Surrogate Nature, Culture, Women – Inner Colonies. Postcolonial Readings of Contemporary Hungarian Films
Surrogate Nature, Culture, Women – Inner Colonies. Postcolonial Readings of Contemporary Hungarian Films

Summary/Abstract: The article examines a group of films which take place in Romania, in Transylvania: stories of murders, incest, self-jurisdiction are implanted into the geographically and culturally localised nature and they are represented as the nature of the respective culture. From the viewpoint of postcolonial theory I examine the stereotypical image that these films transmit about the represented culture. From the angle of the chronotopes of geographical culture postcolonialism itself becomes a problematic term, in this way I identify here a specific local version of the colonising logic. The colonial relationship between the own and the other is transformed into the foreignness, the otherness of the own, thus the Balkans are represented as Europe’s inner colony, its Wild East. The arriving white man does not conquer a foreign virgin land, on the contrary, the homecoming male heroes make attempts to recapture the mother earth. However, the mothers, women are surrogate ones, raped or voluntary whores. If the female protagonist becomes a traveller, then this means transport: they are transported to the West, where their homeland becomes their stigma, and this empowers the Western males to hire them. I regard the term surrogate borrowed from Jacques Derrida – simultaneously bearing the duality of the organic and the foreign – as being suitable for grasping a special version of colonialism, proliferating nowadays, in which nature, culture and women respectively, localised in Romania, are represented as surrogates of foreign (male) conceptions.

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