Lezing Aniko Imre

THE MA IN COMPARATIVE ARTS AND MEDIA IS HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE A LECTURE BY
PROF. Anikó Imre: Brand New EU: Nation Branding Across Media
VU University, room HG-14a10, Tuesday 22 November, 16:00-18:00

Anikó Imre is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her work revolves around film and new media theory, global television, national and transnational media, postcoloniality, global consumption and mobility, studies of identity and play, media education, and European media. She is the author of Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (MIT Press, 2009), editor of East European Cinemas (Routledge, 2005) and co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (Palgrave, 2007), and Popular Television in Eastern and Southern Europe Routledge, 2012).

In her lecture, Anikó Imre will cast a critical look at the phenomenon of nation branding as a multimedia site of interaction between nostalgic nationalism and consumerist identity-construction within the expanding post-Cold War European media sphere. In the aftermath by socialism, nation-states of the New Europe have been forced to reinvent themselves as market-friendly and democratic places and shed the identity damage caused my socialism. State governments have widely embraced corporate nation-branding practices, often creating chaotic messages that have been met by cynical responses among their populations. Imre investigates the political implications of the permeability between the emotional attachment to brands and products and the love of the nation. As a case study, she will focus on the plight of Romania, whose recent rebranding campaigns to revitalize tourism and direct capital investment have been countered by a powerful Western investment in Brand Dracula and Brand Ceausescu as the country’s essential symbols, as evidenced, for instance, in the infamous Romanian episodes of the travel series No Reservations and Top Gear. This leads her to conclude that the paradoxical, “postnational” remapping of the post-Cold War world as a series of competing nation brands tends to reinforce neo-imperial inequalities among nation-states. In the case of small post-socialist nations, branding is promoted, paradoxically, in the guise of a post-national order that relieves citizens of nationalism’s ideological burden and converts its pleasures into a platform for consumer identification.

Everyone is invited to attend!