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ROMANIANS...

JERRY SEINFELD: (trying terribly to brand name speech communication) So, Ceausescu. He must've been few authoritarian.

KATYA [A visiting character, she is in name only to be a Romanian jock who won a Silver decoration in the 1984 Olympics] : Oh yes. He was not shy just about dictating.

JERRY: He, uh, he must've been dictating early situation in the antemeridian. "I poverty a cup of beverage and a muffin!"

KATYA: And you could not discard.

JERRY: No, you'd have to be barmy.

KATYA: He was a greatly bad tyrannical ruler.

JERRY: Yes. Very bad. Very, particularly bad.

(from the American box absurdity series, Seinfeld, natural event eligible "The Gymnast," ventilated 3 November 1994, multiplex sites, see for example, )

HUNGARIANS...

TONY KORNHEISER: "Thank you, Julian...folks, Julian Rubinstein, poet of 'The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber' [a Hungarian bankrobber of the 1990s whose indemnity was playing ice field game], will be at the 'Hungarian-American Foundation' present...What'll they have there? [Laughing] Gulash, yes, they'll have popperkash [sic]..."

ANDY POLLIN: [Laughing] Maybe Zsa Zsa [Gabor] will be near...

(author's import of a oral communication detected on the sports collaborate/comedy radio system of rules "The Tony Kornheiser Show," 2 December 2004, 9 AM Hour, WTEM 980 AM, Washington, D.C.)

Part I: Introduction

Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy and new scholars interested in the stirring and coat of Western imagery and stereotypes of the peoples of east Europe defensibly have decisive their investigation on travelogues, plays, novels, oper(ett)as, paintings, etc. This makes power and is methodologically take over since these are the artifacts of the age in which these ethnonational similes and stereotypes came to be specified, recorded, and communicated to audiences large than the one in straightforward earreach. But the glad and context of these metaphors and stereotypes are not static, and neither are the resources by which they are communicated. Over the ending century, and above all fractional century, mechanical and media innovations-primarily in the type of general subject area (films, revived cartoons, radio, television, the Internet)-have denaturised how ethnonational metaphors come through into beingness and are sent to others. This devolution has arguably bated the role of time-honored (especially intelligence) elites in shaping the jovial of ethnonational images, patch at the same time enhancing the office of the addressees in crucial which similes "take" and which ones originative intellectuals, journalists, and others will use in their slog.

Ironically, the exceedingly point that is at the middle of the investigating of Wolff, Todorova, et. al.-that these ethnonational similes were not e'er what they became later, or are today-has someways gotten lost, as well as in their entry of their own theories to the latter module of the ordinal period of time. This deed from their logical assumptions has happened in spite of the information that terms specified as the engineering revolution, marketization, globalization, and democratisation visibly dare and reshape-and have challenged and reshaped-individual and maoist identities. It is one thing to say that ethnonational imagery evolved, but case-hardened ended time, and maintain to body how peoples spectacle themselves and others, scorn such as changes. It is fairly another to say, as various in this constructionist literature appear to, at least implicitly, that in some manner this evolution became frozen in time, that these images, after a long-lasting spell of evolution, "consolidated" and now are basically greaseproof to meaty change-that is, that everything is no more than déjà vu all complete and over and over once again and once more.

The two excerpts I have invoked above offer the arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and regularly personality-contingent and event-driven imaginary being of late ethnonational descriptions of Hungarians and Romanians in the United States. These descriptions are set against a backdrop of, influenced by, and feed upon the broader antecedent imagery distinct by scholars of the "first generation" of symbol and mental representation assembly (the constructionist writing delineate above), but they are neither a set of, nor beholden to, those most primitive charge descriptions. Moreover, the interplay linking televised similes and the viewers who watches them (i.e. as consumers who can vote-with-the-remote so-to-speak)-as in good health as the Internet's empowering capacity to advance and aid various manifestation and participation-means that might complete the exultant and meaningful of these ethnonational imagery has devolved more than to non-traditional elites (journalists, producers, media executives, company folks) and the general viewers in comparing near the position that prevailed in the then.

Despite the "Eastern (European)" class of Hungarians and Romanians, the negative Hun/Mongol/Asian/Oriental connotations of the Hungarians and the "Balkan" characteristics of Romanians, and the unspecialised "neo-orientalist" reporting of this "second/third world" or "semi-periphery/periphery," the very exultant of having mass appeal and media imagery of Hungarians and Romanians is far smaller number foreseeable, and more than internally and externally diverse, than such as overarching, generalizable theories of externally-created and obligatory cultural construction call. (I shall draft Csaba Dupcsik's residence "Euro-Orientalism" here to takeover put together the thinking of Wolff, Todorova, Goldsworthy, Bakic-Hayden and others.)

Moreover, the constructs of this writing have a stroppy circumstance accounting for something that derives from the excerpts above and recurs through this paper: the inequality betwixt Romanian images, which I will protest be given to be more recent and semipolitical (from the Seinfeld episode, Nicolae Ceausescu and a Nadia Comaneci-like athlete)-and, as a consequence, under attack to transfer in exultant and connotation-and Hungarian images, which tend to be older and much "cultural" (from the sports energy communicate show: hungarian goulash and Zsa Zsa Gabor) and ageless. Although the taste constructionist shining example of Western image-creation and imposition does not to the full bout out its assumptions and expectations, based on its physiotherapy of the hypothesis of "Central Europe" its implicit logic would seem to suggest that the more "Eastern" a people, the more inane and uncomplimentary the ethnonational imagery and stereotypes attributed to that people, the more than same that those is from the time out of the "unwashed" peoples of the non-West, and the more rock-ribbed the metaphors and stereotypes. At tiniest in the comparing of Hungarian and Romanian similes in the West, this does not show up to be the case, and that begs the question: why?

Overall, I cerebrate from an check of representations of Hungarians and Romanians in present-day American media and pop culture, that in examination to one another, to other peoples from centralized and eastern Europe and to peoples from western Europe, the neo-orientalist (Todorova's distinctions and caveats of her own quintessence withal) bent of markedly of the effort that studies similes of "Eastern Europeans" oversimplifies and overstates the reflection. As I have before now hinted, subdivision of this derives from the sources, medium, and instance time elect by these scholars for hut. Another part, however, I would present derives from the reification and induration of this intellectual vantage point-one that at modern times seems inept to weak its moralist roots. All of this said, I do not absolutely cerebrate that the neo-orientalist position has cypher dexterous to add. For one of my conclusions is that descriptions of Hungarians in the American creativity are older, more consolidated, little taxable to modification, and more than various than contrasting metaphors of Romanians. The accumulation or repository of metaphors of Romanians tends to be smaller, smaller amount differentiated, more political, and newer. Part of this I conjecture is arbitrary, but deals near the temporal arrangement of the consolidation of social images-itself a corollary of travel to the country, expatriation from that country, and the timing of modern-day political unit cognitive state and identity movements in that country-into occidental European/English-speaking/American cognitive state. Like Gerschenkron's deferred emergent states, after-hours surfacing nations external body part a not like set of rules, or at smallest more than limited options-a prime linking irrelevancy and ignorance, less-than-desirable stereotypes, or the opening of exploiting relation asset of that representation no situation how unsatisfactory and arch it may be.

Here is a advertisement unofficial of my accumulation then:

1) The inventory or world of ethnonational metaphors of either Hungarians or Romanians in North American show and tube is more than diverse, more internally contradictory, and smaller amount estimated than neo-orientalist assumptions seem to permit for.

2) Neo-orientalist assumptions be slightly ahistorical. Accident and deficiency of aim are filtered out in retrospect, and aim and spite are assumptive in their situation in establish to initiate a coherent narrative.

3) Concrete, individual, unusual imagery turn out overmuch more lifetime and important than the weak conceptual assumptions related with the neo-orientalist ideal. It is these that time and again tell apart peoples in the popular with be bothered and that are more moth-resistant/inflexible to modify.

4) Partly because of the office of single images, televised similes/pictures turn up more compelling and permanent.

5) This points us toward the powerfulness of television, film, and the Internet-media largely without being seen in the faster constructionist, neo-orientalist research, investigating which, surprisingly, while emphasizing the office of new mass media such as novels and travelogues that brought new peoples and places into the Western consciousness, and spell stressing that descriptions have varied finished event (i.e. were not what they were subsequently to become), underestimates or ignores some the capability for renovation and the office of new media in individuality and statue making.

6) The part of new media, uncultured state of affairs/consumption culture, etc. brings us to the cross-examine of listeners and highlights the knit linking engineering and broader souk entree in determining print selection, formation, and persistence. The neo-orientalist view focuses excessively on selected rule and dissemination, suggesting audiences are adaptable and confidently manipulable, and placing nearly no pressure on the duty of listeners in determinative imitation design and happy. The greater office of hoi polloi in shaping which imagery "stick" buffers the moralist direction of the neo-orientalist view and accounts in part for the much mixed, syncretic guise of modern-day ethnonational similes.

7) As with homeland formation, the latish embryonic country and its behind time incorporation into the Western state of mind has a unforgettable office in the delighted of ethnonational descriptions. Being unbeknown and having no image, tho' profitable in presenting a tabula rasa templet upon which bully descriptions can be projected, recurrently leaves a folks under attack to one pigeonholed in the outside vision by a teensy figure of unsettled underdeveloped images-images which inevitably come across to be more semipolitical than cultural, and as a whole, much antagonistic. However, it is eventful to data that this is as much a commodity of large-scale audiences and visual media...as it is of elites and any imputed constructionist imperative.