Fandom Studies in Bulgarian Context
/Fandom Studies in Bulgarian Context
Dora Valkanova (Bulgaria)
I enter the field of media fandom after having completed a dissertation on U.S. Cold War cinema since 1947, in which I applied a Critical and Cultural Studies lens to a cinema canon that had been studied primarily through the methods of film historiography. The necessity of such an approach had been underscored to me both through my own experience as a Bulgarian woman, living in the U.S. since 2003 and as a scholar, broadly trained in the theory and methods of Critical and Cultural Studies. From a scholarly perspective, my training in Critical and Cultural Studies increasingly appeared to suggest that the plight of Eastern Europe and the Balkans was not clearly legible through critical concepts like Global North and Global South, which are central to the field of Media and Cinema Studies and that demanded further analysis. On a personal level, my lived experience in the U.S. has been mediated through U.S. perceptions (and misperceptions) of Soviet and Eastern European communism and post-communism. This was most noticeable specifically during my undergraduate career when jokes about communism were my U.S. colleagues’ usual (and sometimes only) means of engaging with me. On an academic level, I encountered a range of contradictions that seemed to suggest the relevance of the Cold War as an analytical category in studying media. My intention for this opening statement is to briefly outline the concepts and theories that I have found productive in understanding media from and about Eastern Europe and to articulate the framework that will serve as my jumping-off point for studying fandom in Bulgaria.
World maps that depict the geographical boundary between a Global North and a Global South tend to draw the line between the two along the border between Bulgaria and Turkey with the former falling within the domain of the Global North. This is significant, considering that the Global North tends to be associated with whiteness, colonialism, and higher economic development, while the Global South is the geography of non-whiteness, post-colonialism, and lower economic growth (to name a few). What is seldom acknowledged, however, are the Cold War roots of these concepts. The Global North specifically, as mapped onto depictions of the globe, spans the territory of what used to be called the “First World” and the “Second World” in Alfred Sauvy’s Three-World Model. According to that model, “a ‘free’ First World that is modern, scientific, rational, and therefore a ‘natural’ society; a ‘communist’
Second World controlled by ideology and propaganda, with ‘natural’ society subordinated to a totalitarian state; and a Third World that is ‘traditional,’ irrational, overpopulated, religious, and economically ‘backward.’” (Chari & Verdery, 2009, p. 18). However, as Chari & Verdery contend, “[t]his division makes even less sense after 1989, when many socialist countries became, like postcolonial ones, synonymous with underdevelopment” (p. 19).
Bulgaria and Eastern Europe’s odd fit within the Global North/South framework and its attendant implications of coloniality and post-coloniality became further apparent to me through my engagement with the work of Maria Todorova (2009) and Neda Atanasoski (2013), which explores the specific socio-historical orientation of Eastern Europe and the Balkans to the West. Maria Todorova’s work Imagining the Balkans (2009) articulates “balkanism” as a discourse, which shares similarities with Edward Said’s orientalism, but diverges from it based on critical categories such as the fact that Balkan people are white, Christian (albeit Orthodox Christian), and were not colonized. Thus, according to Todorova, while the Balkans were never viewed as totally Other to the West, they were nevertheless seen as an “incomplete self” that has yet to reach enlightenment. That formulation is in turn reminiscent of Slavoj Zizek’s description of the Balkans as a region “caught in another’s dream.” Similarly, Neda Atanasoski (2013) has surveyed Western discourses and imaginaries of the Balkans, Eastern Europe and (to a lesser extent) Russia—what was collectively known as the “Second World.” Atanasoski details the racialization of the Balkans and Eastern Europe through Western media accounts of the region and points out that “[i]in the Western imaginary, the distant and more recent history of Balkan violence and hatred makes manifest the (im)possibility of transition from East to West, from primitive to enlightened, and from barbaric to benevolent” (p. 141). Along similar lines, Milica Bakic-Hayden (1995) has proposed the concept of “nesting orientalisms:” “a pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is premised. In this pattern, Asia is more ‘East’ or ‘other’ than eastern Europe; within eastern Europe itself this gradation is reproduced with the Balkans perceived as most ‘eastern’; within the Balkans there are similarly constructed hierarchies.” More recently, Wallace (2008) used the concept in his study of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, which he describes as a simulacra of Eastern Europe that Cohen associates with the country of Kazakhstan—itself on the Asian continent. Notably, Borat, as one of Cohen’s three Da Ali G Show (2000-2004) alter egos (the other two being Ali G and Brüno Gehard), is an object of fandom within the U.K. and the U.S.
I detail these discrepancies between Eastern Europe and some of the dominant concepts structuring scholarly work on transnational media, because my research suggests that they are indispensable for understanding the current state of fandom in Bulgaria. My own survey of the contemporary contours of Bulgarian fandom as well as its history and development in the latter half of the 20th century appears to support Chari & Verdery’s (2009) argument for the relevance of “the (post-) Cold War” as an analytical category. In fact, in Bulgarian fandom the (post-) Cold War as an analytic mediates more established concepts in Western Anglophone culture such as divisions between high-art and low art. Chari & Verdery’s concept itself is closely aligned to Atanasoski’s (2013) deployment of postsocialism, which she describes as a “global condition that produces a social, economic, and cultural ethic that builds on and disavows previous racial and imperial formations” (p. 23). According to Chari & Verdery, “an integrated analytical field ought to explore intertwined histories of capital and empire, as we have suggested, but also the ongoing effects of the Cold War’s Three-Worlds ideology” (p. 19).
My intention in participating in this forum on fandom is to aim towards such an integrated analytical framework in surveying fandom in Bulgaria. The historical development of Bulgarian fandom necessitates such an approach where questions of whiteness and its construction (Stanfill, 2011), gender (Scott, 2019), sexual orientation, class, and ableism interact with questions of media access (Morimoto & Chin, 2017) shaped by Bulgaria’s past as a Soviet satellite state, the fall of communism in 1990, and the policies of economic “shock therapy” in the 90s. The economic crisis of the 90s had a profound effect on all aspects of media and culture and is evident in various aspects of fandom, including fans’ own accounts of the history of fan activity in Bulgaria (Borisova, 2020). Furthermore, such an integrated approach helps us understand how the “battle of ideologies” played out on real bodies of fans who were left to bridge the gaps between two opposing global ideologies that positioned them as a periphery to their respective centers and how fans continue to labor to close these gaps to present day.
Bibliography:
Atanasoski, N. (2013). Humanitarian violence: the U.S. deployment of diversity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakic-Hayden, M. (1995). Nesting Orientalisms: The case of former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review 54(4), 917-931.
Borisova, E. (2020, March 29). Накратко за българския фендъм (Briefly about Bulgarian fandom). Фантастика и Бъдеще (Science Fiction and Future): https://fantastika-bg.eu/накратко-за-българския-фендъм/
Chari, S. & Verdery, K. (2009). Thinking between the posts: Postcolonialism, postsocialism, and
ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(6), 6-34.
Morimoto, L. H. & Chin, B. (2017). Reimagining the imagined community: Online media fandoms in the age of global convergence. In Gray, J., Sandvoss, C., & Harrington, C. L. (Eds.) Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd Edition, pp. 174-188.
Scott, S. (2019). Fake geek girls: Fandom, gender, and the convergence culture industry. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Stanfill, M. (2011). Doing fandom, (mis)doing whiteness: Heteronormativity, racialization, and the discursive construction of fandom. In Reid A. R. & Gatson, S. (Eds.) Transformative Works and Cultures 8.
https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0256
Todorova, M. (2009). Imagining the Balkans. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Wallace, D. (2008). Hyperrealizing "Borat" with the map of the European "Other." Slavic Review 67(1), 35-49.
