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Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Eliot Borenstein
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Abstract

The comic figure of the yokel has undergone a resurgence in the past decade, culminating in Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat. The yokel, whose predictable humor is based on his aggressive backwardness and persistent malapropisms, draws attention to the “foreignness” with which multiculturalism is uncomfortable, while also highlighting the economic and cultural dislocation of globalization. Cohen builds on the longstanding stereotypes about Jews and Gypsies (Roma), creating a persona who resembles the “vermin” of Nazi propaganda and manages to elicit racist responses from his unwitting audience. Borat functions within a fictional framework of racism and ethnic hostility, bringing to light barely concealed discomforts about border-crossings, cosmopolitanism, and global cultures.

Type
Borat: Selves and Others
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

Epigraphs taken from Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Nozu (New York, 1994), 10; and Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Paul Foote (London, 1966), 25.

1. Friedman, Thomas L., The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 2000), 248-75.Google Scholar

2. On steb, see Matizen, Viktor, “Steb kak fenomen kul'tury,” Iskusstvo kino, 1993, no. 9: 59–62 Google Scholar; and Yurchak, Aleksei, “Gagarin and the Rave Kids: Transforming Power, Identity, and Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Nightlife,” in Barker, Adele Marie, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, 1999), 76–109.Google Scholar

3. “British Comic Cohen Defends His Alter Ego Borat,” Reuters, 15 November 2006.

4. Both Jews and Roma are examples of what Yuri Slezkine calls “Mercurians,” bordercrossing outsiders who functioned as go-betweens rather than working the land. Cosmopolitans “routinely accuse them of tribalism, nepotism, clannishness, and other sins that used to be virtues (and still are, in a variety of contexts).” Slezkine, Yuri, Thejeiuish Century (Princeton, 2004), 24.Google Scholar

5. In Anglo-American popular culture, the same function is often filled by Bulgarian women vocalists, whose “mysterious voices” have provided the background to mystical scenes on Xena: Warrior Princess and HBO's Carnivàle.

6. Bojan Pancevski and Carmiola Ionescu, “Borat Film ‘Tricked’ Poor Village Actors,“ Daily Mail, 11 November 2006.

7. Friedman, Lexus and the Olive Tree, 31.