Realism, violence and representation of migrants and minorities in contemporary Europe

Since the end of the Cold War, mainstream media and state discourses in Europe have established an image of the threatening migrant and minority which fuels anxieties about security. Especially after 9/11, these populations have become associated with terrorism, and depicted as unwilling to embrace European democratic values. In response, liberal media and political activism have approached them as victims of globalization, disconnected from the receiver society and hanging on to age-old traditions and religion. My dissertation explores the ways in which categories of criminality and victimhood inform how Europeans imagine migrants and minorities and how these imaginations reflect upon a European sense of self.;This dissertation also traces a significant renewal of the realist mode in European literature and film. An emergent form of realism extends representation to previously excluded social groups, and responds to migrant and minority association with violence in the news media by narrating the larger social conditions for violence through their "subjective" stories, and by pointing out how the images of victimhood and criminality perpetuate the liberal contradiction between humanitarianism on the one hand, and ruthlessness in defense of security on the other.;The first chapter analyzes Constantinos Giannaris' Hostage ---a documentary drama on a hijacking in Greece narrated from the perspective of the Albanian criminal---reveals the function of migrant illegality in the regulation of borders and neo-liberal flexible labor regimes. My second chapter on Michael Haneke's Hidden discusses the prospects and limits of a new realism in French film: a minority's experience of historical violence serves to bolster the identity of a liberal European self which feeds on post-colonial guilt. The third chapter on Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoglu's works Leyla, Headstuff and Black Virgins, explores the literary market for narratives of victimized Muslim women in Germany and how it promotes the ideology of European liberal freedom. Chapter Four compares Greek writer Sotiris Dimitriou's short stories on the decadence of European bodies and anxieties about social reproduction with those of the nineteenth-century author Alexandros Papadiamandis to trace the links between realist representation and narration of violence, migration, and commodification of bodies.