‘Playing with Fire’ and Playing It Safe: With(out) Roma at the Eurovision Song Contest?

The ‘gay Olympics’? The Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

“…Visions of an inclusive Eurovision and an inclusive Europe also revealed troubling silences and erasures about race (Sieg, 2013b). Iona Szeman (2013: 139), for instance, argued that Eurovision producers had persistently marginalised Roma, a racialised and marginalised group ‘across Europe’: Eurovision entries might contain signifiers of Roma music without Roma performers, or Roma performers without music marked as Roma, but hardly ever both (Bulgaria’s representative Sofi Marinova in 2012 was an exception). When the Romani pop-folk star Azis — whose performance persona was famously gender non-conforming and whose sexuality was ambiguous but undefined (Silverman, 2012: 188–94) — joined Bulgaria’s Eurovision entry in 2006, he was placed almost unseen behind the main vocalist, the (less famous but ethnically Bulgarian) singer Mariana Popova (Szeman, 2013: 132).…”

“…Iona Szeman (2013: 139), for instance, argued that Eurovision producers had persistently marginalised Roma, a racialised and marginalised group ‘across Europe’: Eurovision entries might contain signifiers of Roma music without Roma performers, or Roma performers without music marked as Roma, but hardly ever both (Bulgaria’s representative Sofi Marinova in 2012 was an exception). When the Romani pop-folk star Azis — whose performance persona was famously gender non-conforming and whose sexuality was ambiguous but undefined (Silverman, 2012: 188–94) — joined Bulgaria’s Eurovision entry in 2006, he was placed almost unseen behind the main vocalist, the (less famous but ethnically Bulgarian) singer Mariana Popova (Szeman, 2013: 132). This positioning missed an opportunity to centre a simultaneously non-heteronormative and racialised musician in the Eurovision text so that, to paraphrase Sara Ahmed (2011: 128), he could have entered as a subject with his own voice.…”

The power of violins and rose petals: The Eurovision Song Contest as an arena of European crisis

“…However, the trope of winning through (auto-)ethnicization should not be overstressed: after all, Latvia won in 2002 with a Latin-styled pop song (Marie N with 'I Wanna'), and the chain of successful Scandinavian pop songs in the 2010s can hardly be explained by recourse to ethnicity (contrary to Björnberg, 2013). In addition, the Czech Republic failed disastrously with a hyper-ethnic (albeit tongue-incheek) Roma entry in 2009, winning zero points in the semi-final (Gypsy.cz with 'Aven romale'; on the role of Roma representation at the ESC see Szeman, 2013). More often than not, the musical model of choice was a 'cosmopolitan hybridity rather than a conscious authenticity' -and even more so for the hosting country (Bohlman, 2007: 45).…”

What female pop-folk celebrity in south-east Europe tells postsocialist feminist media studies about global formations of race

“…cosmopolitanism and difference in local, national and "world" musical economies. Yet they are marginalized at the highest tiers of business and celebrity (Silverman 2012: 185), and their contributions to national musical traditions are often erased in presentations of the nation that emphasise white, ethnic-majority identity for an international gaze, such as some performances in Eurovision (Szeman 2013). While Romani presence in folk musical tradition might disturb nationalist ideological premises, structural racism contains the potential disruption.…”