The time Sándor Márai (1900–89) spent in Switzerland, France and Italy in the winter of 1946–7 gave him the opportunity to observe and note the differences existing in ‘frozen, destitute Europe’ between East and West, Easterners and Westerners. The diary that Márai had already started to keep in 1943, Föld, föld!..., first published in Hungarian in 1972 in Toronto, and Európa elrablása (1947) represent interesting sources to reconstruct his experiences and thought about a Europe bisected by the Iron Curtain from the perspective of a ‘traveller venturing forth from the ruins of Eastern Europe’. In these works, he shares with us his impressions and depicts Western Europe, as represented by neutral Switzerland, France and a ‘defeated Italy’ in opposition to and in comparison with the East, represented by a ‘dismembered Hungary’. In analysing Márai’s account, the article focuses on the differences he perceived, on the way he reports them and also on how the West and Westerners viewed the East and the Easterners.
During the last 50 years, descendants of Maghrebians who immigrated to France (beurs) have received French citizenship. Their societal position is paradoxical: French citizens by birth and soil, they live in French society; however, for many French de souche, they are still considered immigrants. Although the French government has a policy of assimilation, many beurs do not participate in the French way of life. They live in the projects, their children go to sub-standard schools, and beur youth unemployment rate is at least double that for the French population as a whole. Their practice of Islam alienates them further. However, while the anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim party is gaining in numbers, beur culture is increasingly a part of French culture: Arabic words have made their way into French, beur music is popular, and there is a strong beur presence in film. In this article, I will explore the portrayal of mixed-ethnicity couples in two films, Il reste du jambon (Anne Depetrini, 2010) and Mohamed Dubois (Ernesto Ona, 2012). These films reflect a growing preoccupation with mixed couples and their conflicts, and are paradigmatic of the process of assimilation of Arabs into French culture. In the first, a beur doctor, Djalil (Ramzy Bedia) integrates and wins a blond, middle-class French reporter; in the second, Arnaud, the son of a rich French banker renounces his French identity, and adopts an Arab heritage to win a beur policewoman. Although both are French productions, the principal beur roles may be seen as breaking through the French stereotypes of Muslims/Arabs and therefore as counter-narratives of the nation, which, according to Homi Bhabha, ‘continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – [and] disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities’. I suggest, however, that while the beur ‘essentialist identity’ is challenged in the films, there are strains of neo-colonialism, with its accompanying ambivalence toward the beur characters, who are subject to mimicry, which consistently maintains the position of the dominant French film-consuming culture.
This paper examines the ways in which Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge recovers a medieval discourse to comment on Portugal’s twentieth-century history in her debut novel O dia dos prodígios (1980). It focuses not on the Middle Ages as a distinct period of European history but on the representations of the Middle Ages in post-medieval worlds, positing medievalism as an instance of Saidian orientalism. Although Jorge’s medievalizing (and orientalizing) gesture towards Portuguese modernity expresses a critical stance towards both the Salazar/Caetano regime and post-dictatorial revolutionary propaganda, this paper argues that Jorge makes a complex and multilayered use of medievalism/orientalism which contains both hegemonic and non-hegemonic, conservative and emancipatory aspects.
This article proposes to look at how the current theories of world literature could be transformed if we looked at the space of world literature from the perspective of marginalized European literatures, such as Basque and Catalan. Departing from the analysis of Obabakoak (1988) by Bernardo Atxaga and Històries de la mà esquerra (‘Stories of the Left Hand’, 1981) by Jesús Moncada, the article elaborates a theory of world literature based on the idea of margin – that is, on recognizing the Otherness of what we want to see as our own – and contrasts it with theories of world literature by scholars such as Casanova, Damrosch and Glissant. This leads to the construction of a model of world literature in which the centre is empty, and which, among other consequences, is a way to break from Eurocentrism. This perception of world literature makes it possible to reflect on the idea of freedom of literature, discussed in relation to Hannah Arendt’s thought.
While Croatia is often classified as a Balkan nation, its citizens tend to reject this label for reinforcing an image of their country as different and ‘backward’. Croatians respond by emphasizing their belonging to Western Europe and projecting the Balkan stereotype onto adjacent spaces outside the nation-state. Literary critic Milica Bakić-Hayden calls this phenomenon ‘nesting orientalisms’. Moving away from the traditional displacement onto another nation or, as in the case of multinational Bosnia and Herzegovina, onto a different ethnic group, contemporary Croatian fiction displays what I call intra-national nesting orientalisms. Namely, in these texts, it is the rural spaces within the country itself that often serve as a stand-in for the Balkans. Croatian author Renato Baretić’s 2003 novel Osmi povjerenik (‘The eighth commissioner’) offers an exemplary image of intra-national nesting orientalisms. Set on the imaginary island of Trečić, it tells the story of the Croatian government’s attempts to colonize its own island. Through colonial and postcolonial tropes, including references to Dracula, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Heart of Darkness, the novel utilizes intra-national nesting orientalisms to explore Croatia’s relationship with the West and its own interior. I argue that the novel’s intra-national nesting orientalisms function to satirize Croatia’s never-ending and often failing efforts to displace the negative stereotype of being a Balkan nation onto another place.
This article investigates how Aleksandr Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas – writers of partial African descent – reconstruct their forefathers’ identities, and to some extent their own, through fictional narratives, thereby restoring ‘whitewashed’ black legacy to its rightful place. The focus on the forefather in Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (begun around 1827) and Dumas’s Blanche de Beaulieu (1826) reflects a watershed moment in the writers’ personal and professional lives, in which they were preoccupied with their public image, their creative legitimacy and their legacy. By simultaneously evoking, yet concealing, the writers’ ancestry, these fictions permit a surreptitious exploration of its distressing aspects. Although the narrative construction of the ancestors’ identity operates within the constraints of the hierarchical representational binaries described by Said in Orientalism, the texts ultimately destabilize these binaries, exemplifying literature’s unique ability to subvert hegemonic ideology.
Any understanding of European literature that does not include immigrant literature results in an incomplete vision of literature created in Europe. As immigrant writers have sought to find a place for themselves and their writing, the labels attached to that writing have been crucial. While such debates certainly have to do with the writers themselves and how they seek to have their writing read, they also reflect an anxiety in Europe about what counts as European literature and, not incidentally, who counts as European. To examine these issues, this article takes the example of the work of Franco-Turkish writer Sema Kılıckaya. In contrast to the usual French fear of communautarisme, which signals for many the fragmentation of society along ethnic and religious lines, the article argues that Kılıckaya’s writing provides another model for national and European belonging, one that depends, perhaps paradoxically, on sub-national and local belonging – in both the country of origin and the country of settlement.
This special issue discusses texts and cultural artefacts that defy the idea of Europe as a homogeneous and coherent construct, with a focus on north/south, East/West divisions. Starting from a series of case studies, the contributions address questions such as: Where does Europe begin and who establishes these boundaries? Who is considered European and who is not? How is difference described, represented and imagined in zones that are positioned within Europe, often at its core? What metaphors or narrative strategies are used to describe the other within Europe? Do writers from minority cultures participate in orientalized representations of their own culture? If orientalism can be conceptualized as the opposite of civilization, is it necessarily connected to notions of backwardness? If so, how does this play out in a European context? The range of the case studies considered in this issue is broad: chronologically, the essays span the nineteenth century to the present, and geographically they go from Russia to France, from Croatia and Hungary to Catalonia and the Basque countries. Overall, the essays take a transnational approach that considers ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences and notions of belonging within and beyond political units. A common ground is provided by recurrent critical concepts that offer a useful theoretical framework for discussion, such as Roberto Dainotto’s argument that Europe constructs itself not only in opposition to the non-Western, but also to its internal other, and Milica Bakić-Hayden’s notion of ‘nesting orientalism’: that is, the idea that countries who have been orientalized can also appropriate this discourse.
In 1848 Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto. The opening line claimed: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.’ In Poland the experience of more than 40 years of communism and the fear that ‘reds’ still secretly control the government haunts the present. This article explores the emerging political culture and the volatile political climate of post-communist Poland. In particular it looks at the various attempts at lustration as part of transitional justice, at the Kaczyłski brothers’ plan to redefine national identity by establishing a moral Fourth Republic, and at the involvement of writers, reporters and film-makers in the lustration debate.
This essay examines the discursive practices of the Critical Review during the period of the Seven Years War, when Tobias Smollett – reputedly a fervent anti-Gallican – was editor-in-chief and one of the journalists to whom a substantial number of articles have now been attributed. Reading the Critical Review from the perspective of Anglo-French relations, throws into relief the critics’ animated engagement with French culture, thought and literature, and discloses the review’s multifaceted reformist agenda. This means modifying previous characterizations of the journal’s aims and ethos. The Critical Review’s journalists endorsed the philosophes’ conception of an ‘Enlightenment Republic of Letters’ whose ultimate goal was personal and social amelioration, and acclaimed the efforts of all writers, whatever their nationality, who wrote like ‘true’ patriots or ‘citizens of the world’ or ‘friends of mankind’. Reviewers poured scorn on the ‘ridiculous national prejudices of the vulgar’ and condemned the manifestations of xenophobia that historians have argued were expressions of a distinctive sense of British or English identity. Anti-French slurs do appear on occasions, and some French works were downgraded, but many were generously praised, and different markers signalling affinity and alignment with French writers abound.
Using the lens of cultural analysis, this study examines Pavel Lungin’s Taxi Blues as one of the characteristic examples of perestroika cinema. The homosocial theme of the movie is explored in much detail, while using the available historical and comparative materials taken from Russian and Western cultural history. Taxi Blues traces the development of a relationship between a musician and a taxi driver during Russia’s perestroika period. The taxi driver ‘saves’ the musician from alcohol dependency, imprisonment, financial ruin and self-destruction, only to be forgotten once the musician achieves fame abroad. Their relationship demonstrates a reversal of fortune in which economic and social status is conflated with sexual identity. As such, the homosocial relationship of the two men is disrupted when their personal fortunes are reversed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The sexual overtones in the relationship implicitly evoke various cultural stereotypes (degenerate sexual behaviour, Jewish effeminacy) as well as inherent power dynamics (master and slave, teacher and pupil) to engage the explicit issues of social and economic status in a society that has been turned inside out by perestroika.
This article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This over-interpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the story through the lens of their own cultural and political predispositions. The historical and social background against which American viewers consumed this story of an illegal abortion during communism shaped its meaning (and perceptions about its political relevance), plugging an art-house Romanian film into the larger national debate over reproductive rights in the contemporary United States. Thus, in its transition from the domestic to the global marketplace, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was transformed from an act of amoral probing of Romanian individual and collective memory about communism, into a film about the controversial nature of particular individual choices within the liberal capitalist paradigm.