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Paper
In Western Europe, there is a long tradition of thinking about television as a national medium. In particular, public broadcasting is often conceived as uniting viewers into one ‘imagined community’ (Scannell 1992). However, the assumption of a homogeneous and shared cultural space is questioned in the age of multichannel global TV, leading to fragmented and niche audiences within nations and to international and diasporic audiences across nations. Nevertheless, European broadcast television still often addresses a national audience, a notion that may have been theoretically deconstructed but that is alive and kicking in everyday broadcasting practice and parlance. Legal and language borders remain important, leading to television that is still generally conceived along national lines (Waisbord 2004).
This paper addresses the question of diversity within such nationally conceived television programming, taking a closer look at Flemish television. Flanders is a Dutch-language Belgian region where broadcasting has always been conceived from a strongly Flemish point of view. Like the French community in Belgium, Flanders has its own media system, including public and commercial television, addressing only one (sub)national community. Is there room, in such a constellation, for ethnic diversity on screen? And are ethnic minority viewers part of the (sub)national viewing community? These are pressing questions, as the social debate on the multi-ethnic society in Belgium is getting more and more polarised, opposing ‘us’ (imagined as the white, ethnically Belgian population) to ‘them’ (mostly Muslims). The opposition is built into the very terms of the debate, opposing ‘autochthonous’ (born here) and ‘allochthonous’ (born abroad). Ethnic minorities are ‘othered’ and unified by the very vocabulary used, even by those sympathetic to their cause.
This paper aims to intervene in this social debate by exploring the assumed ethnic homogeneity of the nation on and off screen, focusing in particular on TV fiction, one of the prime sources of everyday entertainment. Moving on from an overview of existing literature, this paper presents the results of an original, Flemish research project, based on a combination of textual analysis and audience research. First, a week of television fiction is analysed, in order to answer the first research question: how is ethnic diversity represented in prime time fiction on Flemish television? Then, focus groups are used to answer the second research question: how do ethnic majority and minority viewers evaluate these representations? In this way, this research hopes to make an empirically based intervention in contemporary (Flemish) debates about ethnicity and diversity.