Sorting out the archive of contemporary European identity

DETECt investigates how popular culture contributes to shaping European cultural identity as a continuing process of transformation fostered by the mobility of people, products and representations across the continent. By analyzing the crime genre in fiction, film and TV dramas from 1989 to present, the project examines how strategies such as co-production, serialization, translation, adaptation, and distribution support the transnational dissemination of shared representations of European identity. DETECt emphasizes in particular how the representation of borders, transnational networks, gender and ethnic identities in these works reflects on the ability of European narratives to migrate beyond their place of origin and be appropriated elsewhere in different and variegated ways. This ambitious research program requires the development of a complex theoretical and methodological framework taking into consideration the multifaceted nature of the project’s topic and approach. The very existence of an agreed-upon notion of “European popular culture” has indeed often been questioned, which makes the identification of its referents – i.e. the project’s objects of study – a challenge in itself. This document aims therefore to elaborate such a shared framework for the DETECt project, allowing all partners to proceed in the collection and organization of the diverse objects of study in a clear and coordinated way. As its title spells out, the goal of the document is therefore to sort out the proliferating, assorted archive of crime narratives produced in Europe with the goal of turning it into a manageable, representative corpus. Only by completing this process will the researchers be able to elaborate some solid interpretive hypotheses on the representation of European identity in the field of popular culture. The content of the document is the result of intense exchanges among the partners in the consortium throughout the first phase of the project. In fact, the discussion about its themes started before the official start date of DETECt, during a meeting of the WP leaders that was held at the University of Bologna on February 26-27, 2018. The preparation for and delivery of the kick-off meeting and the research workshop held in Bologna on April 26-27 further contributed to developing this document, as the key theoretical and methodological challenges continued to be debated via email, Skype calls and in person. In particular, the Project Coordinator and the leaders of Work Package 2 received extensive feedback from all the DETECt researchers about their initial proposals, which offered some guidelines for the approaches to be adopted in the research and for the creation of a list of works to be included in the corpus. Finally, between May and August, the authors and the main contributors posted in the project’s Basecamp platform several drafts of the text, which were extensively commented on and improved by the other partners. The document is therefore the first research outcome of the strong collaborative approach promoted by the project, as it offered the partners an opportunity to test and refine an agreed upon procedure to be implemented for the development of all the planned research deliverables. The scholars responsible for the initial and then final drafts were the leader of WP2 (Baetens) and the Project Coordinator (Dall’Asta), whose comprehensive view of the project framework made it easier to combine the disparate inputs coming from the other 16 partner institutions. Their research assistants (Dejonghe and Pagello) provided useful support for the enrichment, editing and revision of the texts. The leader of WP4 (Hansen) and the task leaders and colleagues responsible for major deliverables in WP4 (Dobrescu), WP5 (Kálai and Keszeg) and WP6 (Morsch) extensively contributed to the text, especially—but not only—as it touched upon the specific sections of the project in which they are involved. The authors and contributors are grateful to the reviewers, two colleagues from KU Leuven and UCLouvain and internationally renowned scholars in the project’s field of research: Prof. Theo D’Haen and Prof. Marc Lits, who also kindly agreed to become members of the project’s Advisory Board.