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Katarzyna Kubin. 2025.

Creolizing the Modern: A study of local/global interfaces of colonial power.

 

International Sociology, 40(5) | pages: 735-740

https://doi.org/10.1177/02685809251392484b


Abstract

Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires (2022) brings together the authors’ sharp literary criticism, sensitive close reading and erudite precision in historical sociology, to offer a wide-ranging account of the region of Transylvania at the turn of the twentieth century, through the lens of one novel, Ion (1920), by Liviu Rebreanu. Over the course of the book’s seven chapters, Parvulescu and Boatcă excavate the richly drawn world in Rebreanu’s socialist realist novel to show how subaltern lives in Transylvania were impacted by the power dynamics embedded in property and land rights, the division of labour, gender roles and education, as well as religious institutions in the region. The authors’ analysis travels in two directions. On the one hand, it addresses how local imperial formations in Transylvania vied for power. On the other hand, it inscribes these local inter-imperial relations into the global matrix of ‘modernity/coloniality’. By attending to how inter-imperial and colonial forces ‘unleashed’ (p. 158) onto subaltern lives in a geographic region that is conventionally seen as peripheral in the world-system, the book shatters the binaries that have often stalled efforts to relate the East of Europe to the ‘global designs’ of coloniality. The book provincializes (Western) Europe and centres the local context of Transylvania, which enables the analysis to grasp the global reach of coloniality over the longue durée. In effect, this nuanced and complexly layered study practices ‘rethinking, reframing, and creative recomposition of the received categories’ (p. 4), which will surely inspire future studies.