Global Entertainment and the Roma "Underclass".

The paper acknowledges the importance of the pan-European attention that has been paid to the European ‘Roma problem’ at various scales and in various discourses recently, from European Union policy-making to local grassroots activism to social scientific studies. However, it argues that policy-oriented activism and most social scientific research offer an oversimplified view of the Roma’s situation in post-communist Europe by continuing to ground Romany identities in victimization and by ignoring the ways in which global entertainment media and transnational networking have transformed ethnic relations in Eastern Europe in the last fifteen years. The essay considers new representations that revalorize traditionally ludic, entertaining Roma images, analyzing in some detail the recent Hungarian animated film, The District (2004), which features ‘cool’ Roma characters from the urban ghetto, the space of exclusion from the nation, as representatives of an emerging national, ethnic-class solidarity against both corrupt neocolonial governments and global corporate capitalism. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]