European Journal of Cultural Studies

The Irish presence in England has been invoked in a range of recent accounts of ‘race’, ethnicity and immigration. However, Irish migrants were largely obscured in cultural studies’ turn to ‘race’ and ethnicity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite the fact that England’s Irish were the country’s largest migrant minority and intrinsically relevant to the work of cultural studies. This article explores the absence of an Irish dimension in British cultural studies’ work on ‘race’ and ethnicity, focusing on the landmark texts Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order and The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. The article illustrates the salience of the Irish to these accounts, and shows how Irish ethnicity (despite being invoked in the formative work of E.P. Thompson) was erased at key moments. Finally, the article maps the emergence of an Irish dimension in cultural studies’ work on ‘race’ and ethnicity since the 1990s.

In this article, ethnographic research developed within the graffiti community of Lisbon is the starting point for a reflection regarding the social condition of the young members of this community. The graffiti writers live between two social and cultural universes, building complex strategies to manage identity and everyday life. Graffiti represents for many young people a ground for struggle and transgression, a chance to reject the law and hegemonic normatives, an arena where they experiment excitement, risk, heroic conduct and sometimes painful sanctions. In a security-prone society, danger becomes a space for freedom, where young writers challenge the limits of life and normative boundaries. This is often why there is a feeling of release and autonomy and of escaping the disciplinary control of social norms and worldly habits. This is why the nature of their exploits appears to be endowed with greatness and heroism.

This article examines the discourses of forced prostitution that circulated in the US and European media and government publications in the context of the soccer World Cup in 2006. This analysis of the public discourse around prostitution reveals two themes: concerns about immigration and border security, and representations of gender binaries that serve to relegate migrant women to the status of victim. The fears of increased sex trafficking and the condemnation of so-called ‘sex shacks’ and ‘mega-brothels’ for the World Cup 2006 served as foils for other perceived crises produced by globalisation. The debates struggle with a marked ‘other’ that reveals new forms of racialised ‘othering’: dangerously white, understood as both of Europe and a threat to it. The 2006 World Cup historical moment has implications for how international sports, consumer culture and feminist activism inform and conceal human agency.

This article considers the construction of authenticity in documentary films dealing with repression in the former East Germany, focusing on Stefan Weinert’s Gesicht zur Wand (2009) and Christian Klemke and Jan N. Lorenzen’s Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit: Alltag einer Behörde (2002). Taking as its starting point the observation of two modes of authenticity in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning feature film, Das Leben der Anderen (2006), the article analyses the interaction between referential and emotive elements in non-fictional representations of repression. The use of eyewitness testimony is central to both documentary films, and the grouping of personal accounts can create a self-authenticating ‘mediated remembering community’. However, the observation of complementary and competing authenticities in the medium highlights how the authenticity of the witness account can be both harnessed and undermined by its (re)mediation in cultural artefacts. This adds to our understanding of how versions of contested pasts circulate and become salient.

This study focuses on certain aspects of the socialising function exerted by the medium of television. More specifically, it examines in detail some of the televisual strategies used by Spanish public television to reinforce the idea of Spain as ‘state’ and ‘nation’. To achieve this, the study analyses two telenovelas produced in Spain, La Señora (The Lady) and Amar en tiempos revueltos (Loving in Troubled Times), which represent the adaptation of the genre to the cultural characteristics of its target audience. Although both series adhere to the principal rules of this melodramatic formula, they propose, in a similar way, an exercise of interpreting the country’s recent history. They explain and interpret the past of this society, thus justifying the collective present day. The analysis of both texts allows us to identify some of the semantic keys used today by the television media to evoke and legitimate the idea of the Spanish nation.

The study of religion leads a curiously secluded life within intellectual circles. This article argues that this is to our loss, particularly on the part of students of popular culture, since a number of the most widely discussed artefacts depend on religious themes for their effect. Taking note of the largely non-religious reception of one TV show, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the article offers a detailed reading of its constitutive religious narrative, aiming to demonstrate how this narrative owes very much indeed to Mormon theology. In conclusion, the article argues that intellectuals need to regain the skills needed to identify and analyse religious thinking, lest we miss the hermeneutic level on which religiously based artefacts are actually consumed by many viewers.

The annual Eurovision Song Contest has provided a venue where participating nations from the former Soviet bloc, whose relation to Europeanness may be tenuous, strive to perform claims to belonging and partnership. Yet the increasing emphasis on ‘diversity’ in the representation of an expanding Europe has created difficulties for Central and Eastern European countries, which historically were positioned as ‘ethnic’, if not racialized vis-à-vis western European powers. Nevertheless, Central and Eastern European participants in the Contest have engaged with cosmopolitanism as the key term through which Europe has come to define itself. Through a close, historically contextualized analysis of two songs, the article argues that Central and Eastern European participants in the Contest have developed alternative discourses of cosmopolitanism that furnish a corrective to the increasingly reductive equation of the concept with cultural diversity.