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Play, Identity and Media in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Review by
Larisa Puslenghea 
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe, by Aniko Imre. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-262-09045-2. 257 pp.

There has been much concern about Eastern Europe's transition from late communism to late capitalism. Aniko Imre’s personal experience as a subject caught up in this metamorphosis motivationed her to write a monograph on identity games. In so doing, she attempted both to critically understand “democratainment” and to show how postcommunist critiques of media globalization hide subtle forms of exclusion such as nationalism, Eurocentrism, and cultural imperialism. More generally, the book aims to challenge ethnocentric assumptions about media globalization in the post-Cold War era.

Imre, currently Assistant Professor in the Critical Studies Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, based four out of the five chapters of her volume on articles she published between 2004 and 2008. Each chapter in the book focuses on a different form of media. Be it television shows, educational games, children’s media, Roma music, lesbian films or poetry, the common themes of play, performance, nationalism, ethnic/gender/sexual identity run through the insightful and refreshingly critical analyses. The main focus of the monograph is to provide “an argument against naturalizing a vision of globalization determined by neoimperial power interests” (222). Imre elegantly imposes what she calls the “game” model as a useful complement to existing metaphors of globalization such as “flow,” “scape” and “network” and complicates our understanding of the way in which media flows are involved in all aspects of globalization. She convincingly argues that political science alone is unfit to tackle the complexities of multilayered identity games and knowledgeably proposes that media and cultural studies be connected to social sciences in discussing postcommunist transformations of ethnicity.

This volume is provocative reading, particularly for film studies scholars. Imre deftly analyzes a broad range of cinematic productions highlighting, for instance, the joint crisis of masculinity and nation or the contradictions inherent in an alliance between hip hop and territorial nationalism. The aim of her endeavors is “a poststructuralist understanding of identity inspired by transnational and postcolonial theories of gender and sexuality” (96).

In addition, academics wishing to learn more about the way postcommunist identities in Hungary are structured in and through media will find Imre’s book to be a compelling and sophisticated account of ethnic and gender representations in the region. Imre embeds her insightful analyses of the way ethnic representations are complicated by nationalism in a rich conceptual framework. This ability to correlate in original and surprising ways a vast and varied theoretical background constitutes a major strength of her work.

Imre demonstrate a strong grounding not only in feminist and postcolonial theory, but also in Marxism, structuralism and, more generally, in sociology, philosophy and political theory. However, it would be very difficult for a person not familiar with the particular body of literature referenced in the text to follow the argument since many concepts are not at all or only insufficiently explained. Thus, although Schiller’s notion of “transcendent imagination” (35), Margaret Mead’s concept of “prefigurative culture” (36) and Morley and Robins’s idea of the “reimagined community” (38) are worked into the analysis, the reader may be at a loss to make sense of these constructs. Also, the author rarely provides commentary on the highly provocative theoretical quotes she inserts into the text, leaving it to the reader to render the conceptual connections between paragraphs explicit. And moreover, owing to the fact that most chapters originated in standalone publications, it is quite difficult for the reader to recompose the neatly delimited subject areas of the individual chapters into a cohesive set of ideas.

Imre is heavily skewed on her take on the European Union. Although she openly professes her book’s commitment to ambivalence (81), she consistently presents the EU solely as perpetuating “longstanding colonial inequalities within the emerging European empire” (48). Imre casually mentions “a ‘universal’ sense of Europeanness” (56) that rests on the nostalgic longing for a common European cultural heritage based on shared traditions such as the two thousand years of Christianity. Nevertheless, she fails to mention that Europe is the continent that has probably known the most violent wars in history between neighboring states trying to assert their individual superiority. Furthermore, Christianity has been a shared Western cultural characteristic and not an exclusively European trait, thus depriving it of a strong binding force for a uniquely European identity. Most unsettling theoretically is the taking of a specifically European identity for granted, especially at a time when major thinkers like Habermas argue that this is still very much something to be achieved in the future. Ironically, it appears that Imre’s critique of the EU ends up being Eurocentric itself, since it is focused on a seemingly suspended and self-centered continent, effectively neglecting globalization and the need for Europe to assert itself as a global player.

A major weakness of the book is the almost exclusive reliance on secondary sources to introduce the central concepts of major theorists such as Bakhtin, Habermas, Gramsci, Baudrillard or Heidegger. Also, at times citations are truncated and authoritative sources are not provided (e.g., 52, 74). Additionally, it seems that Imre does not always use the most recent available data. It is unlikely that “universities…remain the main hubs of Internet access in the [Eastern European] region” (39) when countries such as Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Macedonia or Hungary boast high percentages of Internet users.

Overall, Identity Games asks a number of highly intriguing questions about identity games in a largely neglected region of Europe. The diversity of the theoretical background and the structuring of the book make for conceptually engaging, challenging and thought-provoking reading.