Transylvania Postcolonial. Literature beyond Illusions (I)
Transylvania Postcolonial. Literature beyond Illusions (I)

Summary/Abstract: Postcolonial theories have mostly problematized the cultural effects of an external, distant colonialism. They refer to the analysis of hegemonic processes and reports on an external territory, distant from the Center. However, in the case of Transylvania, we may speak of a colonial triad over the past centuries, of a Habsburg external colonization, a Hungarian internal one from the period of “dualism” and a Romanian autocolonialism after 1918. The common feature of any form of colonization was cultural homogenization, a process that affected the edges of empires, destroying irreversibly their plural identity. The margins took over the oppressive model of the Centers, and their heterogeneity was destroyed, local communities turning into enclosed, resentful and defensive worlds, despite the multiculturalist utopias that still dominate discourses about imperial borders. What is the function of literature in this complex political and cultural context? Texts such as those analyzed here, whose authors have directly experienced the impact of colonization, such as Liviu Rebreanu, Adolf Meschendörfer or Miklós Bánffy, can be read as genuine counter-discourses to the theses of colonialism. Literature is an authentically historical discourse that can prove the disastrous effects of colonial cultural homogenization.

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