Introduction: Reframing Postcolonial and Global Studies in the LongerDurée

Perspectives on Creolizing the Modern

“…It aligns with the decolonial approach (Quijano, 2000) which embarks on an epistemological quest to construct the world from perspectives beyond Western universalist claims while challenging existing hierarchies and delinking from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies. Making use of the writing on Balkanism and orientalisms in the region (Bakić-Hayden, 1995; Todorova, 2009), I would suggest here another potent concept - Milica Bakić Hayden's nesting orientalisms, which shows how countries create symbolic hierarchies with both their southern and eastern neighbors within Europe. On the one hand, this situates Transylvania's position as a periphery of the former Habsburg empire or in Central Europe — travel writings of the nineteenth century would ascribe to Transylvania, and in particular to the Romanian peasantry the image of backwardness (Ruthner, 2002).…”

“…Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires is impressively expansive in scope and focus. It is both an interrogation of the accepted notion of modernity and a rearticulation of its tenets in a space long considered outside of its confines: “Eastern Europe”— one of the “other Europes” — marked in a number of ways from its divergence from normalized West(ern) Europe, or “heroic Europe,” to borrow a term from Boatcă (2013). The work is in many ways an expansion of Parvulescu’s “ Eastern Europe as a method” (2019) in that it is the product of two diasporic female writers who engage with ideas, concepts, geographies, beyond Euro-American paradigms to analyze Eastern Europe , and an exploration of the questions of framing modernity/coloniality and defining “Europe” present in a number of Boatcă’s works.…”

“…Showcasing linguistic practices as modes of negotiation between cultural inheritance and self-expression they call the reader’s attention to the relationship between interimperiality and subject building where the history of imperial language politics integrally shapes the individual’s capacity to articulate their positionality. Particularly in East-Central European context multilingualism is often invoked – famously in Milan Kundera’s The Tragedy of Central Europe where it is asked to serve as proof of the region’s cultural wealth (Kundera, 1984) – but rarely analyzed and historicized to the level of detail provided by Parvulescu and Boatcă. This attention to the complexity of East-Central multilingualism is largely made possible by the regionalist scope proposed by the authors that abandon the idea that Ion is to be read as a predominantly “Romanian” text and makes the heterogeneity of Transylvanian linguistic landscape buried in the novel explicit rather than implicit.…”

“Yes, but . . .” : On Reforming African Literary Scholarship

“…12 Where Kalliney takes his lead from Vassanji's novel, others take theirs from alternative narratives of globalization that have emerged from historiographical research in "diverse languages and archives" (331). 13 What they all share is the insight that, contrary to orthodox historiography, all systems of political governance, economic production and consumption, and imperial expansion that we now consider unique to modernity neither emerged from, nor were fabricated in, modern western Europe. On the contrary, even key systems such as "finance capital and labor regimes; structures of core and periphery; imperial knowledge-building projects serving colonization and state-building; and cultural interpellation of conquered communities through art forms and media campaigns" (336) 14 that we now associate exclusively with modernity arose from, and were developed in, regions of the world now integrated into the complex fretwork of transnational capitalism as peripheral yet integral nodes.…”

Introduction: Labor Travels, Art Forms

“…See the PMLA “Theories and Methodologies” cluster: “Reframing Postcolonial and Global Studies in the Longer Durée,” PMLA 130.2 (March 2015) : 331–438. Co‐editors Laura Doyle and Sahar Amer.…”