Creolizing Transylvania in an inter-imperial framework

James Morris explores Anca Parvulescu’s and Manuela Boatcă’s book Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022), arguing that if to “creolize” is in part to complicate and challenge national mythologies, then it is important to confront nationalism’s racist language.

In the Western imagination, Transylvania is associated with one singular figure: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Tour companies offer week-long trips that take in all the sights and sites that are loosely connected to the mythical vampire. You can visit his birthplace in Sighișoara or see his ostensible home, Bran Castle, which lies to the southwest of Brașov. Only one of these places has any connection with the historical figure Vlad Țepeș, or Vlad the Impaler, commonly thought to have inspired Stoker’s creation. Vlad may have been born in Sighișoara, although perhaps not in the house that bears his name, but there is no evidence that he ever stayed in Bran Castle, just as Stoker himself never visited Transylvania, instead relying on library books and the accounts of foreign travellers when researching and writing his novel. For Stoker, Transylvania could stand for the “Other”, but there were many “others” in the region, and the multiplicity of overlapping linguistic, national, racial, and gender identities form the subject of Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s effort to “creolize” modernity.

Rather than the vampire who quits his home to prey on the people of Great Britain, Parvulescu and Boatcă choose a more rooted — and autochthonous — literary figure to serve as the core of their study: Ion Glanetașu, the titular character of Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion (1920). The peasant Ion does not leave Transylvania, as Dracula does. He scarcely steps beyond the borders of his home village of Pripas, where he is born, raised, acquires land through marriage, and dies, leaving all that he has accumulated to the local church. The rural horizons of Ion’s life might suggest that he lived in a singular and closed community, but Transylvania’s inter-imperial status ensured that society was far from homogeneous. As Parvulescu and Boatcă note, this was a “multiethnic, multilingual, and multi-confessional region of the world”, home to native speakers of myriad languages, including German, Hungarian, Romanian, Yiddish, Armenian, and Romani, as well as people of a variety of faiths: “Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Calvinist, Evangelical Lutheran, Unitarian, and Judaic”. Transylvania was — and remains — far from the ethnonationalist model so often associated with the eastern half of Europe. It was a place where people mixed, though not on equal terms, hence the use of “creolization”: a “mode of transformation premised on the unequal power relations that characterize modernity/coloniality — dispossession, colonization, and enslavement”.

Transylvanian land was sown with ethnic, linguistic, and gender hierarchies. The rural world is often seen as timeless and unchanging, but Parvulescu and Boatcă argue convincingly for the need to understand its modernity and to reassess the meaning of that word, which is most often associated with cities. In Rebreanu’s novel, the “voice of the land” speaks to Ion, a member of a “class of Transylvanian peasants who […] had been promised land for generations”, but who instead had had to work land owned by others: the largely Hungarian nobility. Through a marriage forced by the rape and impregnation of Ana, the daughter of the wealthier Vasile Baciu, Ion acquires land of his own, which in contrast to his unattractive bride was “ever more beautiful because he owned it”. But Ion’s land did not serve only his interests. Citing Immanuel Wallerstein, Parvulescu and Boatcă note that the grains that fed Western European populations during the age of slavery and empire and the wood used to build the ships that “criss-crossed the Atlantic” likely came from Eastern Europe. These “global processes” of colonization were underpinned by the serfdom of Ion’s ancestors.

Far from being separate from the globalising world, Transylvania was well integrated into a “structurally unequal capitalist world-economy”. Its presence can even be felt at the village level in Rebreanu’s novel. Some of Ion’s land is held on a mortgage from the Someșana Bank, connecting the “local peasantry to an international financial system”, which was connected to both nationalist and imperial programmes. The Romanian politician Alexandru Mocioni sponsored the development of a bank that would provide credit to Romanian speakers seeking to acquire land, while the imperial bureaucracy sought to modernise its operations to “align with developments in other imperial situations”. One of these developments was the introduction of a census, which defined nationality by language. It was a problematic practice in a region with “high rates of intermarriage and complex interglottisms”, which could also contribute to antisemitism as many Jewish Transylvanians adopted Hungarian rather than Romanian. The later implications of this way of defining nationality and its impact on the Jewish population are well discussed elsewhere in Holly Case’s Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (2009).

Another racial minority is often forgotten in Europe, but features prominently in Parvulescu and Boatcă’s study: the Roma. In his 1837 Esquisse sur l’histoire, les moeurs, et la langue des Cigains, the Moldavian intellectual Mihail Kogălniceanu lamented that many in Europe ignored the Roma’s plight. While people campaigned for the abolition of slavery in the United States, they either ignored or were ignorant of the enslaved status of the Roma in his homeland and neighbouring Wallachia. Abolition, too, would be a point of pride for this intellectual. When the enslaved Roma belonging to the Orthodox Church and the Moldavian state — though not those belonging to the noble boyars — were liberated in 1844, he celebrated the deed, noting that Moldavia had acted before the supposedly more civilized United States. In the Transylvanian context, Parvulescu and Boatcă situate the Roma’s experience at “the intersection of labor history and the study of enslavement” and explore how this experience shaped and defined the lives of other groups. The first scene in Rebreanu’s Ion features a Roma troupe performing music at a dance. Whereas Rebreanu renders other languages intelligible through translation into Romanian, he leaves the Roma’s tongue untouched, unwritten, and “untranslatable”. Here, Parvulescu and Boatcă argue, the “Transylvanian Romanians are Romanian not because they are not Hungarian — the most common dichotomy in the context of Transylvania within the Austro-Hungarian Empire — but because they are not Roma”.

The politics of Transylvania were the politics of language. Parvulescu and Boatcă eloquently remind the reader of this feature through a simple choice: to give the Romanian, Hungarian, and German names of every place they mention, every time. Cluj is not just Cluj but “Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg” and Sibiu is “Sibiu/Nagyszeben/Hermannstadt”. Instead of discussing “multilingualism”, a term that only entered the English language in the nineteenth century, at a time when intellectuals and politicians increasingly linked nation, language, and territory, Parvulescu and Boatcă prefer the term “interglottism”, which they define as a “mode of connecting the linguistic with both the political, social, and economic imperial order and its contestation”. In this context, inter-imperial Transylvania also offers an interesting case study for the politics of minority and majority: according to the 1850 census, the Hungarian-speaking Magyar “majority” constituted only 26 percent of the population, whereas the economically disadvantaged “minority” of Romanian speakers made up 59.5 percent. Parvulescu and Boatcă also point to the imperial parallels that Romanian nationalists made with the Irish in the British empire, although this idea could be expanded by noting that parallels were also drawn between the Irish and the Hungarians when it came to the latter’s position in the wider Austrian empire. In 1848, one Irish newspaper would describe Croatia, which remained loyal to the Habsburg Crown, as the “Ulster” of Hungary.

Parvulescu and Boatcă contrast the interglottism of Rebreanu’s novel with the polyglot project of Hugó Meltzl, who established what he described as the world’s first comparative literature journal. Meltzl chose ten European languages that he felt had made the greatest contributions to world literature: German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, and Hungarian. Romanian, for Meltzl, was an oral language. Like Romani, it belonged to folklore; the subaltern spoke, but did not write. In this context, Rebreanu’s choice to write in Romanian was a political act. He was educated in both Hungarian and German and subsequently studied French, English, and Italian. His earliest publications were in Hungarian, but Ion belonged to a Romanian nationalist context. As the educated, middle-class Titu, who spends most of the novel bragging about his proficiency in the Hungarian language will declare towards its end: “I don’t speak Hungarian”. This “monolingualism”, as Parvulescu and Boatcă put it, “has become an agenda”.

If “monolingualism” was central to the cause of inter-imperial nationalisms, then they were also often sustained by a less obvious feature: “violence against women”. Rural Transylvania had no space for the kind of “New Woman” that Virginia Woolf both embodied and created for her novel To the Lighthouse. She was an urban figure. The city’s anonymity allowed for “gender experimentation”, but there was “no anonymity in the countryside”. Gender questions and anxieties instead enter Rebreanu’s novel through the “rural dowry plot”. Ana shares the New Woman’s aspiration to live for herself. She desires a marriage predicated on love rather than economic arrangement, but the object of her love does not share that perspective. Ion’s interest in Ana is not motivated by any attraction beyond financial benefit: her father has land, which he is determined to make his own. He takes it by force, pressuring Ana into a sexual relationship, and when she falls pregnant, the value of her dowry increases. Her father “has to pay”, write Parvulescu and Boatcă, as though she were “a parasite”; only the transfer of the land that Ion desires can redeem her. Once agreed between the two men, husband and father, Ana moves into Ion’s home, where she is beaten and driven to suicide. Ion’s masculinity, and that of the culture he represents, is asserted at Ana’s and woman’s expense.

A feminist alternative to Ana’s fate is both explored and foreclosed through the lower middle-class Laura, sister of the intellectual Titu. Feminism, Parvulescu and Boatcă argue, serves as a “poison” in Rebreanu’s novel: it threatens “anti-imperial nationalism”. While Laura is “tempted by feminism”, she soon commits to her nationalist destiny as “devoted mother and assistant to her husband in the nationalist cause”. Rebreanu denies his female characters the possibility of an education because to offer one would require them to learn Hungarian, German, or French, abandoning the “nationalist monoglot paradigm”. In a society where bodies exist in a “symbolic demographic competition”, a woman’s role is instead to reproduce. Her success is measured by the census and its record of national identity. She rejects the liberated vision of modern feminism in favour of an alternative nationalist understanding of modernity that is anchored in traditional gender roles.

Another traditional institution that is seldom associated with modernity bookends Rebreanu’s novel: religion. The text “begins and ends with a cross”, and the plot’s final dénouement, as Parvulescu and Boatcă observe, lies in “the building of a religious edifice”: the new church that is supported by the bequest of Ion’s land following his death. In Transylvania’s inter-imperial context, religion became coterminous with modern national identity, challenging Benedict Anderson’s suggestion that nationalism took the place of religion and Charles Taylor’s arguments for secular modernity. The construction of a new church in Pripas reveals that the church as much as any other modern entity was a “capitalist institution”. Modernity was far more complex than any overarching theory can suggest; it possessed a “creolized history”.

In Creolizing the Modern, Parvulescu and Boatcă do not so much offer a new disciplinary “framework”, as hinted in the introduction, as provide an important reminder of the need for specificity. Transylvania’s “semiperipheral” and “inter-imperial” status was not unique, but many aspects of its experience were, and it is this uniqueness that gives the book its importance. By studying Transylvania, Parvulescu and Boatcă “decenter our understanding of empire and transform our assumptions about comparison and its benefits”, as they promise. The modern world looks different from this vantage point, which lends force to their suggestion that theory cannot emanate solely from the imperial centre. 

Transylvania’s “inter-imperial” status endures, although the politics of majority and minority have flipped. In 2016, while living briefly in Brașov/Brassó/Kronstadt, a Spanish friend suggested we take a trip to Sfântu Gheorghe in Székely territory. We stopped for lunch in a small restaurant that seemed as much like somebody’s home as a business. The owner greeted us in Hungarian before switching to Romanian when I spoke. She did the same when she came to take our order, only pausing on subsequent visits to ensure she addressed us in a language that at least one of us would understand. I heard more English — spoken by American tourists — that day than I did Romanian, despite being near to the geographical centre of Romania, and the politics of minority and majority in the region have unfolded in curious ways since. When the “Coalition for Family” pushed a referendum to constitutionally outlaw gay marriage in 2018, the motion failed due to poor turnout, which was lowest in the Hungarian-speaking parts of the country. As some community leaders there argued, an attack on one minority would represent an attack on all. Two years later, a Hungarian-speaking community would respond differently to the employment of South Asian guest workers in a local bakery. This incident forms the subject matter for Cristian Mungiu’s film R.M.N., who describes it as a product of a “habit which goes back to when Transylvania became part of Romania”, shortly before the publication of Rebreanu’s Ion.

If there is a weakness to Parvulescu and Boatcă’s study, then I think it stems from their focus on a single text. I wondered how the book might look if their interest in inter-imperiality was matched by a deeper intertextuality, placing Rebreanu’s Ion in conversation with another text from the region, such as the Hungarian Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, which was written in the 1930s but set similarly before the First World War. Where the Romanian Ion is decisive in his pursuit of land, Bánffy’s Hungarian protagonists seem to drift. As the second volume in the trilogy concludes: “and so ended an era in which nothing whatever had been achieved”. People’s personal affairs take precedence over the political ones in Bánffy’s novel, whereas in Rebreanu’s book, the two seem not only to align, but to be inextricable. Might this comparison further illuminate Transylvania’s “inter-imperial status” and perhaps offer a new model for discussing the myriad relationships between language, literature, and nation at the edges and the ends of empires? With or without such a comparison, Parvulescu and Boatcă do much to challenge common understandings of modernity. I only wish that they had gone further in their ambitions.

One choice, though, did leave me feeling uncomfortable. In their discussion of religion, Parvulescu and Boatcă quote a passage that illustrates some of the antisemitism in Rebreanu’s novel: “the young man [Titu] tried to explain to her [his mother] that the Langs were in fact not Jewish, although he was a Jew”. Titu’s point is that the Langs do not practise Judaism, whereas for his mother, “Jews are Jews whether they practice, reform, convert, or are atheists”. She uses what Parvulescu and Boatcă describe as a “racialized term”, but this gets rather lost in their translation. Titu’s word — ovreu — means Jew; his mother’s word — jidani ­­— does not mean Jewish. It means “yid” or “kike”. Not being Jewish, to my knowledge, I suspect that neither Parvulescu nor Boatcă feel as comfortable as I might using either of these words, but it seems important in a text that explores the more chauvinist side of modernity to give an accurate picture of its racism, or at least to reflect further on the way that such terms are translated. By avoiding the offensive, I felt they (understandably) sanitised Rebreanu’s text. As they themselves go on to write: “we are missing something important about the Transylvanian ethnic and racial field if we do not attend to the enmeshing of religion and inter-imperiality in such practices of othering — that is, if we do not creolize our understanding of the modern they embody”. If to “creolize” is in part to complicate and challenge national mythologies, then it seems important to confront that nationalism’s racist language, even if that involves the use of asterisks.