In my project “Re-imagining Europe in Neocolonial Enslavement Narratives,” I examine fictional accounts of human trafficking, particularly those that focus on Black African women who migrate to Europe and end up as sex workers. I introduce the term “neocolonial enslavement narratives” to describe these texts as they depict late twentieth/twenty-first century experiences of enslavement while exposing Europe’s ongoing exploitation of its former colonies. Although these texts share a genre lineage with autobiographical slave narratives, which typically focus on U.S. antebellum slavery, they differ due to their fictionalization and contemporary European settings. A key strength of this emerging genre is its challenging of “the powerful narrative of Europe as a colorblind continent,”[1] supposedly untouched by the oppressive ideologies it spread globally. By decentering and appropriating the white European gaze, films such as Sudabeh Mortezai’s Joy (Austria 2018) contribute to a Black re-imagining of Europe. They also challenge androcentric perspectives in Afropean cultural productions, amplifying the voices of an often-overlooked group within the African diaspora.
Mortezai’s feature film follows Joy and Precious, two Nigerian women in Austria. In Vienna, Nigerian trafficker “Madame,” who financed their journey to Europe, forces them to repay their debts through prostitution.[2] While Joy is older and more experienced, Precious, a teenager, has just arrived. Rather than explicitly emphasizing its Vienna setting, the film subtly hints at its location through casual references. In her review, Nancy Nenno highlights the story’s sense of universality as a key strength since “it targets all Western European nations as potential destinations for sex traffickers.”[3] From Precious’ perspective, Austria—representing both Western and Central Europe—appears as a land of cleanliness, order, and perpetual light. “Light is always here 24 hours,” Precious marvels, “Non-stop. They never take the light.”[4] Yet, this constant light, which exposes Vienna’s comfort, progress, and prosperity, also reveals its flourishing red-light milieu.[5]
However, instead of immediately foregrounding the women’s struggles in the Austrian capital, the film opens with a juju ritual (fig. 1). Rooted in a West African spiritual tradition, these rituals are believed to harness supernatural power. In front of a shrine in a modest Nigerian dwelling, a priest chants an incantation in the Edo (Bini) language while ritually slaughtering a chicken. Beside him, a young woman must swear an oath before leaving for Europe. Repeating his words, she vows that the shrine shall kill her if she leads the police to Madame. Following Nenno, one might question if the explicit depiction of this ritual risks indulging in voyeuristic exoticism, which potentially undermines the film’s efforts to foster identification with the trafficked women. The scene undeniably evokes a problematic white gaze, which was established by ethnographic filmmakers like Jean Rouch and remains evident in recent productions such as Lars Kraume’s Der vermessene Mensch (Measures of Men, Germany 2023). However, the depiction of the juju ritual—characteristic of Nigerian human trafficking networks—effectively conveys Joy’s later fear of breaking her oath and testifying against Madame.
Simultaneously, the film employs what Graham Huggan calls “strategic exoticism”: it utilizes exoticist representational codes only to appropriate and subvert them. This approach becomes fully evident in a later scene that mirrors the juju ritual, reversing the gaze to portray Austrians as exotic and primitive. Madame commands Joy to deliver Precious to Italian traffickers, effectively selling her southward—a direction that, in both historical and contemporary enslavement narratives, rarely signals a positive fate. However, due to an ID check—which echoes a recurring trope in Afropean literature that references the widespread practice of racial profiling across Europe—they have to get off their train early in the small spa town of Bad Gastein. The two women seek refuge at a local inn, where they are eyed conspicuously by the exclusively white guests.
Suddenly, the lights dim, bells clang, and a deep roar fills the room. A “Pass” enters—Saint Nicholas, a basket carrier, an angel, and several “Krampusse,” young men who impersonate the devil by wearing horned wooden masks, fur suits, and cowbells (fig. 2). This performance is part of an Alpine pre-Christmas tradition. In some German-speaking regions, “Passen” visit homes in early December to reward the good children and punish the naughty. There are also public Passen performances—often gaudy spectacles that attract adults as well. The media frequently criticize them for being associated with “sexualized violence, alcoholism, atavism, rural backwardness, low levels of education, and right-wing nationalism.”[6] As the audience is drawn to Joy and Precious, who appear visibly irritated and uneasy, the performance takes on an “exotic” and “primitive” quality—much like the opening juju ritual. This effect persists even for white Austrians like me. In fact, the scene may be especially striking to viewers who are well-versed in the Krampus tradition, as it disrupts familiar viewing habits and employs “a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional.”[7]
Following a raucous display, the Krampusse kneel down as St. Nicholas begins to speak in an Austrian dialect that is probably just as incomprehensible to many viewers as the Edo language in the opening scene:
Wir bringn nur des Liacht und holtn fest dagegn, gegn oll die dunkln Gstoltn, so bes, dass selbst die Eigenen in Kettn holtn. Siebn Sündn übers Johr wern heute gstroft. Unschuldig… das hot noch koaner gschofft.
(We bring only the light and we stand firm against the darkness, against all the dark figures, so wicked they even keep their own in chains. Seven sins committed over the year will be punished tonight. Innocent? No one’s ever managed that.)[8]
The phrase “We bring only the light” carries a tone of appeasement, an assertion of good intentions laced with ambivalence. After all, the electric light symbolizes both Precious’ initial enchantment with Vienna (and Europe) and her confinement to its red-light milieu. While the dark figures who “even keep their own in chains” primarily refer to the Krampusse and the sins they embody, they also chime with the plight of Joy and Precious—two Black women metaphorically shackled by Madame, a fellow countrywoman, and further burdened by their families’ relentless financial demands.
St. Nicholas’ mention of “chains” also evokes the transatlantic enslavement trade, particularly the claim that it was Africans who first sold their own people—a narrative often told by white Europeans to deflect responsibility for colonialism and slavery. African and Afrodiasporic writers like Léonora Miano engage with the question of Black complicity in more nuanced ways. “If it is true that conqueror-Europe spread its inner darkness throughout the world,” Miano observes, “its effects became manifest only because other shadows responded to it.”[9] In Joy, Mortezai explores the involvement of Black individuals in modern slavery, illustrating how trafficking victims can become complicit in ongoing cycles of exploitation. By delivering Precious to Italian traffickers in exchange for partial debt relief, Joy perpetuates the very cycle her family and her Madame—herself once forced into prostitution—had initiated with her. Ultimately, the role of Madame emerges as Joy’s likely future once her debts are repaid.
Although the film rejects the notion of “Black innocence” (Reid-Pharr), I interpret the Krampus scene as a reflection of Austria’s “colonialism without colonies.”[10] While Austria did not possess formal colonies, it was economically and ideologically involved in colonial enterprises and the transatlantic enslavement trade. Several West African coastal towns such as Benin City in Nigeria were pivotal transshipment points directly linked to Europe via triangular shipping routes. In the twenty-first century, despite a change in transportation methods and destinations, human trafficking has revived the role of these cities. This shift is especially pertinent to Austria. Vienna has become a major hub for trafficked Nigerian women since the early 2000s. In this context, the white guests in the restaurant, who respond to St. Nicholas’ speech with the German Advent song “Lasst uns froh und munter sein” (“Let us be happy and cheerful”), exhibit (neo)colonial amnesia. Their call for pre-Christmas cheer starkly contrasts with the reality of the two trafficked women among them: Joy, who facilitates a resale for Madame, and Precious, who is about to be resold. As the film suggests, this trade is driven not by malice, as St. Nicholas implies, but by economic desperation in the age of neocolonialism.
Mortezai’s strategic use of exoticism highlights that what seems exotic—and to whom—depends on perspective. Through her skillful appropriation of exoticist codes in African European “mirror scenes” such as the juju and Krampus rituals, the director challenges viewers to reflect on their own viewing habits, situating them within a broader historical, geopolitical, and cultural context. Moreover, identification with Joy and Precious is not based on pity or sentimentality, as in many historical slave narratives and contemporary trafficking accounts, but on ambivalence. They embody both agency and powerlessness, sometimes blurring the lines between victim and perpetrator. By critiquing Europe and rejecting “white innocence” (Wekker) while resisting a simplistic notion of Black innocence, the film captures some of the complexities of African European neocolonial realities.
Sandra Folie is a comparative literature scholar and postdoc researcher in the ERC project “Black Narratives of Transcultural Appropriation: Constructing Afropean Worlds, Questioning European Foundations.”
[1] Fatima El-Tayeb: European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2011, pos. 82–83. Kindle.
[2] My use of both “sex work” and “prostitution” acknowledges that voluntariness and coercion can coexist or alternate closely in the lives of these women. While most trafficked women are aware that they will engage in sex work in Europe, few anticipate the harsh conditions or the significant difficulty of settling their debt.
[3] Nancy P. Nenno: “Nenno on Mortezai, ‘Joy’”, in: H-Black-Europe, Feb. 2020.
[4] Sudabeh Mortezai (dir.): Joy, 2018. Produced by FreibeuterFilm and ORF. DVD. 00:13:51–00:13:57.
[5] For more information on the ambivalent image of Europe in Joy cf. Sandra Folie: “The White Continent of Night. Re-Imagining Europe in Women’s Neocolonial Enslavement Narratives: On Black Sisters’ Street and Joy”, in: Sandra Folie and Gianna Zocco (eds.): CompLit. Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society 6.2 (2023) – Sketches of Black Europe in African and African Diasporic Narratives, 91–115.
[6] Matthäus Rest and Gertraud Seiser: “The Krampus in Austria. A Case of Booming Identity Politics”, in: Ethnoscripts 20.1 (2018), 35–57 (38).
[7] bell hooks: “The Oppositional Gaze. Black Female Spectators”, in: Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press 1992, 115–131 (116).
[8] 01:09:55–01:10:15, my transcription of the Austrian dialect and my translation into English.
[9] Léonora Miano: Afropea. A Post-Western and Post-Racist Utopia. Translated by Gila Walker. London: Seagull Books 2024, 156.
[10] Patricia Purtschert, Francesca Falk and Barbara Lüthi: “Switzerland and ‘Colonialism without Colonies’. Reflections on the Status of Colonial Outsiders”, in: Interventions 18.2 (2016), 286–302.
VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Sandra Folie: Appropriating Exoticist Codes, Exposing Neocolonial Amnesia in Sudabeh Mortezai’s “Joy,” in: ZfL Blog, 20.8.2025, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2025/08/20/sandra-folie-appropriating-exoticist-codes-exposing-neocolonial-amnesia-in-sudabeh-mortezais-joy/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20250820-01
