Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires

by Anca Parvulescu, Manuela Boatcă

How are modernity, coloniality, and interimperiality entangled? Bridging the humanities and social sciences, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Historical Transylvania, at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, offers the platform for their multi-level reading of the main themes in Liviu Rebreanu's 1920 novel Ion. Topics range from the question of the region's capitalist integration to antisemitism and the enslavement of Roma to multilingualism, gender relations, and religion. Creolizing the Modern develops a comparative method for engaging with areas of the world that have inherited multiple, conflicting imperial and anti-imperial histories.

Genres: History

270 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 15, 2022

Reviews

[grace elston · Rating 3 out of 5]

one of the most theory-dense books i’ve ever read, honestly so hard to follow at times but i did find this an interesting read nonetheless

[Patricia Furstenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creolizing the Modern is a daring and enlightening examination of colonialism, empire, and modernity via Transylvania's underappreciated past. The authors provide the idea of inter-imperiality, a network of overlapping powers, identities, and racial hierarchies that persist long after borders change instead of seeing empires as discrete nation-building endeavors.
Using Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 novel Ion as a lens, Parvulescu and Boatcă unpack land struggles, linguistic hierarchies as well as anti-Roma and anti-Jewish racism, and the control of women’s bodies in nationalist narratives. Their approach is theoretical as well as deeply human, revealing the way rural regions such as Transylvania complicate simple colonizer/colonized binaries.
This is not light reading, but it’s groundbreaking one in reclaiming Eastern Europe within global conversations on coloniality.
This book is perfect for anyone interested in sociology, postcolonial ideas, or Eastern European history and fiction research. It offers a fresh perspective, showing that modernity isn’t simply Western, but mixed, layered, and constantly challenged.

[Davyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

То влучно, то натягнуто, то влучно, то натягнуто, але все з однаковою шкільницькою впевненістю.