Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe. Anikó Imre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 257 pp.
Though it has now been more than two decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain, many of us still have little knowledge about life or media in Central or Eastern Europe—let alone experience. Identity Games should help fill that gap, as author Anikó Imre examines the corporate transformation of the post-communist media landscape in the region.
Avoiding both uncritical techno-euphoria and the nostalgic projections (by some) of a simpler and thus better media world under communism, Imre, a faculty member at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts, argues that the demise of Soviet-backed regimes and the transition to transnational capitalism have had crucial implications for understanding the relationships among growing nationalist pride, media globalization, and identity.
Imre analyzes situations in which anxieties arise about the encroachment of global entertainment media and its new technologies on heretofore protected national cultures, examining the aesthetic hybrids that have developed during the past two decades. Where the media were once American, as Jeremy Tunstall observed, the global media landscape—and its impact on cultures—has become much more diverse and less dominated by the West.
In Identity Games, Imre investigates the gaps and continuities between the final communist-controlled generation and the initial post-communist populations in education, tourism, and children’s media culture. She examines the racial and class politics of music entertainment (including the Roma Rap and Idol television talent shows), and media configurations of gender and sexuality (including playful lesbian media activism and masculinity in “carnivalistic” post-Yugoslav films). The wide range of topical material helps to underline how media feed upon and at the same time project the images of these new (but very ancient) countries.
Throughout, Imre uses concepts of “play” and games as metaphorical and theoretical tools to explain the process of cultural change, as well as an emerging engagement with play across a variety of relevant scholarly disciplines. In the vision Imre provides, political and cultural participation are seen as a series of these games where rules are continually open to negotiation.
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University