Shohat and Stam) I had already expected the article(s) that became Race and the Yugoslav Region to be based on, one of the books I direct readers to most often appeared early in 2016: Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence.

White Innocence, Wekker’s challenge to Dutch racial ‘exceptionalism’ and the comforting myths most white Dutch people hold about their nation having one of the most liberal and tolerant traditions in the world, has a critical drive behind it that is simultaneously deeply grounded in the political struggles of feminists of colour in the Netherlands and deserves to carry well beyond the Dutch context.

In the course of refuting the exceptionalist excuse that white Dutch people ‘did not know’ about race until large numbers of postcolonial migrants and guest workers started arriving after the Second World War, however, Wekker uses the critical tools of Black feminism and Afro-European Studies to show, as scholars of Germany and the Nordic region have done, that ample evidence of public consciousness of race, racism and whiteness can be found even in societies with no history of mass migration of people of colour.

Part of the ‘cultural archive’ of colonialism, a term Wekker brings over from Said, is the ephemera of advertising and commerce, of school textbooks and medical discourse, of popular culture and entertainment, that were already revealing whiteness as a core part of national identity – with racialised notions of primitivism, hypersexuality and Africanity on the other side of this symbolic boundary – at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

As well as a challenge to racial exceptionalism itself, Wekker offers a model for tracing race, racism and whiteness through the everyday consciousness of predominantly white societies which overcomes one of the obstacles to putting race alongside other social identities at the centre of south-east European studies: does race really matter if there have been so few people of colour living there?

Starting with the everyday, and with the embodied cultural politics that we become able to see when we take apparently ephemeral sources like popular music seriously, shows that it does: and besides, ‘few’, of course, is not the same as ‘none’.

Many of the examples I discuss for a paragraph or two in Race and the Yugoslav Region could be books of their own, and I hope this book will help others to conceive them and many other books like it: how has the Venetian figure of the Moor lived on in the Yugoslav region (where Rijeka has its own blackface carnival character, the morčić), and what traces did traditions of colonial spectacle that radiated out from the German-speaking cultural area through the Habsburg lands leave behind? What was it about the small shore of Martinska, near Šibenik, that inspired Aimé Césaire to begin writing his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) – and what ties of anti-colonial friendship and solidarity brought him there? What histories of migration, pushed to the sidelines when the region’s history is written solely as the history of majority ethnic groups, reveal the region’s transnational connections to their full extent? And what could myths of South Slav nations standing at the ‘bulwark of Europe’ against the Ottoman Empire, or Venetian-Ottoman warfare in the early modern Adriatic, have to do with the emergence of ‘race’ through colonialism and slavery across and around the Atlantic itself? Historians of other periods will be able to take this further than a specialist in the post-Cold-War: this book will at least suggest some of what is at stake when they do.

Even as I was writing the book, the amount of new research on race as well as postcoloniality in state socialist Yugoslavia seemed to be increasing month by month – Peter Wright, Nemanja Radonjić, Aida Hozić, Radina Vučetić, Jelena Subotić and Srđan Vučetić all presented new work at conferences in 2016 on issues such as the experiences of African students in Yugoslavia, or Tito’s visits to Africa – to say nothing of the amount of research starting to reassess the politics of post-Yugoslav national identity or public space in view of the refugee crisis.

For all these reasons, and in acknowledgement of authors like Dušan Bjelić, Tomislav Longinović and Konstantin Kilibarda who have already brought critical race scholarship to bear on understanding the Yugoslav region, plus the vein of ‘postsocialist/postcolonial’ research that has already started to extend so many of the connecting branches that made this book possible, I also hope that this book will not become the last word on race and the Yugoslav region – indeed, I urge the reader at the end to make sure through their own citational practices that it does not.

This is a book that responded to the challenges issued by campaigns such as ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?‘, rather than drove them, and is by an author who benefits from the assumed objectivity of whiteness and of not being from the region they are writing about: there is an even greater responsibility on me to create opportunities for the knowledge of marginalised scholars to be elevated, valued and remunerated than there would have been if I had not written this book.

In showing that the global legacies of colonialism have passed and do pass through the Yugoslav region, however, it also contributes to showing that Britain and the former Yugoslavia do not exist in separate spheres of history – and that if, for instance, recognition of historic wrongs (as so much scholarship on the Yugoslav region argues) is a precondition for social peace after ethnopolitical conflict, then for a society as implicated in and structured by the history of racism, slavery and colonialism as Britain, this must be even more the case.

The real impact of Race and the Yugoslav Region, I hope, will lie in how others extend, transform and criticise its suggestions in producing new knowledge and theory from their own situated perspectives – but, if nothing else, it will help to demonstrate that the Yugoslav region is not, and has never been, ‘outside’ the global politics of race.

Eurovision 2017 was remarkable for its lack of politics

This post originally appeared at the LSE European Politics and Policy blog on 15 May 2017.

Eurovision 2017 was a contest with politics much further in the background than many viewers would have expected at the end of last year’s show: the 2016 contest saw Jamala win Ukraine the right to host the following Eurovision with a song that commemorated Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944.

Russia’s last-minute selection of a contestant, Yuliya Samoilova, who had visited Crimea in 2015 without crossing the Russian-Ukrainian border and would therefore be ineligible for entry under Ukrainian law, generated almost a month-long stand-off before Russian television decided in mid-April not to accept any compromise solution or broadcast the show. This meant the greatest reverberations of the Russia–Ukraine conflict for Kyiv 2017 had subsided before they could preoccupy the bubble of journalists, bloggers and fans that generates many of the framing narratives for every Eurovision during a fortnight of rehearsals in the host city.

While visitors to Kyiv were surrounded by architectural and visual reminders of Ukraine’s increasing cultural separation from Russia and the memory of coexistence in the USSR, Ukrainian nationhood in the broadcasts themselves came across largely through citations of folk tradition. There was no equivalent of the moment in Eurovision 2005 where President Viktor Yushchenko, presenting the winner’s trophy, reminded viewers that the Orange Revolution had only ended four months before. Even the Ukrainian entry by rock band O.Torvald had abandoned the ticking countdowns, flame and rubble concept of its early performances – calling to mind iconic photographs of the Euromaidan – for an abstract, utilitarian design.

The European Broadcasting Union, for its part, contributed to the politics-free atmosphere by preventing Portugal’s Salvador Sobral, who had been urging European governments throughout the week to accept more refugees, from wearing an ‘SOS Refugees’ sweatshirt in his last press conferences on the grounds that it broke Eurovision rules against ‘political or commercial’ messages. This was despite the fact that last year’s Eurovision had contained a segment, the acclaimed ‘Grey People’, which was no more and no less political in its depiction of the dangers refugees subject themselves to in order to reach the very ‘Europe’ that Eurovision viewers are celebrating.

The nature of live television nevertheless creates occasional ruptures in this increasingly tightly regulated ideological space. Israel’s spokesperson Ofer Nachshon’s farewell to Eurovision from the soon-to-be-closed Israel Broadcasting Authority left many viewers wondering if he was also announcing the departure of Israel itself. Perhaps the most alarming moment I can remember on a Eurovision screen occurred during the interval, when a man wearing an Australian flag climbed on stage and dropped his trousers in front of Jamala as she performed her new single, ‘I Believe In U’.

While no-one was readier than the internet’s Australians to take self-deprecating credit for the display, the man was a Ukrainian ‘prankster’, Vitalii Sediuk, with a long track record of confronting and assaulting mostly female celebrities in public. With Ukraine in direct conflict with another country where opposition politicians and journalists are liable to become targets of attacks in the street – and with tennis fans in the Yugoslav region especially likely to remember a spectator’s attack on Monica Seles in Hamburg 24 years ago – the fact that a member of the public could get this close to any performer on stage, let alone as politically symbolic a figure as Jamala, overshadowed a contest where in many respects the politics remained off screen.

Under the rainbow arch: hinges of queerness and nationhood at Eurovision

In May 2007, just before Helsinki was about to host its first ever Eurovision Song Contest, a group of media and performance researchers gathered at the University of Helsinki for a symposium on ‘Queer Eurovision!’, later written up as a special issue of the Finnish queer studies journal SQS.

The aim of the symposium, wrote its co-organiser, Mikko Tuhkanen, was to take stock of the ten years since the ‘open secret’ of gay and queer presence at Eurovision had moved from a private subtext behind the show to an inescapable part of the text, starting with the first performance by an out gay man (Páll Óskar from Iceland) in 1997 and written into Eurovision history when Dana International won in 1998.

Many young, and some older, trans viewers of Eurovision were able to see in Dana International’s confidence and glamour the first aspirational representation of trans femininity that film and television had ever offered them. To Eurovision’s much larger number of cis viewers, meanwhile, her identity as a trans woman and her roots in the Tel Aviv’s gay nightlife – at a historical moment where LGBT activists were starting to win limited but important victories by lobbying European institutions – seemed to confirm: yes, Eurovision was gay.

Or as Tuhkanen wrote: ‘With Dana International, the disclosure was complete.’

A few days later, Marija Šerifović would win Eurovision 2007 for Serbia with a performance that the symposium’s other co-organiser, Annamari Vänskä, would persuasively read as an example of ‘lesbian camp‘. Šerifović’s victory took Eurovision 2008 to a country where the government’s failure to provide sufficient security for Belgrade Pride marches to take place had become a symbol, both at home and in European politics, of how far ‘European values’ were or were not embedded in Serbia.

Eurovision 2008 would open up a new chapter of the international politics of queerness and LGBT rights at Eurovision – one where queer people’s equality and security in host states would be heavily scrutinised when the contest took place in postsocialist, eastern European countries (but taken for granted during contests that were held in ‘the West’), and one where sexual orientation and gender identity were becoming matters of foreign policy for many countries in the global North and some (like Brazil and Argentina) in the South.

Šerifović’s victory, in other words, marked the start of another new phase in the queer politics and history of Eurovision – one where, increasingly outside Eurovision as well as inside, tolerance and respect for LGBT rights were about to become a new symbolic boundary in the imaginative geography of ‘East/West’ divisions of Europe that dated back even further than the Cold War.

Of all the contributions to ‘Queer Eurovision!’, the one most often cited in the subfield of ‘Eurovision research’ that itself started growing like a snowball after around 2007 and 2008 is Peter Rehberg’s article ‘Winning failure: queer nationality at the Eurovision Song Contest‘. Rehberg had noticed that the celebrations of queer (above all, gay) identities at Eurovision were an almost unparalleled occasion where fans and viewers did not have to choose between their queerness and their nationhood in order to experience belonging – a rare thing when nationalism, as an ideology, had historically been so hostile to homosexuality and transgressions of traditional gender roles.

(That past tense matters: by the mid-2000s, ‘LGBT-friendliness’ was itself becoming a symbolic value in some accounts of national identity, helping to define nations such as the Netherlands, Sweden or Britain in terms of cultural differences from supposedly ‘more homophobic’ parts of the world – a new way of expressing Europe’s imaginary east/west divide, and sometimes even of creating a troubling, simplistic hierarchy setting ‘the West’ above ‘Islam’ or ‘Africa’.)

Rather than fans celebrating their membership of a transnational gay or queer community instead of nationhood, Rehberg argued that Eurovision allowed them to celebrate as people with queer identities and as members of nations – ‘a rare occasion,’ in his most-quoted line, ‘for simultaneously celebrating both queerness and national identity’ (p. 60).

Ten years on from ‘Queer Eurovision!’, the song contest and queer geopolitics have become even more tied together.

As I’ve written here before, the years between 2008 and 2014 enmeshed Eurovision in the same political struggles over international events, LGBT rights and human rights that are most familiar from controversies over the Beijing and Sochi Olympics (which themselves book-end 2008 and 2014): Belgrade’s hosting of Eurovision in 2008 followed by Moscow in 2009, where the mayor of Moscow sent in police to break up a ‘Slavic Pride’ march on Eurovision final afternoon; the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises Eurovision, again accused of complicity with a repressive and homophobic regime when Baku hosted in 2012; London’s attempt to distance itself from Beijing through how it performed national identity at the 2012 Olympics echoed at Eurovision by Malmö 2013’s self-presentation as the antithesis of Baku 2012, with equal marriage among the many symbols of Swedishness celebrated in the interval; moments of celebrity activism like Krista Siegfrids’s on-stage kiss with another woman, beamed out across Europe while sending a more specific message to Finns before a parliamentary vote on an equal marriage referendum; and, after the Russian parliament criminalised the promotion of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ to under-18s in June 2013, the cycle of Europe-versus-Russia representations around that symbolic boundary of LGBT rights that ran organically from the human rights campaigns before the Sochi Olympics into the meanings of ‘Europe’ and Eurovision when Conchita Wurst took part.

The hinge between queerness and nationhood that Rehberg found at Eurovision would widen in some countries, at least conditionally, with expansions of marriage and family rights and even – after much more struggle – tentative improvements in mechanisms for trans people’s gender recognition: provisions that add up to a greater sense of ‘citizenship’, or the ability to actually exercise the same rights as other citizens, for queer people, or at least those queer people whose race, ethnicity, nationality or religion don’t remove them from that sense of citizenship in other ways.

And yet frictions between the celebration of queerness and the sovereignty of nationhood would persist at Eurovision itself. In 2016, the EBU embroiled itself in unnecessarily awkward dialogues with LGBT fans over whether or not rainbow flags would be allowed in the Eurovision arena (if they were being used in a ‘political’ way, leaked instructions to security staff at the arena suggested, they shouldn’t be allowed – and yet the rainbow flag’s origins in political protest are still, for many but not all LGBT people, inseparable from its meanings in the present), and expected the more specific identities symbolised by the wider family of pride flags (like the bi and trans flags) to be accommodated in the all-encompassing rainbow.

Meanwhile, it had to be aware both that its Russian member broadcasters were under LGBT-phobic pressure to withdraw from Eurovision – so that Russian families wouldn’t have to watch examples of ‘Western decadence’ like Conchita Wurst – and that the very celebrations of queerness many viewers would expect from Eurovision, indeed be disappointed if the contest didn’t show, might now be ruled illegal to broadcast in Russia under the laws that a coalition of neo-traditional politicians and the Russian Orthodox Church had steered through parliament with Putin’s approval in 2013.

Since 2007, in other words, that hinge between queerness and national belonging that Rehberg had found one expression of at Eurovision had acquired three new dimensions: its vulnerability to being instrumentalised as a way of constructing tolerant and progressive Western and European national identities against backward cultural ‘others’; the hardening of a symbolic boundary between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’; and the realisation, as Russian queers saw in 2013 and Western queers themselves have had to come to terms with after seeing the Obama presidency’s steps towards LGBT equality reversed in a matter of weeks, that the greater sense of national citizenship and belonging that some LGBT people have been able to win can always be assaulted and lost again.

Come into me from within, we can be as one in the sin

The vagaries of Eurovision qualification – where almost 40 entries will take part in two semi-finals and only 20 go through to the grand final on Saturday – mean that this year’s most interesting example of how queerness and nationhood can combine at Eurovision, Slavko Kalezić’s ‘Space’, has already gone out of contention. Hidden away in the Tuesday semi-final, the 2017 entry most conscious of, and most adapted to, the homoerotic male gaze of gay spectatorship didn’t come from any self-imagined north-west European stronghold of gay rights, but from Montenegro – and depended on specifically post-Yugoslav ways of reinventing masculinity rather than any denationalised model of the ‘global gay’.

The presentation of Kalezić’s preview video for ‘Space’ in March left no doubt this was a song and performance aimed at the gay and bisexual male viewer in the sense that their likely pleasures are more embedded in the song than any other. Entering through a neon galaxy (with echoes perhaps of Lady Gaga’s ‘Mother Monster’ phase), the camera takes viewers to a dark disco and a dramatic rocky landscape where Kalezić is dancing shirtless, often singing directly to the viewer in extreme close up, as we hear lines like ‘Wet dreams, wild nightmares, I surrender / Come into me from within / We can be as one in the sin’.

The rest of the lyrics are filled with callouts to ejaculation and orgasm, mixed with a fluidity of gender roles (‘I’m Venus and Mars of the hour’), and fans were quick to interpret a line about ‘I’ve got my suit on, no need to worry’ – ostensibly, of course, about a space suit – as standing for using a condom during safe sex.

Even as Eurovision entries go, ‘Space’ is remarkable in its commitment to the codes of double entendre. Moreover, the lyrics put Kalezić in a receptive role, the riskier and queerer position for a man who has sex with men to take in many binaries of male sexuality that view receiving penetration, as opposed to giving penetration, as a much more threatening act for masculinity (thus feminising and stigmatising passive sexual role): it’s the thought that men can enjoy being penetrated that really unsettles many homophobes.

While Kalezić’s unabashed enthusiasm for male/male sexuality has rough Western equivalents – a Frankie Goes To Hollywood or, especially, a George Michael – ‘Space’ is far from an import of Western gay aesthetics – and that needs saying all the more loudly when so much public and state homophobia, the ideology behind the Russian ‘gay propaganda’ laws or the far-right and Church mobilisation against LGBT activism and Pride marches in Serbia, Ukraine, and many other countries, is grounded in imagining that the authentic masculinity of the nation can never accommodate being gay or taking pleasure in sexual acts performed by other men.

Throughout the introduction of LGBT-phobic legislation in Russia, the current persecution of gay and bisexual men in Chechnya, or the ongoing harassment and violence of LGBT activist movements and Pride campaigns, discourses of nationalism and sexuality hold that – supposedly – it’s against the authentic morals of the nation for men to behave like this. Opposing moves to recognise LGBT rights as human rights as the United Nations, the Russian government has argued that the West has sought to impose LGBT equality on Russia in the face of Russia’s authority to determine its own moral code: in the Russian nation as Putin imagines it, ‘non-traditional’ sexual relations should stay out of sight.

The hostile comments Kalezić received from Montenegrin social media users after his video was published similarly included references to ‘Western decadence’ or the remark that ‘Njegoš would be ashamed.’ The epics of Njegoš, the 19th-century prince-bishop and national poet of Montenegro who wrote (with graphic violence) about the heroism of Montenegrin highland clans fighting the Ottoman Turks, are at the core of Montenegrin myths of national masculinity.

In response, Kalezić told the Montenegrin web portal CDM: ‘if Njegoš were alive, he’d actually support me. Those of you who are mentioning him, if you’ve read The Mountain Wreath or A Night Worth A Century [his two major works] should know that in fact he was an exceptional thinker and empath. Full of symbolic energy and the energy of life.’

Beyond queering Eurovision or queering the nation, Kalezić was doing something even more threatening to Montenegrin heteronormativity: queering Njegoš.

Moreover, the way Kalezić – in his video more than his Eurovision performance – embodies genderfluidity and male/male sexual desire reflects a tension for queer people across most of the globe: how to find modes of sexual difference and gender non-conformity that don’t require total separation from national tradition, that is, how to situate oneself in the linguistic and cultural material of a nation to which one should be able to belong.

The questions are the very stuff of global queer politics – including in Montenegro, where (as Danijel Kalezić writes in his contribution to Bojan Bilić’s recent volume on post-Yugoslav LGBT activism) non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming people question whether their activism and organisation necessarily needs to follow the Western European and North American model of Pride, why anyone should expect queer identities to develop with the same categories or timescale they have in the West, and where there might be Montenegrin queer histories to reclaim.

‘Space’, on video, contains visual nods to Byzantine iconography and also, in the whirling of Kalezić’s robe and hair, something of Sufi tradition: a reference which, at least to me as a spectator, brings to mind another gender-non-conforming post-Yugoslav singer from Bosnia, Božo Vrećo.

Vrećo, seen here in his own enrobed whirling through a dramatic landscape, has succeeded in what Tea Hadžiristić described in an article for Balkanist as ‘queering sevdah’. In singing and writing this form of traditional Bosnian folk music, Vrećo speaks both as a woman and as a man. His gender expression, both in and out of performance, actively reuses Bosnian traditions across gender boundaries: among his tattoos, for instance, are symbols on his hands that Bosnian Catholic women used to tattoo as protective bridal charms. Vrećo neither uses nor needs Western or Anglophone categories of sexual and gender variance to present himself. As a result, Hadžiristić writes:

Vrećo eschews ascribing Western-style identity categories to himself that allows him to be celebrated by Bosnians as a star and emblem of Bosnian talent, while at the same time enacting his own brand of queer gender presentation. Outside of a context where LGBT rights are seen as part of a modernization package leading to EU accession, his queerness is accepted because it is seen as Bosnian rather than a threat coming from the ‘outside’. In itself, this has radical potential because it demonstrates that queerness is not a Western import and that it can and does exist naturally in Bosnia and jive with ‘Bosnianness’. A Bosnian queer is possible.

So, Kalezić shows, is a Montenegrin queer. So is a Serbian queer: Marija Šerifović, Serbia’s Eurovision winner in 2007, came out in 2013 (after years of public speculation about her sexuality during which she was only photographed with one boyfriend, Slavko Kalezić), and in gender expression is indistinguishable from male stars in the same field of Serbian pop – though doesn’t subvert dominant ideologies of Serbian nationhood in other ways (after all, Serbian women, or women anywhere else, are not necessarily left-wing committed anti-nationalists just because they’re queer).

The aesthetic codes that ‘Space’ as a video depend on are already well-established in Belgrade-based popular music production for the post-Yugoslav linguistic and cultural area: in fact, its director, Dejan Milićević, is none other than the foremost video director for Serbian pop-folk music or what’s still sometimes called ‘turbofolk’.

Milićević’s videos employ what Balkanist‘s pop blogger Eurovicious (in his ‘Queer as Turbofolk’ series) calls a ‘tricky balancing act’ in which ‘the queer subtext must be subtle enough to pass over the heads of the straight audience, but explicit enough to maintain the interest of the gay male audience’. This example, for a Danijel Djokić video in 2012, is as good as any:

Milićević’s signature devices of lingering on the exposed male body and visualising the male singer’s inviting gaze back at the viewer – all filtered through the conventions of fashion photography – are an established aesthetic in post-Yugoslav music. For Marko Dumančić and Krešimir Krolo, in fact, they help to suggest that the Belgrade school of pop-folk music has produced a – however commodified and objectified masculinity that differs importantly from how the same music used to celebrate the masculinities of paramilitarism and organised crime.

The Milićević aesthetic taken into Eurovision sees a localised homoerotics, in which queer men in and around Serbia and Montenegro are already taking pleasure, meshing with other queer, and straight, gazes situated elsewhere. Indeed, Macedonia’s preview video for Tijana Dapčević’s entry in 2014 relied on the same presentation of the male body and the same scopic pleasure of looking at the male body even though it was directed by a different director, Mert Arslani:

For better or worse, the Macedonian team didn’t bring the video’s homoerotics of the Macedonian Air Force into the live performance (or even get Tijana to wear the white glasses that she’d showed to every journalist who met her during Eurovision week) – and Eurovision viewers didn’t get to see half as Montenegrin a setting for ‘Space’ as Kalezić’s preview had been able to conjure.

The braid stays, but the robe is off within less than fifty seconds (Kalezić is wearing sparkly jeans underneath), and the high-resolution video backdrop is showing galactic patterns or blow-ups of Kalezić’s body rather than the mountain landscapes that Montenegro’s preview videos can be guaranteed to show off: I do wonder whether the more localised elements from the video (even if many viewers elsewhere in Europe would just view them as ‘more Balkan’) might have helped the song stand out better in a semi-final that contained at least one other south-east European pop song based on astrophysics and the return of Moldova’s Epic Sax Guy.

Once the EBU releases the semi-final results and the breakdown of how expert juries and the public voted in each country, it’ll be interesting to see whether Kalezić’s points were simply relatively low all round or whether he encountered the obstacle that made even Conchita Wurst’s scores not as high as they might have been: that five music professionals per country have more influence than a member of the public, by a magnitude of thousands, over whether a performance that plays on queerness as much as Kalezić or Conchita is going to get any points. Both homophobia, biphobia and transphobia on the part of a juror, or pressure from the broadcaster or elsewhere, can have a disproportionately high impact on the votes a jury gives.

Indeed, this isn’t just a problem of the 2010s: Páll Óskar’s ‘Minn hinsti dans’, in 1997, scored only 18 points and came 20th out of 25th – but 16 of the 18 points came from countries that were experimenting for the first time with a public televote, Austria, Sweden and the UK.

Conchita, in 2014, didn’t suffer a mass rejection among public voters even in Russia, but expert juries ranked her noticeably lower than the public, leading to eastern Europe countries appearing to have given her relatively fewer points than the West.

With Kalezić out of the running for the grand final, however, the most significant hinges of queerness and nationhood at Eurovision 2017 are likely to be behind the scenes rather than on stage.

Repainting the rainbow arch

Ukraine’s public diplomacy, since 2014, has striven not only to inform the world that Ukraine still has sovereignty over Crimea and eastern Ukraine but also to show that Ukraine belongs to a different, European community of values than Putin’s Russia – a political and cultural separation not unlike the move with which Croatia in 1990-5, before and during its war of independence, sought to separate itself (sometimes coercively) from Yugoslavia.

One of several important differences between the Croatian case and Ukraine’s, however, is that there was no incentive for the 1990s Croatian regime not to double down on homophobia in its political compact with the Catholic Church. For Ukraine, on the other hand, being able to demonstrate progress on what diplomats take as the benchmarks of LGBT rights (such as whether Pride marches are being held safely) could – at least when LGBT rights were the foreign policy issue that they were under Obama and still are to some governments – help to create a clear moral boundary in Western eyes between Ukraine and Putin’s Russia.

If Russia had not withdrawn from Eurovision after Ukrainian security services banned the Russian contestant Yuliya Samoilova from entering the country (in 2015 she had visited Crimea without first legally entering Ukraine), public awareness of the organised disappearances, torture and killing of gay and bisexual men in Chechnya could well have elicited more hostile reactions from viewers than Russian competitors faced even in 2014, the first Eurovision since the ‘gay propaganda’ law went into force, or 2015 – perhaps not even a contestant able to win as much goodwill from fans as Sergey Lazarev would have been able to do much to hold it off.

The potential diplomatic value of publicly performing support for LGBT equality sits uneasily with the patriarchal homophobia of the Ukrainian far right and paramilitary movement – a potential insurgent force that continues to overshadow the Ukrainian government.

The impasse was symbolised by the outcome of an initiative to repaint the Arch of the Friendship of Peoples, a Soviet monument built in a large Kyiv park in 1982. The Arch is among the monuments that the Ukrainian government now plans to remove under a ‘decommunisation’ law introduced in May 2016 (bringing Ukraine, two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, closer to the memory politics of early post-Yugoslav Croatia).

First, however, Kyiv city council decided to repaint it in rainbow colours as a temporary Arch of Diversity in time for Eurovision and Kyiv Pride – as if taking up the street-art aesthetic that since 2011 has regularly been seeing Sofia’s Monument to the Soviet Army repainted so that the soldiers are wearing American superhero costumes, bright pink uniforms or even Ukrainian flags.

The rainbow symbol, and ‘diversity’ itself, contain a non-specificity and deniability which often frustrates queer and LGBT people who want their identities and experiences to be named as such; ‘Celebrate Diversity’, the slogan of Eurovision 2017, is so broad it could be celebrating nothing at all (while performing a celebration of diversity, as Sara Ahmed writes, is so often a substitute for institutions actually making the difficult structural changes necessary for their workforce to be meaningfully diverse). That very slipperiness, however, also creates the space of manoeuvre in which the painting of the Arch of Diversity could take place without the city council having to openly name the rainbow as queer.

Painting the Arch of Diversity in Kyiv, April 2017

The arch was in a half-painted state last week when members of far-right groups including Right Sector and Svoboda threatened municipal workers and ordered the painting to stop – calling the rainbow ‘gay propaganda’, in the same terms as LGBT-phobia in Russia. On 4 May the mayor of Kyiv, Vitaliy Klitschko, announced, in what was widely seen as a symbolic concession, that the rest of the arch would be filled in with ‘a Ukrainian decorative pattern.’

The bands of orange, yellow, green, blue and purple that currently rise from the base of the arch, leaving blunt interruptions of grey metal near the top, could as an aesthetic choice have captured the viewer’s gaze and forced them to think about why the progress was incomplete, better than the full rainbow would have done: in that sense, designing such a rupture into the arch might have expressed the contingency of queer politics better.

Enforcing the rupture from outside, however, means that the unpainted metal of the present arch and the traditional national pattern of its future – likely based on the same handicrafts that have given Eurovision 2017 much of its visual identity – also represent the material power that the far right in Ukraine can exert over what degree of LGBT equality, visibility or public presence they are prepared to allow.

The half-rainbowed arch under which many Eurovision fans, of different genders and sexualities, are photographing themselves this weekend in Kyiv is not only, therefore, a symbol of transnational ‘rainbow’ politics or an instrument of national public diplomacy. It is a sign of the contingency and insecurity of queer existence: the knowledge, as immediate or distant as it seems, that even official commitments towards equality can still be met with violence and still bargained away.

The idea that time’s imaginary arrow can go backwards – that even if you can belong more to your nation than you used to do, the time may still come when the nation and its state turns on you again – is not just an experience of queerness in Russia or Ukraine: it is one that queer people in the West are also confronting, after only a few years where it started to feel possible to forget.

There’s a moment, or many moments, in Belgium’s performance at Eurovision this year where, even though the singer Blanche as far as anyone knows isn’t queer, the song captures a mood of insecurity and doubt that queer, and feminist, politics in 2017 knows very well.

In a voice so uncomfortable that a lot of viewers – including myself the first time – initially heard it as stage fright, yet selling the song to enough voters for it to qualify from the semi-final, Blanche keeps returning to the same refrain: ‘All alone in the danger zone / are you ready to take my hand? / All alone in a flame of doubt / are we going to lose it all?’

Rather than fulfilling the same storytelling momentum that recent Eurovision winners have increasingly been able to convey through digital staging that sometimes seems to tell an almost mythological story of command over nature or technology, ‘City Lights’ is caught in indecision. It doesn’t offer the climax of the young-adult dystopian narratives it seems to draw from, where we know that sooner or later the young heroes will make their break, escape the city and join hands; instead, it cycles back to hesitation.

Its last seconds, where Blanche repeats the same line three times before the lights and music suddenly drop out as she crosses her arms, would be an even bleaker winner’s reprise than the end of Jamala’s ‘1944’ – and yet, for some viewers, the words are already on their minds:

‘Are we going to lose it all?’

Yugoslavia’s last summer dance: did Serbia and Montenegro really break up over Eurovision?

This post originally appeared at Balkanist on 8 May 2017.

Two and a half months before Montenegrins were due to vote in a referendum on independence from Serbia that would bring the union of the last two Yugoslav republics to an end, Montenegrin and Serbian television viewers in March 2006 had a different kind of vote to cast: choosing what might be Serbia–Montenegro’s last entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.

The outcome of the national selection at the Sava Centar in Belgrade – with the Montenegrin delegation outraged that spectators had jeered and thrown bottles at the winning Montenegrin band, the Belgrade audience and the Serbian press accusing the Montenegrin jurors of ganging up to make sure a song from Montenegro won, and Serbia–Montenegro ultimately unable to send a song to Eurovision that year at all – seemed to symbolise a breakdown in relations that would have to make separation inevitable: if Serbia and Montenegro couldn’t co-operate on picking a song for Eurovision, how could they be expected to co-operate on anything else?

If Evropesma 2006 hadn’t happened, one or other of the smart young post-Yugoslav directors on the mid-2000s film-festival circuit would have had to make it up: a portmanteau of political contradictions and historical legacies crashing into each other in a setting tailor-made for pop-culture nostalgia, with cameos from a world-weary Sarajevan and a sex symbol from Split, all circling round a competition where the question of who got to take credit for the Eurovision entries of a disintegrating state had rumbled on ever since the Yugoslav federation fell apart.

Yugoslavia had been telling stories about its place in the world through Eurovision since 1961, when joining in the annual contest as the only state socialist country ever to take part helped to symbolise the proud geopolitical position ‘between east and west’ – unattached either to Soviet communism or American capitalism – that Tito’s Yugoslavia claimed as the host, later that year, of the First Non-Aligned Conference in Belgrade.

Out of the string of songs that TV Zagreb guided through Yugoslavia’s inter-republic Eurovision selection festival, Jugovizija, in an unbroken streak between 1986 and 1990, the most successful had been the jaunty slice of zabavna (light-entertainment) music called ‘Rock me baby,’ with which the Zadar band Riva narrowly won Eurovision in 1989 – entitling Yugoslavia to host Eurovision 1990.

 

By May 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen, most of the 22 Eurovision contestants that year had come equipped with something about freedom, walls or Europe in their lyrics, and moving the symbolic centre of Europe for an evening to a state socialist country adapting to multi-party democracy told an even more powerful story about ‘Europe’ than viewers in 1989 would have anticipated there would be.

Within Yugoslavia, of course, 1989–90 had been a time of increasing political tensions between republics, spurred on by Slobodan Milošević’s populist agitation about the ‘minority’ position of Serbs in the federation, the anti-democratic steps he took to build his personal power on the federal presidency, his suppression of Albanians’ civil rights in Kosovo, and the reactions this climate provoked in Slovenia and Croatia.

Rivalries between TV Zagreb and the umbrella federal broadcaster Yugoslav Radio-Television (JRT) dogged the organisation of the contest, and the TV Zagreb that hosted Eurovision in May 1990 was very soon to become Croatian Television (HTV), a state broadcaster with a declared nation-building mission – to reshape Croatian public consciousness around the public’s sense of themselves as Croats, away from affinity with Yugoslavia or even memory that Croats and Serbs had once sought a political future together.

Indeed, Croatia’s first multi-party elections – which voted the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) into power on a ticket of freedom, independence and closeness to Europe but alarmed Serbs who saw in HDZ a disturbing ambivalence towards the legacy of the 1941–5 Independent State of Croatia and its genocidal persecution of Serbs – had their second and last round the day after Eurovision 1990.

‘Rock me baby’, as Croatian viewers are annually reminded, is the star turn in Croatia’s national history of Eurovision – a victory in the name of Yugoslavia but, along the contours of post-Yugoslav Croatian cultural identity, unambiguously made in Croatia.

It was also, of course, a Yugoslav victory – something which in the cultural politics of ‘brotherhood and unity’ belonged to the whole country, regardless of the republic that had produced it. Milošević, unlike the 1990s Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, did not sever Serbian cultural identity from ‘Yugoslav’ culture even as he gave orders in wars that would destroy the Yugoslav idea in practice. On Serbian television, Riva’s Eurovision win in 1989 is just as much ‘ours’ as it is in Croatia.

After Eurovision 1990, when Croatian teen idol Tajči performed another standard of late Yugoslav zabavna music, the fifties-retro ‘Hajde da ludujemo’ (‘Let’s go crazy’) – not at all to be confused with newly-composed folk music star Lepa Brena’s 1987–9 musical trilogy Hajde da se volimo (Let’s fall in love) – no Croatian participant would even come close to representing Yugoslavia.

 

The state of relations between Tuđman’s Croatia and the federal institutions Milošević successfully dominated was such, by March 1991, that none of the Croatian singers who travelled to Sarajevo for the last ‘Jugovizija’ to involve all six republics are likely to have believed they had a serious chance of winning – least of all Tedi Spalato, who chose to perform his song ‘Gospode moj’ (‘O, my lord’), one of many overtly Catholic songs now allowed to be shown on HTV, dressed as a friar.

TV Belgrade’s entry, to nobody’s surprise, won the next Jugovizija in 1991, with Milošević exerting enough control over institutions in Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro to pressure their JRT ‘studios’ to vote the same way as Belgrade. TV Belgrade and TV Priština gave no points to Spalato the leading Croatian contender, Danijel Popović – a Montenegrin born in Podgorica who would relaunch his pop career then in 2005 – whose song followed in Tajči’s retro footsteps with the Americanising title of ‘Daj, obuci levisice’ (‘Come on, put your Levis on’).

The winner, Bebi Dol with ‘Brazil’, reached 68 points on the basis of votes from the Belgrade, Priština, Novi Sad and Montenegro studios – and nowhere else.

 

One last Jugovizija, with entries from the Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Priština, Belgrade and Montenegro studios but no Slovenian, Croatian or Macedonian participation, took place on 28 March 1992 – the same day that the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, would withdraw his assent to the Lisbon Agreement and its suggested division of Bosnia-Herzegovina. TV Belgrade’s Extra Nena performed at Eurovision 1992 in Malmö a few weeks before United Nations sanctions against the Milošević regime came into force and prevented what had become the ‘Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ (FRY) – that is, Serbia and Montenegro – from competing in Eurovision for the rest of the 1990s.

Taking part in Eurovision became a possibility again after Milošević fell from power in October 2000. A year after FRY converted into a looser State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, meeting the pro-independence ambitions of the Montenegrin prime minister Milo Đukanović halfway, the Association of Public Broadcasters of Serbia and Montenegro (UJRT) returned to Eurovision in 2004 in almost as dramatic a way as possible: by selecting an expertly assembled repackaging of musical and cultural traditions, Željko Joksimović’s ‘Lane moje’ (‘My faun’) that came second, behind Ukraine’s Ruslana, and set the format for many of the Yugoslav region’s most successful Eurovision songs over the next decade, often written by Joksimović himself.

 

Joksimović’s performance, as Serbian anthropologists including Vesna Mikić and Marijana Mitrović have written, aimed to communicate a gentle, non-threatening image of Serbian masculinity a world away from the pictures of gangsters, paramilitaries and war-criminal leaders that had dominated Western perceptions of Serbia since the Yugoslav wars. Hitting all the buttons of the mode of ‘consenting self-exoticisation’ that had spread from the ‘world music’ circuit to Eurovision by 2004, Joksimović performed a knowing familiarity with the exoticising gaze of Western viewers that aimed to reposition himself and the nation as paradoxically modern, able to step away from tradition at the same time as playing with it.

Joksimović had got to Eurovision through a sixteen-song final in Belgrade, Evropesma, with eight songs from Serbia and eight from Montenegro. Four of the Serbian songs had themselves come through the 28-song Beovizija festival, held the night before – perhaps as a way to include popular pop-folk acts in the spectacle with minimal risk of one actually going to Eurovision (even pop-folk superstar Jelena Karleuša, in her only attempt to take part in Eurovision so far, had only scraped an undistinguished 13 points).

Montenegrin viewers who complained that the Serbian jurors and audience hadn’t voted for any of the Montenegrin songs in Evropesma 2004 – quite likely because Montenegrin television hadn’t booked any singers with an established audience outside Montenegro – had much more to celebrate a year later, when ‘Zauvijek moja’ (‘Forever mine’) by the new Montenegrin boyband No Name won Evropesma 2005.

‘Zauvijek moja’ was the Joksimović formula applied to Montenegro’s striking landscapes and old coastal towns, with lyrics doing the typical geographical move of many post/Yugoslav patriotic songs by knitting a diverse landscape of shorelines, rivers and mountains into one national whole – representing both countries, but quite clearly coded with its use of the ijekavian language variant (rather then Serbia’s ekavian) and its emphasis on hills, not to mention its video, as Montenegro.

 

Serbia–Montenegro at Eurovision could have carried on, formally or informally, in this post-Yugoslav version of an ‘ethnic key’ for some time (responsibility for Belgium’s Eurovision entries, after all, rotates between the French- and Flemish-speaking broadcasters every year).

Instead, Evropesma 2006, at the Sava Centar in Belgrade, proved to be the last joint selection in which the two republics would ever take part – and one of the last media events to involve both republics before Montenegrins voted for independence in a referendum which, it was declared on 2 March 2006, was going to take place only a day after the 2006 Eurovision final.

Evropesma 2006, as in 2005, combined the top-scoring songs from separate festivals in Serbia and Montenegro (Beovizija and Montevizija) into one final contest in Belgrade. Montenegrin grievances before Evropesma in 2005, when Serbian television had apparently promoted its own songs (including a Joksimović-written entry for Jelena Tomašević) more heavily than Montenegro’s, had been somewhat alleviated by No Name’s result, though the surprisingly few points Serbian jurors gave No Name and the no points at all that Montenegrin jurors gave Tomašević suggested that their relations at Evropesma were beginning to echo the increasing political separation of the republics.

If you could have tracked Yugoslavia’s disintegration in 1989–92 through the process of its Eurovision song selection breaking down, was the same about to happen for Serbia and Montenegro?

Radio-Television Serbia (RTS) arrived at Evropesma with a slate of big names and productions including Ana Nikolić – whose pan-Balkan ‘Romale romali’, rumour held later, was supposedly going to be re-recorded in English by none other than Kylie Minogue – Ivana Jordan’s etno-trance ‘Lazarica’, and Tijana Dapčević’s tightly-choreographed ‘Greh’, which stopped short in its fifteen-second instrumental break for the Macedonian-born, Belgrade-based singer (whose married surname came from her Montenegrin husband) to mime playing the cello live on stage.

Beovizija runners-up Flamingosi, joined by the etno-jazz singer Ljubiša Stojanović Louis, had only been formed the previous year but gathered more and more momentum before Evropesma as TV and radio replayed their comic take on twenties dance crazes, ‘Ludi letnji ples’ (‘Crazy summer dance’). The duo of TV presenter Ognjen Amidžić, born in Šabac, and actor Marinko Madžgalj, who had been born in Belgrade but grew up in Kotor, Montenegro, crammed the names of seventeen European capital cities into what the beginning of the song already announced as ‘the winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2006’.

Ironically, in light of the result, ‘Ludi letnji ples’ would have been more representative of the Serbia–Montenegro state union than almost any other entry from Serbia – with Amidžić singing in the ekavian language variant and Madžgalj singing in his own ijekavian, a small linguistic detail with big symbolic weight. (Montenegrin, like Croatian, uses the ijekavian variant as standard – and the two versions of the vowel mark language as ‘in Serbian’ or ‘not in Serbian’ in much post-Yugoslav language politics today.)

 

Radio-Television Montenegro (RTCG), for its part, brought the winner of Montevizija, Stevan Faddy’s ‘Cipele’ – an uptempo ballad in the style of Danijel Popović, the Montenegrin singer who had performed another of TV Zagreb’s classic Eurovision entries in the eighties – and the top half of the Montevizija scoreboard. Serbian viewers would have recognised few of the acts except No Name, seeking a second consecutive Eurovision performance.

Their song ‘Moja ljubavi’, with traditional zurla pipes mixed into the soundtrack, involved essentially the same drums and harmonies as ‘Zauvijek moja’, set itself between the sea and mountains, and addressed a ‘you’ who might as well have been a woman or the nation.

 

The confrontation between Evropesma’s live audience and the Montenegrin jurors – who were uniformly choosing not to vote either for Flamingosi or Ana Nikolić – did not just bring back to mind the gradual collapse of Jugovizija and Yugoslavia because of how it juxtaposed Serbian perceptions of Montenegrin obstructionism with the determination of Montenegro’s political leadership to obtain independence: it also took place in the presence of two Croatian and Bosnian pop stars with widespread appeal across the post-Yugoslav region who had been invited to perform in the Evropesma interval, each of whom brought their own associations with the cultural politics of wider Yugoslavia.

Hari Mata Hari, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s contestant in 2006, was set to win Bosnia’s best ever Eurovision result – third place – with his song ‘Lejla’, co-written by Joksimović in what was now the recognisable Eurovision genre of the ‘Balkan ethnic ballad’.

 

Bosnian TV’s invitation to Joksimović had been controversial among Bosniak nationalists who believed that inviting a Serbian composer to write the Bosnian entry was unfair to Bosnian songwriters and an insult to the memory of victims of war crimes committed by Serbs.

The cooperation between Hari Mata Hari and Joksimović, however, was characteristic of the tentative re-establishment of connections between Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian music industries that had started to take place at the end of the 1990s and was becoming, if not yet routine, at least a regular practice by 2006.

While Bosnian–Croatian collaborations were the least politically sensitive and most common, the most sensitive material and symbolic boundary in post-Yugoslav cultural politics during the mid-2000s was between Croatia and Serbia – and this was the line that Evropesma’s other special guest, the Croatian star Severina, had crossed in choosing to collaborate for her Eurovision entry with the Sarajevo-born, Belgrade-based composer Goran Bregović.

 

The elements of folk song, dance and costume from the Dalmatian hinterland that Severina had incorporated into her own example of Eurovision ethnopop, ‘Moja štikla’ (‘My stiletto’) – written for her by Croatia’s Eurovision representative in 2005, Boris Novković – had been the subject of a moral panic in Croatia for weeks before it had even won Croatia’s own marathon Eurovision selection, ‘Dora’. When Croatian national identity was supposed to depend on the nation being European and not Balkan – therefore not Serbian, Yugoslav, or ‘eastern’-sounding either – the Dinaric chants and gusle lines of ‘Moja štikla’ sounded far too much like what many Croats thought of as Serbian ‘turbofolk’ to represent Croatia in a competition with a hundred million Europeans looking on.

Insisting that the song’s component parts were authentically Croatian, as Severina and her team went through all sorts of strategies to do, just reminded people of the uncomfortable truth that traditions understood as ‘Balkan’ were inseparably part of Croatia’s own cultural identity. Traditionalists objected to Severina’s racy past – in 2004 she had been one of the first celebrities from any country to have a sex tape leaked on to the internet – and the song’s interjections of ‘s-s-s-sex’.

In short, Severina had tapped into almost every cultural anxiety in mid-2000s Croatia even before it was confirmed that the song had been composed by Goran Bregović – the Sarajevo rocker turned world music entrepreneur who the Croatian press could easily describe as Serbian himself after his choice to live between Paris and Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, and who was famous for incorporating Serbian folk music and – often uncredited – Romani music into his songs.

Bregović’s old band, Bijelo dugme, had reunited in 2005 for three large concerts in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb, the first time corporate sponsors – especially in Croatia – had stood behind the nostalgia for Yugoslav popular culture that had sustained some remnant of a pan-Yugoslav cultural space despite the violence with which inter-ethnic coexistence in the region had been torn apart.

Evropesma 2006, with Yugoslavia’s last two republics pulling away from each other and the memory of a larger Yugoslavia haunting the Sava Centar in the shape of two Croatian and Bosnian stars with their own complex relationships to whatever ‘Yugoslavia’ might mean fifteen years after the Yugoslav wars began, would have unfolded in the shadow of the ‘former state’ even without the news that began to filter through to the Serbian public that Saturday afternoon: that Slobodan Milošević had been found dead in The Hague.

Milošević’s death in custody at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), cutting short his trial and the longest case the ICTY’s prosecutors had ever worked, came only a week after the first president of the Republic of Serb Krajina (RSK), Milan Babić, had also been found dead in the ICTY detention unit. Babić had been convicted of crimes against humanity for his part in the RSK’s occupation of Croatian territory and displacement of Croats from the area that Milošević had planned to annex into Serbia; serving his sentence in an undisclosed location, he had returned briefly to the ICTY to testify against Milan Martić, the second president of the RSK.

Babić had committed suicide, while Milošević suffered from a chronic heart condition that had already delayed his trial on several occasions; Serbs who found conspiracy theories persuasive still suspected the deaths had not been accidents. Even if only unconsciously, the script of ‘conspiracies against Serbs’ would have been in at least some audience members’ minds as the Evropesma voting ritual broke down.

 

The Sava Centar audience began booing Montenegro’s first juror, music producer Predrag Kalezić, as soon as he awarded his top two sets of points, 10 and 12, to the top two Montenegrin favourites ‘Cipele’ and ‘Moja ljubavi’ – the same pattern as the Montenegrin votes in Evropesma 2005. The second Montenegrin juror, journalist Milica Belević, was booed as soon as she walked on stage. In contrast, the crowd cheered RTS music editor Zoran Tašić as he walked on stage, even before he said ‘We’re going to try and be a bit more correct about our voting’ – to more applause – and gave 12 points to ‘Ludi letnji ples’. Spectators were already booing even the small number of points that Tašić and other Serbian jurors gave Montenegrin songs.

As the pattern continued, more Serbian jurors began their votes with comments on the Montenegrins’ behaviour, and a few audience members began to walk out – from the same complex where members of the Slovenian and Croatian branches of the League of Communists had walked out of the last all­-Yugoslav Party congress in January 1990 in protest at Milošević, triggering the announcement of multi-party elections in their two republics and then in every other over the course of that year.

The Serbian tabloid Svet would indeed write, on 16 March:

In the same Sava Centar hall where, exactly 16 years ago, the fall of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began at the 14th Congress of the League of Communists, what little remained of that country finally fell apart too! The irony of history: on the day of Milošević’s death, Severina with her Likans and Dalmatians received ovations, and the Montenegrins were chased off stage with bottles and whistles!

When No Name were declared the winners over Flamingosi by 64 points to 60, more than half the remaining audience started putting on their coats – while the presenters carried on trying to award No Name their winners’ trophy.

Instead, another Serbian juror, Milan Đurđević from the rock band Neverne bebe, came on stage to tell the audience ‘in the name of the people who did their job honestly – those are the people from the Serbian jury […] that we came here honestly and honourably, and […] didn’t vote using any kind of “key”,’ calling on the producers to reopen the result.

With the audience milling around in the aisles, No Name finally came on stage – only for the camera to cut away and No Name to walk back off after, it would turn out, bottles had been thrown at the band.

‘This is Wonderland!’ (‘Ovo je zemlja čuda!’) said one of the presenters, shaking his head, as Flamingosi came out instead to perform what turned into – itself the kind of hedonism–resignation–confusion one often found in post-Yugoslav Serbian film – an impromptu conga around the Sava Centar as the credits rolled.

During the next week, Serbian media kept up pressure on RTS and UJRT to re-run the final, declare Flamingosi the winners, or do anything other than send No Name to Eurovision, while RTCG contacted the European Broadcasting Union (the organisers of Eurovision) directly to ask them to recognise No Name.

This international recognition crisis, unlike Slovenia’s and Croatia’s, only lasted a few days: when RTS and RTCG failed to come to an agreement as the EBU had insisted they do, Serbia–Montenegro withdrew from Eurovision 2006 on 20 March, freeing up the automatic spot in that year’s final that Serbia–Montenegro would have had on the basis of No Name’s top-ten finish at Eurovision 2005.

By one more of the many quirks in the Evropesma story, the 11th place that Boris Novković had won for Croatia when he took part in 2005 meant that Serbia–Montenegro’s irreconcilable entry put Severina and ‘Moja štikla’ – the most controversially ‘Balkan’ song in Croatia’s Eurovision history – straight into the 2006 final.

Or as another Serbian tabloid, Blic, wrote on 20 March: ‘Only Severina is representing us in Athens.’

Hari Mata Hari, rather than Severina, would turn out the more successful bearer of the shifting Serbian/Yugoslav domestic ‘we’: ‘Lejla’ came third and cemented Joksimović’s reputation as a Eurovision entrepreneur, while ‘Moja štikla’ came a relatively disappointing twelfth, its weeks of controversy ensuring that no Croatian entry since has ever taken a similar cultural risk. (The Croatian entrant in 2017, Jacques Houdek, may risk ridicule for a song that requires him to sing in both pop and opera voices – but at least the cultural origins of the music he is mocked for will be unambiguously seen as bourgeois and European.)

Flamingosi recorded a second version of ‘Ludi letnji ples’ for domestic – as in Serbian and Montenegrin – consumption, with the names of Serbian and Montenegrin towns replacing European capitals, and the introduction changed to ‘Good evening, everybody, you’re listening to almost the winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2006.’

 

Serbia itself would return to Eurovision in the most successful way possible in 2007, when Marija Šerifović’s ‘Molitva’ won the contest, enabled Belgrade to host Eurovision the following year, and put a symbolic value of the so-called ‘second Serbia’ – tolerance for LGBT rights – in front of more than a hundred million Eurovision viewers.

Montenegro would fail to qualify through the Eurovision semi-finals in 2007–9, skip 2010–11, return with a pair of what most Eurovision viewers thought of as novelty songs in 2012–13 (2012’s being a satire of the Eurozone financial crisis by none other than the perpetually choleric Rambo Amadeus) and hit top-ten form in 2014–15 with songs by the calibre of Montenegrin star that Evropesma viewers in 2004–6 might have expected to see in the first place, Sergej Ćetković and Knez. Montenegro’s representative in 2017, Slavko Kalezić, offers one of the most unambiguous depictions of male/male sexual desire even for Eurovision, with an aesthetic straight from the pop-folk videos of Dejan Milićević.

 

What had happened, behind the scenes, to bring the fiasco of Evropesma 2006 about? The politics of nation-building through state media in Đukanović’s Montenegro strongly suggest that RTCG intended to ensure a Montenegrin entry would win Evropesma. No Name’s participation was widely rumoured to have been supported by Milo Đukanović’s brother Aco, while the Montenegrin jury president at Evropesma in 2006, Bojan Bajramović, would later tell Monitor’s Željko Milović that:

All the Yugoslav republics have used Eurovision to promote the new states, and that’s completely legitimate. Of course it’s legitimate to call your country ‘my love’, by association. And it was all according to the rules, so whoever thought those rules up – that’s their business. We had the right to give all the Montenegrins high points, and the favourites from Serbia nothing. That was, therefore a legitimate politicisation of Eurovision, because we didn’t break even a single rule. Let’s not hide it, that night in the Sava Centar we started the referendum campaign, and many of us weren’t even conscious of that.

Indeed, Bajramović even suggested that the RTCG delegation would have displayed a Montenegrin flag during the live broadcast of the Eurovision final if No Name had won – an unproblematic gesture today, with Montenegro and RTCG fully recognised by the UN and EBU, but at the time could well have been viewed by the EBU as an unacceptably political display.

Ironically, the collapse of Evropesma prevented the entry from Serbia that had done most to accommodate Montenegro from going to Eurovision – but that too might not have been a bad thing for an independence campaign.

Did the breakdown of Evropesma 2006 and the resultant anti-Montenegrin invective in Serbia’s press really make Montenegrins more likely to conclude that Montenegro could not function in the same state as Serbia and vote for independence? It’s unlikely – even though the referendum took place the day after the Eurovision final.

Montenegro’s political and institutional drive towards independence was already well advanced by the time RTCG began selecting Montenegrin finalists for the national selection, let alone Evropesma itself. Moreover, only 55.5% of voters opted for independence, not very much higher than the 55% threshold on which the European Union had insisted before it would recognise the results: Evropesma did not harden the public mood in Montenegro in the way that acts of violence such as the Plitvice Lakes confrontation at Easter 1991 and, above all, the Borovo Selo massacre in May hardened the mood among wavering Croatians that independence was the only option for preserving Croatian liberties.

What the Evropesma events expose instead is something much more technical, but still significant for the cultural politics of inter-regional and international events: the capacity for a small number of jurors in a Eurovision-like competition to magnify a politicised stance into an international incident. Despite what moves towards jury transparency the EBU has tried to make, half the points available to any competitor at Eurovision – in a competition where the privilege of hosting an event worth millions to national and international subcontractors is at stake – depend on the choices of five jurors per country in a room, who can reach or be persuaded to reach a politicised consensus much more easily than hundreds of thousands of people in the viewing public.

The outcome of an independence referendum might not be on the line – and wasn’t at Evropesma 2006 – but the saga still shows on how few people these symbolic competitions can depend.

Diversity, family, and LGBT rights: watching Eurovision across borders

This post originally appeared at ESC Insight on 3 May.

The working seminary building, with bishops’ portraits hanging in the corridors and a six-foot crucifix nailed to the back wall of the conference room, that I visited in April to take part in Maynooth University’s conference on ‘The Eurovision Song Contest in a Changing World: Culture, Geography and Politics’ is one of the less likely venues for giving a talk on the Song Contest – especially one about how the Contest got tied into the international politics of LGBT rights – and yet somehow felt very much in the Eurovision spirit.

To understand what might be so ‘Eurovision’ about using a room surrounded by the iconography of a traditionally homophobic, biphobic and transphobic institution to talk about European LGBT activism, Dana International’s impact on trans history, and the symbolic role Conchita Wurst took on in 2014 for people who foresaw a renewed cultural ‘Cold War’ between Europe and Russia involves understanding that Eurovision has always meant, for many of its LGBT fans, a way to rewrite heterosexual community and ritual into something special to them.

To many of the LGBT fans, especially gay men, who have historically been so heavily involved in Eurovision fandom, straight society’s annual rituals of celebration and family reunion have at best assimilated them and at worst been actively oppressive.

The World Cup and the Olympics both assemble fans celebrating national success and (above all at the World Cup) national masculinity; Christmas, the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick wrote, is when all the social institutions where homophobia resides ‘are speaking with one voice’ to remind queer people that the idealised family excludes them. Even before Eurovision became an LGBT celebration on stage, with historic performances in 1997–8 by Páll Oskar and Dana International, Eurovision was already giving thousands of queer people an annual focal point for getting together with community and family.

 

Or as one ‘out-of-office’ graphic that’s gone around Facebook in Eurovision week over the last few years, asking forgiveness if fans are taking a long time to keep up with email, frames itself in the language of a religious festival: ‘This is because we are celebrating Eurovision.’

For someone who researches popular culture, nationalism and conflict since the end of the Cold War, the Eurovision Song Contest represents the one moment in the year when the general public in the UK or Ireland is likely to be interested in something as obscure as controversies over what narrative of national cultural identity should be the basis for Croatian popular music – the subject, more or less, of my first book, which I wouldn’t have written if wanting to find out more about Croatia’s 1990s Eurovision entries hadn’t been the very first step towards what became a PhD project on the politics of popular music in Croatia after its separation from Yugoslavia.

(The controversies over Severina’s Eurovision entry in 2006 – in many ways the ‘We Are Slavic’ of its decade – ended up giving me a case study I hadn’t even expected when I’d started the PhD in 2005. A spin-off paper I wrote on the Ruslana/Željko Joksimović mode of ethnopop at Eurovision, which I’d initially just planned as background for explaining Severina’s ‘Moja štikla’, has consistently been my most cited article since it came out in 2008, just as networks were starting to form around what’s now become an academic subfield of Eurovision research.)

 

In fact, talking about the politics of Eurovision from a perspective that starts with the cultural politics of the individual countries that participate is an opportunity to show there are more interesting cultural dynamics than just ‘political voting’ behind why East European countries seem to vote for each other at Eurovision all the time – and maybe to get people to rethink how they mentally divide the continent into ‘east’ and ‘west’.

Today, one of the big ‘symbolic boundaries’ in that imaginary east/west division involves LGBT rights and state homophobia/biphobia/transphobia. This was already emerging in the late 1990s, but really entered public ‘common sense’ in the twenty-first century as LGBT movements won important legislative struggles for LGB and sometimes even trans equality – leading to widespread stereotypes in western European countries that ‘Eastern Europe’ is somewhere ‘more homophobic’ than the West. (The same stereotypes are often, just as simplistically, applied to ‘Africa’ or ‘Islam’.)

Traffic-light maps of LGB rights in different European countries, like the ILGA Rainbow Europe Map, tend to come out looking green in the west and red in the east, giving an instant visual impression of which countries are supposedly further ‘ahead’ or ‘behind’. (The Trans Rights Europe Map, interestingly, is rather less spatially coherent.)

These indexes simplify a lot of legal and social complexities into a yes-or-no checklist of rights, and create an illusion of western European progressiveness and eastern European backwardness that east European queer scholars have taken the lead in pushing back against. Contemporary homophobia, biphobia and transphobia is not just international but transnational, with US pastors inspiring persecution of LGBT people in the Caribbean and Uganda, and French and Polish groups campaigning against LGBT equality exchanging slogans and symbols with each other. Nevertheless, opponents of LGBT equality have been more successful in some countries than others in persuading governments to follow their ideas and rhetoric – notably in Russia, where the federal parliament passed the so-called ‘anti-homopropaganda’ law in June 2013.

Eurovision is cherished by many fans as a site of gay, trans and queer celebration and even citizenship – a rare occasion, Peter Rehberg wrote in 2007 shortly before Marija Šerifović’s heavily queer-coded ‘Molitva’ won that year’s contest, for queer people to be able to feel that the nation being celebrated includes them. At the same time, it’s broadcast across (and beyond) a continent where public broadcasters in different countries will have very different ideological positions, and even be in very different legal positions, towards representing sexual diversity and gender non-conformity on screen.

Vitaly Milonov, prime mover of the ‘anti-homopropaganda’ law in Russia, has also argued for several years that Russian television should not broadcast Eurovision – precisely so that Russian families would not have to watch the ‘Europe-wide gay parade’ and ‘Sodom show’.

What I wanted to talk about at Maynooth was the problem of ‘transnational spectatorship’, or, taken out of academic language, the fact that audiences – and broadcasters – in different countries watch Eurovision from the perspective of some very distinct national cultural politics, and yet the same contest has to satisfy them all.

Something which is the stuff of everyday Saturday-night entertainment in one country, like the kiss between two men when the Swedish comedian Petra Mede officiated a same-gender ‘wedding’ during her interval act in 2013 (marking gay-friendliness as a Swedish national value), or a direct expression of activism in another, like the kiss between two women with which Krista Siegfrids attached her performance of ‘Marry Me’ that same year to the campaign for an equal marriage referendum in Finland, could now be legally questionable under laws like those currently in place in Russia.

 

Much as Eurovision organisers like to insist that the contest is a non-political event, the social and political struggles in every European country over giving LGB and trans people access to the same rights that their straight and cisgender citizens take for granted show that an event that has become so symbolically associated with LGBT belonging in Europe is not actually outside politics at all.

The language of ‘diversity’ and ‘family’ with which the European Broadcasting Union describes Eurovision is unthreatening and non-specific. During 2016’s ‘flags controversy’, where Eurovision producers’ instructions to security staff at the venue initially stated rainbow (and EU) flags would only be allowed ‘providing they will […] not be used as a tool to intentionally make a political statement during the show’, the EBU eventually said that the rainbow flag ‘technically represents diversity which is a core symbol of the EBU’ (and didn’t give other flags in the Pride family, like the trans flag, the same recognition as the rainbow flag).

This is far from the understanding of the Pride flag as a symbol of political struggle that many activists today would still insist on – but perhaps a necessary fiction, from an organisers’ point of view, to avoid a larger confrontation with broadcasters who might object more strongly to rainbow flags on screen if the EBU itself politicised them.

The language of a ‘family’ show, meanwhile, has resonances to many queer viewers that straight people may not even appreciate – because we know how often describing television as ‘family viewing’ has led to queer lives being erased from what children are able to see. ‘Family’ as a broadcasting standard can alarm queer viewers even while it sounds completely innocuous to most straight and cisgender people – who could disagree with something as everyday and happy as the family is supposed to be?

 

And yet the ideology of family, in homophobic hands or even hands that are just trying to balance homophobia and demands for LGBT rights in a false equivalence, seeps easily into withholding queer representation from children on the grounds that they should be allowed to grow up ‘naturally’ and that LGBT experiences are in and of themselves an ‘adult’ theme. The false assumption that young people are only led towards ‘alternative’ sexualities because media have exposed them to same-gender affection and transgressions of gender norms is ultimately what lies behind legislation that criminalises promoting ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ to under-18s, the phrasing of the legislation in Russia.

Yet this is not to suggest that conceiving of Eurovision as ‘family entertainment’ necessarily closes down space for it to be a queer celebration, even though the language of family does contain within itself a hinge where that could occur. Eurovision is, and has always been, a show watched by families: so many viewers’ first memories of Eurovision come from watching it as children, on such an out-of-the-ordinary night you were allowed to stay up past your bedtime, hearing languages you’d never heard before.

Most people who remember how better queer representation in media when they were young could have made it more pleasant to grow up in their own families want there to be ‘family entertainment’ – but family entertainment that affirms all kinds of queer identities and experiences, the ones that could have shown us what we were earlier and the ones that could have shown us what a diversity of possibilities for experiencing sexuality and gender – for forming family – was actually around us.

If Eurovision, with its long LGBT history, has the potential to bridge queerness and national belonging, can Eurovision also bridge queerness and family?

The eighteen-month-long millennium: when Britain and Europe weren’t meant to look like this

I wrote the second part of this text almost a year ago, in July 2016, at a loose end in central London after the March for Europe, and didn’t post it until a documentary about Geri Halliwell in the 1990s – which ended with her becoming a UN Population Fund goodwill ambassador – reminded me again about the memory that prompted it in the first place – a Model United Nations based around the UN Millennium Development Goals that I went to in April 2000. Then something else happened, so I didn’t post it then either, and now it’s Article 50. 

Sometimes these last few years have managed to be mind-bendingly resonant with their counterparts from twenty years ago – who would have thought my old school would start offering its gender-variant students recognition in a way I could never have imagined then (when I didn’t even know there were other things to be recognised as) – but when it comes to ‘Europe’ it’s the kind of looking-glass where everything’s shaped wrong.

This is going to get worse as 2017 turns to 2018 turns to 2019, and to Brexit, when 1997 turned to 1998 to 1999 and turned to future, politically, but also for my late teenage self as well.

The late 1990s were when I developed my lived experience of ‘Europe’ in a way that was an important part of my identity for a long time – as a language learner, as someone who belonged to literary and musical cultures beyond the nation and linguistic area I’d grown up in, as someone who expected to be working in another European country one day.

The optimism of those few years is already outside the living memory of most of the students I teach – who very soon are going to have been born after the Millennium, and a year or two after that will mostly have been born after 9/11.

By 2000, I’d visited other European countries five times, all since 1996. The first was a family holiday to Greece, to the most meaningful places my parents had visited in the 70s, when Britain must have only just joined the EEC and the Greek military junta must only just have come down; being 14, I moped for two weeks over that summer’s confusing friendships and gave the impression of paying as little attention to my surroundings as I could get away with. Needless to say this didn’t go down well.

We still used travellers’ cheques, which you queued up at the bank to cash every few days. I didn’t have a passport until that holiday; the covers were red, and as far as I knew always would be.  The only problem about being in the European Union was that when you visited another member state they didn’t stamp the page.

Everywhere else I travelled was through the school. I hadn’t asked to go on a foreign trip before, conscious of the cost, until our Spanish class was due to go on an exchange to Barcelona in 1997. I used to say that I came out in Barcelona, or rather, had to accept while I was there that I was going to need to. I brought a necklace back from Barcelona that I wore for years, until it fell off at work; it’s still there (I’ve just seen) in photos from the first academic conference I ever took part in, in Dubrovnik in 2004 where I had to give a presentation in Croatian about my Masters research in front of a woman who had been head of the communist party in Serbia until 1972.

I have no idea where the rest of this photo went.

Two years later we had another exchange visit to Spain, in Murcia, where I wanted to spend my time so differently from most of my classmates that it felt like I wanted to distance myself from Englishness and Britishness altogether, which lasted several years. (I write that now and think: is that a politically dangerous thing to admit, when our prime minister has described ‘people who believe they’re citizens of the world’ as ‘citizens of nowhere’ and when even wanting to be mobile is a symbolic social boundary that didn’t used to mean so much?)

My exchange partner’s older sister gave me a novel in Spanish that perfectly matched my tastes then, probably even better than she knew, Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El club Dumas; I acquired all the rest of his books, and anything else like it, from the European Bookshop on – I think on Warwick Street, before you could order them reliably online and shops like that were still spaces of discovery.

The last summer at school I had the chance to go to Moscow/St Petersburg and, my first time through the Channel Tunnel, Paris: I’d left the country three times in a year.

The next encounter with Europe was Europe coming to me, at what felt like the beginning of a new moment in history but now feels like a millennial dead end.

*

I’m writing this – of course I’m not writing this now; this is still July 2016, when we could still joke that Vladimir and Estragon ‘do not send the Article 50 Notification‘ – a few metres away from the International Maritime Organization’s headquarters in Vauxhall, after walking in the March for Europe – bigger than anyone who came seems to have expected, still probably too small on its own to ever count.

It was a young march. Whiter and more middle-class – just going by the people and accents around me – than a march representing London ought to have been; but most marchers younger than me. Some of that is me getting older. (I’m in London for a birthday celebration put back by a week for several reasons, one of them being to keep it at least somewhat separate from the referendum.) Some of it isn’t.

Many of them would have been young people anticipating using their freedom of movement rights, in either direction, along routes they might not even have thought of as constrained by nationality until the question was suddenly thrown open, until now a week later the front-runner for the Conservative leadership is even sounding as if she’s prepared to play poker with the long-term residency rights of EU citizens who are already living here.

Not quite as many other European countries’ flags as you’d see in a Eurovision audience, but getting close. (I tried to play flag bingo: Denmark, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Poland with the biggest flag of all, Romania, Italy and Sweden holding hands, the Czech Republic, one Catalan separatist flag with a Union Jack taped on, and a baby in a red and white checked hat I’m calling for Croatia because you never know.)

I’m struck by how many of them might have been queer, in ways that young people in London might be legible as queer (and obviously more of them will have been queer than that), with far more confidence and expressiveness and diverseness of expression than I remember being surrounded by at the same age at all; now about to have rights they’d taken for granted taken away in at least two ways at once.

Why have I walked down here. Partly to circumvent weekend engineering works that no mayor of London, not even last-hope-of-the-Jedi Sadiq Khan, has managed to do anything about; partly (I realised from the bridge where I saw the tall red building with its light blue flag and its whiteboard-marker roof, just as I used to look out for when Waterloo trains passed Vauxhall) because this is where Europe as a thing, not just Europe as a collection of other countries, first started being something I lived in.

I’d travelled to Greece once, Spain twice, Paris for a weekend, and even Russia, but my first experience of Europe in a slice of its complexity was the year our school’s debating society entered a team to the Model United Nations that was going to be held to celebrate the signing of the Millennium Development Goals by modelling UN committee work to agree a Millennium Declaration of our own.

This must have been organised by the UN (I could find out which agency if I waited to write this until I’m back in Hull, where I still have the programme from it somewhere).

I did have the programme: I tweeted a few pages from it after the Geri documentary. I’m even in one of the photos, obliquely, not really looking like myself-in-2000 yet at all, but holding up a large ‘Croatia’ sign. 

The keynote speakers were Geri Halliwell (these days, it would probably be Angelina Jolie-Pitt; you get a more famous calibre of celebrity humanitarian this half-generation), an Irish peacekeeper, and the writer Zlata Filipovic, five years after publishing her childhood diary of the siege of Sarajevo, who we met during a break and who might have looked at me more guardedly than I remember when she saw that I had the Croatian seat.

There might have been a hundred participants – or maybe they did fill every last member seat – all supposed to be 18 or thereabouts, because this was the generation that was going to go out and change the new millennium. (The young men not much older who flew their hijacked planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon less than a year and a half later would do much more towards that than us.) I was still 17, without a vote in the coming or just-passed London mayoral elections, to the consternation of some of my classmates when it came up in a History seminar.

(I can’t remember when the elections happened in relation to this. These pieces come out differently when I’m not online.)

About two thirds were from the UK, the others from pretty much everywhere else in western and northern Europe. There might have been a few Poles and Hungarians – or maybe there was a parallel Eastern European one of these? – but not the greater number who’d have been able to afford to come after the low-cost airlines (what were those bright orange things?) really got going.

Croatia had just elected a liberal president and the tide seemed to be turning against authoritarian nationalism, which made them timely to represent, if not as challenging for a historian as it would have been to have to intuit the positions of an ideology with which I profoundly disagreed.

But that didn’t seem to be what anyone was doing (except a few performative moments in committee if someone had, say, Belarus). The mood among this group of young Europeans – all from schools that had heard about this thing and could afford to send students to it, let’s be clear, we weren’t a demographic cross-section of the continent by any means – was: let’s come up with something that is fit for purpose and expresses that strange intangible sense that just because the first digit of the year has turned around it might mean we could do something differently.

I could probably find the final text, which they sent us in a commemorative binder two or three months later, and tick off the resolutions: that one hasn’t happened; that one hasn’t happened; that one… yeah.

These days now I know people who actually do discourse analysis of UN documents, it’s a piece of historical evidence, isn’t it: a snapshot of a young people’s history and geography of internationalism, part of the only eighteen-month-long Millennium there’s ever been.

(A car stuck at the lights is playing ATB’s ‘9 am Till I Come’, wasn’t that 1999?, and that would be an interesting time slip. You know what book you’re going to have written last year? That’ bit went all right. The rest of the world around it… not so much.

Except a few of the songs I had taped on to a cassette for the train into Vauxhall were already from Croatia, Vanna’s ‘Kao rijeka’ which had nearly been picked for Eurovision and which I was just beginning to have enough language competence to realise was probably about the Millennium (it was), with a leaving-the-past-behind-us motif which from 1999-2000 Croatia sounds now as if it could only be about one thing; except that in a lot of places people felt like that.)

Within all that, the effort of will that it took Catherine at 17 to even begin speaking to a delegate from Portugal who, a few years later, a friend of mine looking at the commemorative folder from this thing would go on to mistake for me but who I could never even have begun to compare myself with at the time.

Would I rather have been 17 then, or 17 now and entering the next stages of a global crisis (which, I didn’t appreciate then but came to understand, has many of its longest-term roots in the legacies of the dominance through which my own country got rich in the first place)? I’d be in a position, assuming the same complex of identifications and insecurities, to understand much more about my self and sexuality-and-gender than I could have then. Maybe I would have done better, half a generation later.

But in terms of being able to access the conditions for a life that promised to be fulfilling and have some advancement in it in the long term even when things temporarily fell down – I worry that half a generation makes a difference that is already hard to repair. And will get harder to repair now that the result of the referendum has added an extra layer of instability to those already facing Britain and the rest of Europe. [And then there was still more.]

So much for the Millennium, and its goals, and whatever it was we voted to develop anyway; except that, as any pedant with a calendar will tell you, millennia really start themselves in 2001.

*

Will young people growing into their late teens in Britain now have the same opportunities to get to know that the cultures you can belong to don’t just depend on where you were born, or what language you grew up with as your first one?

The Europe I believed in at that point was a liberal fantasy anyway, and I didn’t understand how much privilege I moved through it with. Opportunities for me weren’t opportunities for everyone. But at least we hadn’t gone through the rejection of Britain’s European future that the referendum result in 2016 implied, the escalation of xenophobia against white EU citizens as well as the people of colour it already stigmatised, or the symbolic politics that mean if I speak about attachment to Europe now some people might hear it as she doesn’t want to listen to us.

The answer will probably look very different from each of Britain’s four nations – to an extent I’d also have found unimaginable in 2000, except that by studying the end of Yugoslavia I was already imagining it after all.

How to write a conference abstract: a five-part plan for pitching your research at almost anything

One of the things about academic life that, when you’ve done them a lot, you start forgetting you didn’t always know how to do is writing conference abstracts.

Answering a conference’s call for papers will nearly always involve writing an abstract, or a summary of what your talk is going to be about, to a word limit the organisers have set – usually 200, 250, 300 or 500 words.

(Some may ask for other things, like a biographical note or a short CV, and some will choose papers on the abstracts alone – so make sure you know what else to send, and what word limit you’re working towards for a particular one.)

Some large conferences, like the ones scholarly associations hold in different subject areas, will ask for this almost a year in advance, which makes it even more difficult to know what to put in the abstract – since, especially if you’re a postgrad, you probably won’t yet have done the research.

I’ve probably been writing 5-6 of these things, with a success rate of more than 90%, most years since 2006, when I was in the middle of my PhD (on a topic – popular music and narratives of identity in post-Yugoslav Croatia – that followed on from my Masters, so I already had well-worked-out arguments to talk about) – most of these presentations will have needed abstracts written for them, aimed at audiences with different disciplinary and thematic interests (even the ones where I’ve been invited to give the talk, the organisers have usually asked me for an abstract so they can tell their networks what it’s going to be about).

Before I’d had to write most of these, I’d also been involved in selecting abstracts for a large postgraduate conference that a group of PhD students in my department organised in 2006 – so I’d read a whole spectrum of abstracts from stunningly clear and exciting to utterly baffling or, once or twice, so off-topic I wondered if it was meant for something else.

Smaller conferences often circulate all the speakers’ abstracts in one document before the conference or put them in registration packs; larger conferences usually make them available through their online system. Most abstracts at academic conferences that were high enough quality to be accepted have a similar structure, as you’ll probably start to see if you look through your next conference’s abstracts book.

Their purpose once they’ve been accepted is so people at the conference can work out which papers and panels they want to hear. Their first purpose, on the other hand is to persuade the organisers that they want your paper – and you – to be part of the discussion they’re having about their conference topic, in a context where they’ll almost certainly have more submissions than they can accommodate.

They don’t just want you and your research to be there – they need you and your research to be there – or that’s the impression your abstract ought to give.

The five-part structure I’m going to go through here would make sense to organisers throughout the humanities and social sciences (I’ve used it for abstracts that needed to fit into history, politics, sociology, geography, media or cultural or popular music studies, interdisciplinary area studies, anthropology, education, even conferences on topics my CV looked like I don’t study explaining why I did study them after all) – some of its principles probably apply in sciences as well, though your fields might have more formal requirements for what you put where.

This is an abstract I wrote in 2012, based on work from my postdoctoral project on translation/interpreting and peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for submission to a set of Feminist Security Studies panels at the International Studies Association conference in 2013. I’d been realising that my research about everyday intercultural encounters on military bases actually fitted in with what this expanding field of International Relations was doing, so I needed to emphasise topics that field was talking about (peace support operations) and concepts and approaches that the organisers would recognise as relevant (power and, since this was a feminist strand, above all gender).

Here’s the abstract, and then we’ll go through how each part works:

Gender, translation/interpreting, and the exercise of power in peace support operations
Dr Catherine Baker
University of Hull
cbakertw1@googlemail.com

Ethnographic perspectives on peace support operations invite us to view their  activities, and thus their exercise of power, as constituted by multiple acts of written and spoken communication between agents of foreign intervention and local people and institutions within the sites of intervention (Pouligny, 2006; Rubinstein, 2008; Higate and Henry, 2009). Yet since most military personnel in most interventions rarely speak the language(s) of their destination, this power rests in fact on multiple acts of translation and interpreting. To fully understand this dimension of international security we must therefore understand the experiences and positionalities of language intermediaries, not just of foreign military actors. Reflecting on 52 semi-structured interviews with foreign soldiers and locally-recruited interpreters collected during a project on peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper suggests ways in which language and translation/identity are embodied, exploring nationality, ethnicity, military/civilian status and, primarily, gender. How did the discursive gendering of language and translation/interpreting structure recruitment and employment practices for language intermediaries? How did male interpreters negotiate the feminisation of their role? And how did the feminisation of translation/interpreting intersect with what has been perceived (with problematic essentialism) as a wider conceptual feminisation of contemporary militaries through peace support?

Here’s a model of the structure I mocked up for historian Stephanie McKellop when she was asking about abstract-writing advice on Twitter today:

Let’s take each of those sections in turn.

Step 1: start with the current state of knowledge in the field you’re engaging with. What do we think we know? (What you put here is also a bit of a performance of who you think ‘we’ are, for the purposes of joining this conversation.)

Ethnographic perspectives on peace support operations invite us to view their  activities, and thus their exercise of power, as constituted by multiple acts of written and spoken communication between agents of foreign intervention and local people and institutions within the sites of intervention (Pouligny, 2006; Rubinstein, 2008; Higate and Henry, 2009).

Here I’m making a point that had already been well established by recent literature on peacekeeping and peacebuilding: all these operations achieve what they achieve because they happen on an everyday level, and all these interactions are made up of acts of communication.

I’ve even referred to some recent academic works that have contributed to showing that. I cite them in a way that suggests I’m familiar with them and I think the organisers and audience will be too – don’t overuse this, but it’s another way to signal that this presentation would be contributing to a conversation that’s already going on. (And yes, I’ve used author-date referencing; sorry, humanities. Footnotes in conference abstracts don’t work well.[1])

I could add a first line with a really eye-catching detail that expresses the point I’m making as Step 1, but either I couldn’t pick one or the word limit was too short, so…

Step 2: move the narrative forward: something is WRONG with what we think we know.

Yet since most military personnel in most interventions rarely speak the language(s) of their destination, this power rests in fact on multiple acts of translation and interpreting.

All this (brilliant, valuable) work on the everyday politics of peacekeeping has missed something super important: language, translation and interpreting. (Words like ‘yet’ and ‘in fact’ are your signals here for showing that the argument is changing course.)

Suddenly we have a problem that needs solving. Narrative tension!

Luckily, someone’s just done some research about that…

Step 3: offering a solution.

To fully understand this dimension of international security we must therefore understand the experiences and positionalities of language intermediaries, not just of foreign military actors.

Here, I’m pointing to what I think can resolve the problem: accounting for language intermediaries (translators and interpreters) as well as foreign peacekeepers themselves. It isn’t perfect (for one thing, there’s a clunky repetition that I should have caught), but in using phrases like ‘to fully understand…’ it signals that it’s about what we can do to overcome whatever Step 2 is. The narrative moves forward again.

I’m benefiting in this particular Step 3 from having two feet in different disciplines. There’s a well-known idea in Translation Studies of ‘the invisibility of the translator’ (thanks, Lawrence Venuti), which had motivated not just me but also the senior academics who designed the project to research language intermediaries in war and conflict in the first place. Taken into other settings where people don’t talk about the invisibility of the translator so much, it’s one of those ideas that can stop people and make them say ‘oh, of course’ – which is exactly the kind of feedback I got after I gave this talk.

Even if your research doesn’t have this kind of background, though, there’s still something about the concepts, theory or literature that you use which will help cut through the problem you posed in Step 2 – and that’s part of what makes your research original.

(Remember that you’re much more used to the material you draw on most closely than most of your audience will be – what seems to go without saying for you now you’ve been reading about it for months or years can seem much more original to an audience who hasn’t.)

So what are we going to do about this? The next step tells them.

Step 4: methodology. What did you do (or what will you have done by the time the presentation happens) to solve the problem like you said you would?

Reflecting on 52 semi-structured interviews with foreign soldiers and locally-recruited interpreters collected during a project on peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina,

This is where your research volunteers as tribute. Summarising your methodology (was it interview-based? archival? creative? quantitative? What sources and data did you use?) shows that the findings from the research will be rigorous, and produce the kind of knowledge that the audience expects – or maybe the kind of knowledge that the audience doesn’t expect, because their methodologies have been too limited all along as well.

This was quite familiar methodology for my audience, so I didn’t spend much time on it – really just to specify the size of my collection of material, and something of the scope.

If you’re doing something unconventional with methodology, like Saara Sarma who uses collages of internet images to expand the boundaries of how International Relations experts think about world politics, you’ll want to spend relatively longer here. It’ll need more explanation, but it’s also one of your biggest selling points, so make sure you’re telling a strong story about that throughout the abstract: it’ll grab the organisers’ attention, but they’ll also want to know how the innovative thing you’re doing fits into or changes something about a field that doesn’t normally do that, and if you don’t make this clear you’re depending on how well or willing they’ll be to extrapolate from what they are able to see.

This may well be the hardest part of the abstract to write if the conference is many months away. Don’t worry if some things about your methods, sources or data change between now and then; conference audiences are used to that, and explaining why that happened can often become part of the talk.

By now the narrative’s really moving along. There was a problem; you Did The Thing; and now we’re somewhere different than we were before.

Step 5: RESOLUTION. We got there!

this paper suggests ways in which language and translation/identity are embodied, exploring nationality, ethnicity, military/civilian status and, primarily, gender. How did the discursive gendering of language and translation/interpreting structure recruitment and employment practices for language intermediaries? How did male interpreters negotiate the feminisation of their role? And how did the feminisation of translation/interpreting intersect with what has been perceived (with problematic essentialism) as a wider conceptual feminisation of contemporary militaries through peace support?

This is your hypothesis or conclusion, depending on what stage the research is at – either what you expect to find, or what you found. Frame it in a way which shows the reader what you’re contributing, in a way that resonates with what already matters to them because of what field they’re in.

Here, for instance, I’ve made some suggestions why gendered perceptions of translation and interpreting could tell us something about wider issues feminists and International Relations researchers would be interested in (gender inequalities in employment and the military; experiences of men working in jobs that are usually gendered feminine; an ongoing debate about how far peacekeeping might have been changing the gender politics of international security itself).

This part could have been a lot better: it ought to end in a more emphatic sentence, rather than a question, about how this research will change the part of the field you’ve seen that it could change. It still did enough to get the abstract accepted, because Steps 1 to 4 had made a compelling and original case – and it also gave me the basic structure for my talk.

You can use this structure to pitch almost any piece of research for almost any conference – once you’ve worked out what story it can tell.

[1] Unless, of course, you’re writing an abstract in a field where you’ve already seen a lot of other conference abstracts that look like that.

‘I think you should change it!’: the Spice Girls guide to calling out racism

One of the essay questions that students on my music and politics module have been able to make their own, several times over, is one that columnists and gender studies academics were already debating in the late 1990s, when most current undergraduates were born: were the Spice Girls feminists?

I owe this one to a young woman called Emma who proposed it the first year I taught this module at Hull, who wasn’t sure something so recent and everyday and feminine and from her own experience was suitable for a history essay, even one where you have to choose your own topic like this; and of course it was, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that thinking like a historian can illuminate, so I added it to the list of ‘Past essay titles on this module have included’ in our handbook the next year, to give a signal that yes, the 1990s and childhood and girlhood and pop music are all part of History.

Other students since then have framed the Spice Girls idea their own way and, more than once, turned it into first-class work. I like to think getting the chance to find out how formative moments from your childhood were actually part of gender history is one of those transformative experiences that university teaching can create when teachers trust students to be independent and support them to do more with their knowledge than worry if they’ve got the answer ‘right’.

I won’t pre-empt future students working out how their childhood fits into the history of feminism, consumerism and any other context we might fit the Spice Girls into, but I will mention something I’d started to forget about them since they became, like the other nineties girlbands, commercial reunion fodder: the authenticity of their friendship and solidarity in the early years that still shone through the multinational industry they quickly became, the emotion behind what so many fans wanted to watch, be and buy.

This clip from a Dutch children’s TV show in 1998, which coincidentally resurfaced just as the Internet was getting ready to commemorate 20 years since the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – another artefact of 1990s popular culture in which so many women were able to recognise themselves, then talk about it through the nascent mass internet – shows the group of friends you wanted them to be, standing up for their best mate when the presenter confronts them with the blackface carnival character Zwarte Piet, but also shows how in their early twenties they’d already grasped something it takes a lot of white women, including me, much longer to learn – what you can do in the heat of the moment when someone does something racist.

Before we go any further, Zwarte Piet is a character from Dutch Christmas tradition, a sprite or demon who accompanies Sinterklaas (St Nicholas) to bring presents to children. He’s dressed as a servant from the Golden Age Netherlands, when Amsterdam was at its height as a colonial metropole, and traditionally is always played by a white person in blackface. Which is where the problem lies.

People of colour and their white allies have been protesting against the racism of Zwarte Piet for years, and some Dutch public institutions have very recently started to compromise by dressing their Zwarte Piets in a light dusting of soot (though that doesn’t change the character’s origins in the caricature of a black slave).

Many white Dutch people contend that since the Netherlands was a more benign imperial ruler than those slave-trading Brits, Dutch people can’t be racist and neither can Zwarte Piet; read Flavia Dzodan on how present-day Dutch racism makes that so unconvincing, or see Gloria Wekker’s excellent White Innocence for a book-length explanation of how Dutch racial ‘exceptionalism’ hides how long and how intimately race and whiteness have formed part of Dutch national identity.

In mainstream Dutch public opinion, all the more so in the late nineties, bringing out Zwarte Piet a few weeks before Christmas is no more controversial than – is the equivalent of – a British kids’ TV show bringing out Santa, so that’s exactly what the Paul De Leeuw show did in the middle of an interview with its star guests, the Spice Girls, late in 1998.

footage has just unearthed of the Spice Girls calling out a TV host for having white people in black face #GirlPower pic.twitter.com/P5Z8u3W1Te

— 20 Years of Spice (@SpiceGirlsFilm) March 9, 2017

This fifty-second clip, unearthed by a Spice Girls fan site, says as much as many feminist blog posts about calling out racism and how you often get treated when you do.

Mel B, the only woman of colour in the Spice Girls, is the first to realise that De Leeuw and his producers are about to put her in the extremely uncomfortable position of having to perform the emotional labour of appearing as a star and role-model for children while surrounded by five gurning, waving characters in infantile blackface, knowing that hardly anyone is even going to realise why that might make her upset.

Calling out – which isn’t not in character – ‘I don’t like them! They’re not very good!’, she’s backed up at once by (it sounds like) Geri and Mel C, shouting ‘No!’ and not letting the interview stay business as usual. As white women and allies, they can use their whiteness as well as their membership of the same world-famous band to say: this isn’t how just one person feels because she’s black, this is something none of us find acceptable. ‘We don’t like them!’, as it becomes, is an even stronger, unified message.

Rather than making themselves the centre of attention as the woke white girls (in the nineties, we’d have said ‘right-on’) who know Zwarte Piet isn’t OK, however, they give Mel B the space and the reassurance to say what she wants to say: ‘I think they shouldn’t paint their faces! You should get proper black people to do it. You shouldn’t paint their faces. I don’t think that’s very good.’

De Leeuw’s reaction is also a classic example of derailing a conversation about racism – along the same lines as hundreds of Zwarte Piet conversations, and their equivalents in other countries, online and offline.

First he falls back on the argument that Zwarte Piet is part of Dutch ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’; then he turns the exchange into a joke that only reveals how far Zwarte Piet does depend on aggregated racist stereotypes as Africa by calling one of the Piets ‘Winnie Mandela’.

‘I think you should change it!’ says Mel B. ‘You shouldn’t have their faces painted… this is the nineties!’

Late nineties Britain, even as society liked to tell itself it had overcome the open racism of the 1960s and 1970s, was characterised by many forms of systemic racism, including an alarmingly high number of black people dying in police custody; the specific expression of racism the Spice Girls were encountering here, blackface on television, had gone off air in 1978 with the end of The Black and White Minstrel Show.

‘Yeah, but that’s culture!’ says De Leeuw.

‘Update your culture!’ says Geri – sadly not in tight enough focus for a gif – and Mel B is able to restate her point about blackface: ‘You should get proper ones! Proper black people!’

Another version of the clip, with a few extra seconds, shows De Leeuw doing something that anyone who’s called attention to racism, sexism or harassment will recognise: turning the person who pointed out the problem into the problem and making them feel responsible for spoiling the atmosphere.

(No-one in contemporary feminism writes about this more vividly or poetically than Sara Ahmed, who’s given a generation of feminists – many of whom grew up with the Spice Girls as icons – the words to understand that it really isn’t just them.)

When De Leeuw says, ‘I warn you, you mustn’t spoil a children’s party… don’t spoil a children’s party,’ he both reiterates the narrative that Zwarte Piet is an innocent children’s tradition, nothing to do with racism, and throws the responsibility back on Mel B for ruining the children’s Christmas treat.

The Spice Girls don’t march off altogether, as their ‘Wannabe’ personas might have suggested and as some stars would; other clips show them carrying on the interview. It’s still clear that the white women in the band are letting Mel B take the lead and using their own stardom and whiteness to have her back as best they can.

I wonder what impression this show might have had on a young Dutch fan of the Spice Girls, who might have been seeing for the very first time that idols she looked up to had a dramatically different view of a tradition that her parents, her school and wider Dutch society had always treated as normal and everyday.

Whether or not you think that the Spice Girls, as a phenomenon, were feminists, in the middle of a Dutch TV show at the end of 1998 they still managed to do something it’s taken many white feminists much longer to learn.