TY - JOUR
T1 - Constructing ethnic minority detectives in french and german crime television series
AU - Luna-Dubois, Álvaro
N1 - Funding Information:
1 The research presented here has been financed by the research project DETECt — Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (Horizon 2020, 2018–2021) [Grant agreement number 770151]. 2 Fatima El Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. xxvii. 3 Cf. Alec Hargreaves and Antonio Perotti, ‘The representation on French television of immigrants and ethnic minorities of third World origin’, New Community, 19.2 (1993), 251–261; Jessika Ter Wal, ‘Introduction’, in Racism and Cultural Diversity in the Mass Media (Vienna: European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, 2002), pp.11–26; Jakob-Moritz Eberl et al., ‘The European Media Discourse on Immigration and its Effects: a Literature Review’, Annals of the International Communication Association, 42.3 (2018), 207–223; Katharina Hall, Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016). 4 Sylvie Dumerlat, ‘The Algerian War and its Afterlives Painted Noir in Sérail Killers by Lakhdar Belaïd: Beur Literature or Roman Noir?’, Expressions Maghrébines, 7.1 (2008), 148–158, (p. 142–143). 5 Claire Gorrara, The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 92. 6 Stephen Soitos, Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 33. 7 Axel Stähler, ‘Screaming “Black” Murder: Crime Fiction and the Construction of Ethnic Identities’, English Studies, 100.1 (2019), 43–62 (p. 43). 8 Ivi, p. 60. 9 Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 187. 10 Durmelat, p.156. 11 Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 29. 12 Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald, ‘Ethnic Detectives in Popular Fiction: New Directions for an American Genre’, in Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the “Other” Side, ed. by Adrienne Johnson Gosselin (New York: Garland, 1999), p. 60. 13 Cf. Sam Neath, ‘Loftier Ideals? France, Big Brother, and the Banlieues’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 8.2 (2004), 13541; Éric Macé, ‘La Fiction télévisuelle française au miroir de The Wire’, Réseaux, 5.1 (2013) 179–204. 14 Ginette Vincendeau, ‘From the Margins to the Center: French Stardom and Ethnicty’, in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie and Raphaëlle Moine (Chichester: John Willey & Sons, 2015), pp. 1279–1334, (p. 1291). 15 Ibidem. 16 Michelle Mattson, ‘Tatort: The Generation of Public Identity in a German Crime Series’, New German Critique, 78.1 (1999), 161–81, (p. 169). 17 Vera Alexander, ‘Investigating the Motif of Crime as Transcultural Border Crossing: Cinnamon Gardens and The Sand Glass’, in Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. by Christine Matzke and Susanne Muehleisen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp.139– 160, (p. 142).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Universita degli Studi di Milano. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/11/17
Y1 - 2021/11/17
N2 - This article examines and compares the representation of ethnic minority lead investigators in the television crime series, Tatort Hamburg (ARD, 2008-2012 season), Cherif (France 2, 2013-2019), Last Panthers (Canal+, 2015), and Dogs of Berlin (Netflix, 2018). It suggests a typology of the figure of the ethnic minority detective based on representational patterns shared by the series and other literary and television narratives, which is discussed and contextualized within the ideological and commercial limitations of French and German television cultures. The last section assesses the series’ potential to depict ‘postmigrant societies’ founded on and influenced by social plurality and former and ongoing migration movements. In so doing, the study highlights role of typologies and narrative tropes in the portrayal of ethnic minorities in crime television and insists, despite the shortcomings of some series’ representational strategies, on the value of figures of identification for minority and majority audiences that attest to a shifting understanding of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in contemporary European societies.
AB - This article examines and compares the representation of ethnic minority lead investigators in the television crime series, Tatort Hamburg (ARD, 2008-2012 season), Cherif (France 2, 2013-2019), Last Panthers (Canal+, 2015), and Dogs of Berlin (Netflix, 2018). It suggests a typology of the figure of the ethnic minority detective based on representational patterns shared by the series and other literary and television narratives, which is discussed and contextualized within the ideological and commercial limitations of French and German television cultures. The last section assesses the series’ potential to depict ‘postmigrant societies’ founded on and influenced by social plurality and former and ongoing migration movements. In so doing, the study highlights role of typologies and narrative tropes in the portrayal of ethnic minorities in crime television and insists, despite the shortcomings of some series’ representational strategies, on the value of figures of identification for minority and majority audiences that attest to a shifting understanding of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in contemporary European societies.
KW - Crime television series
KW - Ethnic minority detectives
KW - European crime fiction
KW - Postmigration
KW - Representation of minorities
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U2 - 10.13130/2036-461X/16392
DO - 10.13130/2036-461X/16392
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85120321138
SN - 2035-5270
VL - 21
SP - 125
EP - 143
JO - Cinema et Cie
JF - Cinema et Cie
IS - 36-37
ER -