Dirty White Race Sarcasm: Weaponizing Porgy and Bess in Budapest

This article draws on empirical material from Hungary to develop conceptual contributions to understanding the transformation of the racial order in Europe. The alignment of the racialization of east-central European societies with longue durée patterns of inequality has produced several interlocking paradoxes. Focusing on the reception of Porgy and Bess in Hungary, we compare debates surrounding the opera’s 1970 socialist-era staging, which relied on blackface as a theatrical device for marking Blackness, and the controversies generated by the 2018 production at the Hungarian State Opera House, which also ignored the Gershwin estate’s all-Black-cast stipulation without using blackface. The resulting international controversy revealed patterns of Whiteness claims unfolding through invocations of Blackness as evidence for semi-peripheral strategies of moral geopolitics, while also situating these debates within longer historical transformations of race relations. Using press materials, institutional statements, and public debates, we trace how competing techniques of representation become embedded within broader struggles of identity politics and racialized judgments of taste. The article demonstrates how cultural conflicts over opera and “high culture” can illuminate transformations in the racialization of east-central Europe within global cultural hierarchies.