Abstract
Since its publication, Creolizing the Modern has won both the René Wellek Prize for outstanding books in the discipline of comparative literature and the Barrington Moore Book Award for the best book in comparative historical sociology. Few, if any, books can lay claim to receiving such esteemed accolades across the disciplines of sociology and literary studies and this alone should give the reader a sense of the significance that this intervention represents. A product of collaboration between a literary scholar (Anca Parvulescu) and a sociologist (Manuela Boatcă), the book is based around a close textual reading of Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 modernist novel, Ion, which centres on struggle of its eponymous character for land ownership in the Transylvanian village of Pripas (now named after Liviu Rebreanu) in the early twentieth century.
In Creolizing the Modern, Ion is situated within what the late French literary critic, Pascale Casanova, called the ‘world republic of letters’, a stratified and unequal global network of genre conventions, stylistic orders and linguistic systems. This notion of ‘world literature’ is itself melded with what Immanuel Wallerstein theorized as the capitalist ‘world system’, denoting the historical development of a transnational economy and an accompanying division of labour which divides the world into ‘core’, ‘peripheral’ and ‘semi-peripheral’ regions. Ion takes on a double significance in this meeting of world literature and world system. On the one hand, Ion is a modernist novel set in a rural part of a semi-peripheral region, written in the peripheralized language of Romanian and published within a marginal system of national literary institutions. This, resultantly, means that the novel has remained ‘virtually non-existent for global audiences’ (p. 12), a fact reflected in the difficulty of obtaining an English translation today (two versions exist, both produced in the 1960s and mostly held in university libraries having been acquired during the area studies heyday of the Cold War). On the other hand, Ion itself thematizes the formation of the capitalist world system and its attendant regimes of class, gender, ethnic and religious hierarchy. Over the course of Creolizing the Modern, various characters and passages from Ion are evoked to refract and connect themes such as the ‘land question’ faced in rural peasant communities (ch. 1), the links between world-system formation, peripheralization, antisemitic discrimination and the legacy of the little-known enslavement of Romani (ch. 2 and 3), the complex politics of language (ch. 4), anti-imperial nationalism, violence against women and Transylvanian feminism (ch. 5 and 6) and ethno-religiosity (ch. 7).
Binding this all together is the framework of ‘inter-imperiality’, a concept formulated in the recent work of the literary scholar Laura Doyle and brilliantly applied here. Transylvania sits at, and has been substantially shaped by, the mutable intersections of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires and its consideration, Parvulescu and Boatcă argue, ‘exposes a deep-seated methodological nationalism that still reigns in the humanities and social sciences’ (p. 11). Transylvania is a multiconfessional space whose modernity is substantially ‘creolized’ in dialogue with legacies of Greek and Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodox Christianity, Lutheran and Unitarian churches, as well as Judaism and the Islamic confessions of the Ottoman Empire. Significantly, it is also a multilingual space whose early twentieth-century inhabitants communicated across Romanian, German, Hungarian, Yiddish, Armenian, Romani and French. This is reflected in Ion where ‘the language characters choose to speak at any given time is as important as what is being said, if not more so’ (p. 91).
The theorization of the region’s ‘interglottism’ – a term which the authors develop to denote not a ‘polycentric mix of multiple but equal languages’ but rather ‘a mode of connecting the linguistic with both the political, social, and economic imperial order and its contestation’ (p. 93) – is a central innovation of Creolizing the Modern. The sensitivity to language and to the nuances of translation account for some of its most striking passages. All quotations from Ion appear in the Romanian original alongside the English translation. This is especially enlightening in the discussion of Ion’s Laura, a character who stands for the ‘unspoiled, uneducated lower middle-class women’ and who describes her youthful feminist dreams as akin to ‘bees in my bonnet and my heart [aveam gărgăuni cap şi-n inimă]”’. In the original, the word gărgăuni connotes ‘poisonous wasps’ and is ‘used idiomatically to invoke extravagant, strange ideas in need of extermination’ (p. 140). In other words, feminism, in Rebreanu’s novel, is a poison that strikes at the heart of anti-imperial nationalism. Nationalist movements in the region also problematized interglottism and multiconfessionalism in their anti-imperial projects, a fact symbolized in Ion by the character of Titu, a nationalist intellectual who strongly advocates for a Romanian monolingualism that, literary critics have previously suggested, represents a cipher for Rebreanu himself. This is not the view of Parvulescu and Boatcă: ‘We believe that Rebreanu chose to write in Romanian not because he found his soul and the soul of his nation reflected in it but as . . . an inter-imperial literary gesture’ (p. 112).
Another of the book’s innovations inheres in its sophisticated positioning of east Europe in contemporary discussions of global coloniality and the global historical sociology of modernity and capitalism. The authors remind the reader that Transylvania is not in the ‘Europe’ that figures in de- and post-colonial critiques of ‘Eurocentrism’, a Europe often implied as a colonial–imperial formation in toto. This is present across the entirety of the text but is fascinatingly broached in a discussion of the distinction between ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ difference. The defeat of the Habsburgs in the colonial Americas precipitated the Empire’s imperial expansion eastwards, wherein the catholicization of East Europe ‘was considered a civilizing mission’. Later in the nineteenth century, as West European colonial empires claimed to export ‘secularism’ (which bundled together assumptions ‘anchored in the continuity between the Christian promise of redemption and a secular narrative of progress’), a parallel process unfolded in the imperial setting of the Habsburg lands. ‘We rarely consider the fact’, Parvulescu and Boatcă write, ‘that this happened in both European colonies and East Europe – resulting in an extended period when secularism was almost synonymous with modern rationality’ (pp. 161–162). Creolizing the Modern, in this respect, works similar conceptual ground to Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans and Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe, the pursuits gathered together under the auspices of the ‘new imperial histories’, and the attempt by scholars like Martin Müller to locate a ‘missing global East’, lost when the three world model of the Cold War dissolved into a global imaginary bifurcated into North/South.
The book’s focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which mirrors the chronology of Ion, means that the later formations of the Soviet and Nazi imperialism are only addressed in passing. Nevertheless, to this reader, there are clear continuities between the framing of Transylvanian inter-imperiality here and evocative geographical concepts like ‘the bloodlands’ (Timothy Snyder) or ‘shatterzone of empires’ (Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz) that have been developed principally by historians in recent years to capture the inter-imperiality of Soviet communism and Nazism in various parts of East Europe from the 1930s onwards. Ominously present in the discussions of nationalism and the persecution of Jews and Romani – both ‘seen as a threat to the social and political order of enlightened European states’ (p. 118) and subject to Habsburg assimilatory drives – are the spectres of the cataclysms which followed. In 1940, 20 years after the close of the narrative of Ion, which poetically and portentously evokes a road ‘without end or beginning’, Northern Transylvania was incorporated into Miklós Horthy’s Hungary. A significant number of the Jews of Transylvania, particularly from Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenberg, could be counted in the infamous transports of Jews from the axis regime in Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau between May and July 1944. In Romania, 1942, under the regime of Ion Antonescu’s Iron Guard, which included Southern Transylvania, Roma were deported in their thousands to astonishingly inhumane conditions in Transnistria where a great many perished.
I shall finish on the relationship between sociology and literature. It is sometimes said that literary modernism in certain respects operated as a parallel form of sociology. Rebreanu’s Ion is typically modernist in this respect: ‘Rebreanu’s naturalism draws from psychology and criminology, and it imagines itself as a companion project to the ethnography and sociology of the region’ (p. 122). Relatedly, Wolf Lepenies influentially argued that sociology has historically oscillated in the interstitial space between science and literature as a ‘third culture’. There are many examples of sociologists drawing on literary influences, and there are sociologists who have engaged in literary writing themselves (and vice versa – see H.G. Wells, for example). But, curiously, as the authors suggest, ‘sociology and literary studies largely resist each other’ today (pp. 15–16). Creolizing the Modern shows what sociology and literary studies can be when joined together, without one perspective dominating or subsuming the other. What emerges is itself a form of ‘creolization’ – the generation of novelty out of a merging together. Indeed, perhaps the book’s greatest contribution is to serve as a model of interdisciplinary collaboration.