Innovative, boldly interdisciplinary, and conceptually ambitious, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă's Creolizing the Modern defies easy classification. But that's only fitting for a book all about fracturing categories and dissolving borders. It fuses literary/critical theory, sociology, and history to bring Transylvania—and, by implication, East Central Europe—into methodological realms well explored by scholars of Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian post- and de-colonialism, but less familiar (in my experience) to Habsburg-area specialists. Taking as their analytical lodestar Laura Doyle's concept of inter-imperiality, Parvulescu and Boatcă present Transylvania as a European case study in a larger global history of coloniality and capitalism: a zone forged by the contestation of multiple empires and economic systems, which generated an intricate creolization of ethnicity, language, confession, and exploitation.
Though the book's aims are many, they coalesce around the deep reading of a single text, Liviu Rebreanu's novel Ion (1920). Regarded as a landmark work in the Romanian canon, it is scarcely known to outsiders. The novel takes place in a Transylvanian village in the early twentieth century and centers on the travails of its ethnically Romanian title character. Parvulescu and Boatcă summon from the novel a stunning galaxy of thematic investigations, and every chapter is its own constellation. Chapter 1 teases from Ion's land-lust the contemporaneous politics of nationalism and the agrarian question in a globalized context. Chapter 2, propelled by Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory, assesses Transylvania's integration into global capitalism and uses that frame, linked to Ion's Jewish publican, to make sense of antisemitism. Chapter 3 argues for the overdue recognition of Romani music in labor history, tying it both to specific characters in the novel and the long but glossed-over record of slavery in the region. For chapter 4, the authors coin the term interglottism—essentially “multilingualism” with a critique of imperial power relations baked in—to parse the politics of language use in Ion, as well as to illuminate Transylvania's status as the birthplace of the comparative literature discipline. Chapter 5 examines the intensely gendered nature of nationalism, landownership, and the family through the plight of Ion's oppressed, battered wife Ana. This flows compellingly into chapter 6, in which Parvulescu and Boatcă deftly evince the tension between nationalism and women's liberation in the late Habsburg Empire out of the novel's demonization of feminism as “poison” (139). The book terminates in chapter 7, where the authors knot all its thematic strands around that of religion, which likewise circumscribes Ion itself.
Taken at least on the merits of its adventurous vision and sorcerous analytical complexity, Creolizing the Modern is an outstanding contribution to the study of East Central/Southeastern Europe. For a field that has been only fitfully globalized, and one in which the historiography of empire is imbued with a kind of stodgy (if not always unbeguiling) Austrian Schlamperei, this volume points the way to excitingly original, more academically cosmopolitan horizons.
However, this higher-order brilliance comes at the cost of recurring frustration in the details. First, despite their constant invocation, the really key terms of art—inter-imperial, coloniality, and creolization—are defined largely by inference. It was only after consulting Doyle's source text that inter-imperial, the most important concept by far, was functionally meaningful to me. This posed a genuine problem because so much of the book depends on ascribing inter-imperiality to so many phenomena; yet an esoteric shroud, combined with overuse, dimmed its explanatory power. Second, there are, frequently, too many lines of argument in play at once, such that the authors' lessons muddle one another. The chapter on interglottism, for instance, takes on inter-imperiality, world systems analysis, creolization, a critique of literary modernism, plus introduces the authors' own neologism—but it delivers no truly cohesive, durable takeaway for the aggregate. Third, the book behaves as if it takes for granted that its readers already know the plot and cultural significance of Rebreanu's Ion. It is dispensed piecemeal and exegetically, with some chapters offering more direct access to the text than others, inspiring a certain sense of incoherence. Fourth, the historical evidence on offer is, at times, spotty and even perplexing. The discussion of Transylvania's place in the global economy in chapter 2, for example, relies more on the dates of railway completions and Wallerstein's schema than on specific data; the composer Franz Liszt, without explanation, is leaned on as the main source for stereotypes about the Roma; Georges Clemenceau is quoted as an authority on 1890s Hungarian education policy. In short, there are aspects of Creolizing the Modern that, in my view, still require further empirical trial before their conclusions are ready for broader application.
But such, perhaps, are the flaws that attend a pioneering work—as this certainly is. Professors, place it on your seminar syllabi and comps lists; it is a book built to thrive in the vanguard action of graduate study.
