Open AccessBeasts from the East
Author(s) -
Júlia Havas,
Anna Mártonfi,
Gábor Gergely
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
view
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2213-0969
DOI - 10.18146/view.265
Subject(s) - britishness , multiculturalism , nationalism , brexit , deviance (statistics) , drama , heterotopia (medicine) , prestige , media studies , sociology , white (mutation) , gender studies , aesthetics , history , political science , art , law , literature , philosophy , european union , linguistics , statistics , genetics , mathematics , biochemistry , chemistry , politics , biology , gene , business , economic policy
This article interrogates the figure of the Eastern European itinerant in contemporary prestige BBC drama to highlight the figure’s role in mobilizing ideas of nationhood and foreignness in Brexit-era Britain. Our critical analyses of Dracula (BBC1, 2020), Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018–), and Call the Midwife (BBC1, 2012–) show that programming that putatively celebrates British multiculturalism and diversity configures the Eastern European foreigner as a threat to idea(l)s of Britishness, by deploying this figure in strikingly similar imaginaries of contagion, deviance, and savagery. Such treatment embeds these portrayals in discourses of white nationalism that seek to manage national belonging by articulating the limits and rules of the national community as implicitly racialized terms of culture and space.