Research Network: New Eastenders – The Prequel Anahita Razmi

New Eastenders: The Prequel

This lecture performance by Anahita Razmi considers and broods on the launch and structure of a non-existent “coming to your living room soon” soap opera, titled “New Eastenders”, and some of its possible and multi-referential preconditions.

Referring to the long-running British BBC soap opera “Eastenders”, set in London’s East End, the “New Eastenders” are proposing a geographical shift, considering the “Global East” – with its unclear definition – as the series’ new quixotic setting. The Near East- ‘Middle East’- Far East-Enders make the cast of the series, drafting a shifted storyboard for an ‘East and its End’.

The event considers TV soap operas from different contexts and countries, stereotypical storylines, pilots, prequels, trailers, happy-endings, sad-endings, open-endings, drama and TV studio sets as possibilities for its developing script. Film and TV narratives of the Beginning and the End, colonial, post-colonial and political references are included in the search for inspiration.

As a prequel to something not already scripted or broadcast, the series structure might be seen as deliberately non-linear and non-original.

This will be followed by a discussion with Goldsmiths’ MA Race, Media and Social Justice co-convenor Dr. Anamik Saha.

Anahita Razmi is a Berlin-based artist with Iranian background whose work revolves around cultural transfers and translocations.  What role does ‘the East’ play in mass media, consumer culture and pop culture? How do identities and bodies transform from one place to the other? Working mainly with video, installation, new media and performance, Razmi’s work is reconsidering visual memory, stereotypes, political conditions and standards between Orient and Occident. In 2017, Razmi received a BS Projects scholarship at Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany. Other residencies and awards include the Werkstattpreis of the Erich Hauser Foundation (2015), the Goethe-Institute Villa Kamogawa Residency, Kyoto (2015), the MAK-Schindler Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program, Los Angeles (2013) and the The Emdash Award, Frieze Foundation (2011).

Dr Anamik Saha is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and co-convenor of its MA in Race, Media and Social Justice. He is also the author of the book Race and the Cultural Industries (Polity, 2018). Before joining Goldsmiths he worked at the University of Leeds, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests are in race, and cultural production, particularly in relation to broader questions of empire and neoliberalism. As well as his new book, his research has been published in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Media, Culture and Society and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He recently co-edited a special issue of Cultural Sociology on inequalities in the cultural industries.