Your Race Sounds Familiar?

Abstract

Your Face Sounds Familiar, a celebrity talent television format developed by the Dutch production company Endemol and first broadcast in Spain in 2011, has entertained audiences in more than forty countries with the sight of well-known professional musicians impersonating foreign and domestic stars through cross-gender drag and, on many national editions, cross-racial drag, with results that would widely be regarded as offensive blackface where this has already been extensively challenged as racist in public. In central/south-east Europe, however, blackface is sometimes justified by arguing that it cannot be a racist practice because these countries have not had the UK and USA’s history of colonialism and racial oppression. Through a study of the Croatian edition Tvoje lice zvuči poznato (2014–), where until 2020 blackface had rarely been publicly challenged, this paper explores how far a critical race studies lens towards blackface can also be applied there.