Critical Human Geography in Hungary? Structural Dependencies and Knowledge Circulation in a Semiperipheral Context

július 24, 2019augusztus 11, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

KÃ©ptalÃ¡lat a kÃ¶vetkezÅre: âfence hungaryâ

Knowledge filtration under structural constraints
(Source: https://www.middleeasteye.net)

Book chapter proposal for Political Ecology in Eastern Europe, edited by Eszter Krasznai Kovács

This chapter provides a critical overview of how Hungarian human geography developed since 1989, by showing the long-term continuities and structural shifts in local intellectual positions and knowledge epistemologies from a world-systemic perspective, reflecting on how structural dependencies have shaped local knowledge production strategies and disciplinary identity politics in a semiperipheral context. This account offers a perspective on how institutional settings and narrative networks developed according to the various rounds of Hungarian geographers’ semiperipheral integration and re-integration into hegemonic knowledge structures from the late socialist era to neoliberal “return to Europe” and European Union accession, until today’s post-2010 authoritarianism and “global opening”.

In this context, this chapter focuses on how “critical geography” in Hungary was defined and why has its formulation ultimately failed? Can we identify “critical geography” at all compared to its original Western conception? What might be the challenges for any “critical geography” after the 2008 crisis and the authoritarian “illiberal” turn since 2010? These questions are explored through insights from the history and sociology of scientific knowledge, including epistemic strategies of academic provincialism, connectivity, entitlement and gatekeeping. The literature on the geographies of knowledge elucidates the selective circulation, inclusion/exclusion dynamics and local interpretation of Western approaches to human geography, in order to understand how they got positioned and translated into local knowledge interests with very different social and political functions in a semiperipheral structural context. The chapter points out that Hungarian authors either completely dismissed or unreflectively reproduced the Anglo-American postpositivist canon through narrative and epistemological dependency, evading critical self-reflection, historically contextualized and comparative engagement with Anglo-American and Hungarian geography in the “knowledge transfer” of “catching up” to the West.

Meanwhile, amidst the global rise of conservative nationalist authoritarianism, recent Hungarian government attacks against leftism, liberalism, Marxism, feminism and gender studies, race studies, the “1968 generation” and the 1989–2010 liberal period have complicated the interpretive context of West-imported “critical geographies”. The “illiberal” Christian-nationalist Kulturkampf revived geopolitics and global historical approaches (e.g. turn to Asia), while mischievously appropriated postpositivist criticism, postmodernist representational and identity politics, and postcolonial or decolonial ideas as molded into nationalist victimization, anti-Western or anti-EU rhetoric, civilizational exceptionalism and color-blind racism. This chapter aims to critically reflect on how East-West knowledge dependencies in geography constrain meaningful criticism of these processes, and argue for re-evaluating Hungarian “critical geography” based on a historically and geographically self-reflexive world-systemic engagement with the (de)colonization and self-colonization of geographical knowledge.

Citation:

Ginelli Z. (2019): Critical Human Geography in Hungary? Structural Dependencies and Knowledge Circulation in a Semiperipheral Context. Critical Geographies Blog. Link: /2019/07/24/critical-human-geography-in-hungary-structural-dependencies-and-knowledge-circulation-in-a-semiperipheral-context

The Semiperipheral Positioning Politics of the Hungarian Authoritarian Turn

július 17, 2019július 17, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 2018 Turkic Council in Cholpon Ata (Source: merce.hu)

“We will not become colonies” – so goes the official statement of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has since 2010 been labeling his government an “illiberal democracy” or recently “Christian democracy”, whilst revitalizing anti-Western nationalist victimization against both postsocialist neoliberalization and the European Union, and drawing up civilizational-racial demarcation against the global periphery. The political analyses of Orbán’s authoritarian turn have dominantly focused on identifying this “new type” of authoritarianism: whether and to what extent it is democratic, what political typology it fits into (e.g. “hybrid regimes” or “semi-authoritarian regimes”), or how is it embedded in a global rightwing turn or a new neoliberal or neoconservative authoritarianism. However, these institutionalist approaches are geographically unreflective and inherently conceptualize from the lack of democracy and Western values, thereby reproducing East-West dichotomies and local self-colonization, failing to understand the local historical epistemologies and experiences Orbán’s political regionalism (“classical” Europe, Central Europe, Eurasia) and colonial discourse is based upon. The seemingly “irreconcilable” and “antagonistic” positions of this political discourse have specific functions connected to the new geographical alliances and scalar politics of Hungarian semiperipheral world-systemic integration. This paper analyses Hungarian political discourse from a postcolonial and world-systemic perspective to understand the semiperipheral geographical positioning of the country in-between the global center and periphery.

Posztkoloniális Magyarország a rendszerváltás után

július 11, 2019július 11, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

Hétfőn, július 8-án a Politikatörténeti Alapítvány és Intézet nyári egyetemén tartottam egy kb. 25 perces előadást “A közép-kelet-európai rendszerváltások politikai gazdaságtani elemzése” panelben, “A magyar rendszerváltás a globális nyugat, kelet és dél történelmi viszonyában” című workshop keretében. Az én előadásom arról szólt, hogy az 1989-es rendszerváltást, annak következményeit és emlékezetét miért érdemes posztkoloniális szemszögből vizsgálnunk. A fő állításom az volt, hogy a magyarországi gyarmati diskurzus és történelmi gyarmati tapasztalatok megértését a világrendszer-elemzési és posztkoloniális megközelítést összekapcsoló “félperifériás posztkolonialitás” fogalmán keresztül érthetjük meg. Ez a fogalom segít feltárni a globális centrum és periféria közötti, olykor egymásnak látszólag ellentmondó, de funkcionálisan mégis jellegzetesen félperifériás struktúrákat alkotó pozicionálási stratégiákat Magyarországon.

Az előadásomban arról beszéltem, hogy a rendszerváltással miért és hogyan alakult ki “posztszocialista amnézia” a kelet-európai félperiféria és globális periféria közötti kapcsolatok elfedésével, és mik a kihívásai és politikai tétjei ebből a szempontból annak, ahogyan az Orbán-rezsim mozgósítja a magyar “gyarmati” történelmi tapasztalatokat a rendszerváltás “liberális” szakaszával szemben, méghozzá egy igen összetett “gyarmat diskurzusban”, a nacionalista viktimizáció és a “dekolonizáció” üzenetei mentén, egy “új rendszerváltás” politikai legitimációjának megalapozása érdekében. Márpedig a rendszerváltás utáni neoliberális és EU-párti átállás kritikai megközelítésben nemcsak egy gyarmati viszonyként értelmezhető, aminek hazai kritikája a liberális elit euró/nyugatpárti beállása miatt alig bontakozhatott ki, hanem emögött egy – az ún. konzervatív és liberális pozíciókat egyesítő – máig folytonos “fehér forradalom” is zajlott már az 1980-as évektől a posztkoloniális periféria lecsatolásával és a korábbi “rassztapasztalatok” elfeledtetésével (vö. mai migrációs diskurzus). A gyarmati diskurzussal egyébként a kormány “kulturkampfja” a nyugati posztkoloniális és dekoloniális kritikák üzeneteit sajátítja ki, kihasználva, hogy ezek itthon korábban nem kerültek politikai megvitatásra és mozgósításra a térségben, és úgy mozgósítja a nyugattal szembeni félperifériás gyarmati diskurzus bevett “imperialistaellenes” kritikáját (vö. szocialista időszak), hogy a gyarmatiságot kisajátítja a kelet-európai térség számára, egyúttal leválasztja magát a globális gyarmattörténelemtől, amit teljesen el is hallgattat. Ehhez képest a rendszerváltás gazdasági ígéreteinek kudarcából beérett “gyarmatozó” nacionalista revansizmus megértéséhez sokat tanulhatnánk abból, ha ezt az 1960-as évek eleji afro-ázsiai dekolonizáció nacionalizmusaival vetjük össze, figyelembe véve az államközpontosítási stratégiák hasonlóságait is. Az előadásomban arról is beszéltem, hogy a hazai “migrációs diskurzust” abban a kontextusban is kell értelmeznünk, hogy az EU-ban jelenleg verseny zajlik a korábbi “európai/nyugati posztgyarmati periféria” és a kelet-európai térség között a nyugati erőforrások és mobilitási lehetőségek fölött. Illetve arról is szó esett, hogy a keresztény identitás mozgósításának nemcsak lokális funkciója van az EU-n belüli pozicionálás szempontjából, hanem a Fidesz ezt a “globális nyitás” politikája révén egy újfajta diplomáciai és beruházási-üzleti szövetségi hálózat kialakítására is felhasználja pl. az adományozási rendszeren keresztül, mindkettő esetében reagálva arra a kényszerre/lehetőségre, hogy a világ keresztény lakosságának túlnyomó része már nem Európában van.

Mindezek talán olyan kérdések, amelyekkel a jelenlegi hazai politikai és értelmiségi elit egyáltalán nem vagy csak néhány kivételes kutató foglalkozik, de jellemzően nem válnak a politikai diskurzus részévé.

Socialist Worlds on Screen: Beyond Black and White

május 31, 2019

poster_EN_finalA2-(comp)

Download poster and program.

Film Festival

Cinema Union (Bucharest, 24–27 June 2019)

The history of internationalism was quickly forgotten following the fall of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. But now these stories are surfacing once again, fascinating a new generation alive to conflicts over peoples and cultures on the move in today’s global order and seeking fresh takes on the past. This festival presents a rich and exciting range of films inspired by ideas of revolution, national liberation, and solidarity between socialist Eastern Europe and the Global South. We bring the Romanian audience stories from Cuba, Angola, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, and the former Yugoslavia—stories that explore belonging, border-crossing, and belief in radical change. Several of the directors featured were themselves internationalist migrants in the socialist era—men and women from the Global South who brought their talents to the socialist East. All bring visions of socialist worlds that shatter the easy black and white categories of the Cold War and raise important questions about what it means to be international, and in solidarity, then and now.

The event is organized within the project “Socialism Goes Global: Connections between the ‘Second’ and the ‘Third’ Worlds” an initiative implemented by Universities of Exeter, Oxford, Leipzig, Columbia, Belgrade, University College London and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). The curator of the festival is Prof. Kristin Roth-Ey (UCL).

The festival’s partners are: the Romanian National Film Archives – Cinemateca Română, British Council, French Institute (Bucharest), La Cinémathèque Afrique, Russian Centre for Science and Culture, Embassy of Cuba in Bucharest, ‘Respiro’- Human Rights Research Centre and Association ArtViva.

The films will be subtitled in Romanian and English or French.

Each film will be introduced before the screening by a special guest.

All films will be screened at Cinema Union (Ion Câmpineanu street, no 21, Bucharest, Romania). For tickets: kompostor.ro or the ticket booths at cinemas Union and Eforie.

Monday, June 24

18.30

The Teacher (El Brigadista) – Cuba, 1978, 111 minutes, subtitles in Romanian and English, feature film.

Director: Octavio Cortázar

Introduction (10 mins) by Vladimir Smith Mesa (UCL).

The film presents the literacy campaign in the early days of the Cuban revolution (1961) in order to explore the socialist “civilising mission” of the new regime in rural regions. The conflict between past and present holds centre stage along with the impact of the new regime on the social and gender identities of the main characters. The director, Octavio Cortázar studied film at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU).

The film received the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the director was nominated for the Golden Bear (1978).

20.40

The First Teacher (Pervyy uchitel) – Russia, 1965, 102 minutes, subtitles in Romanian and English, feature film.

Director: Andrei Konchalovsky.

Introduction (10 mins) by Kristin Roth-Ey (UCL).

The first movie by director Andrei Konchalovsky based on a novel by Chingiz Aitmatov, who also wrote the screenplay. It presents the literacy campaign in Kyrgyzstan, focusing on the clash between generations and the conflicting identities (religious, gender, political etc.) triggered by the cultural-political offensive of the Soviet regime in the region.

Best director at Jussi Awards (Finland, 1973); nomination for the Golden Lion and Cupa Vopli (best actress) at the Venice Film Festival (1966).

Tuesday June 25

20.00

Guardian of the Frontier (Varuh meje) – Slovenia-Germany, 2002, 100 minutes, subtitles in Romanian and English, full feature.

Director: Maia Weiss.

Introduction (10 mins) by Catherine Baker (University of Hull).

The story of a canoeing trip by three students on the river Kolpa that separates Slovenia and Croatia and the conflict between their values determined by alternative views of society and tradition (e.g., gay identity) and the conservatism of local nationalist politician. The film focuses on the fluid identities and the new symbolic and physical frontiers of post-socialism – the fate of Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe is an important theme.

The Manfred Salzgeber Award at the International Film Festival in Berlin; the best actress and best director awards at the Slovene Film Festival; nomination for the director in the category “European Discovery” at the European Film Awards (2002).

Wednesday, June 26

20.00

October – 1992, Mauritania, 38 minutes, black and white, subtitles in Romanian and French, short film.

The second film by director Adberrahmane Sissako (well-known for works such as Bamako and Timbuktu) presents the love story of Idrissa, an African student in Moscow, and Ira (a young Russian woman). Their drama fleshes out the everyday challenges of human and revolutionary solidarities between the Soviet Union and African countries. Between 1983 and 1989, Adberrahmane Sissako studied at the All-Union State Film Institute in Moscow.

Nominated for the category “Un certain regard” at the Cannes Film Festival (1993); the best short film at the International Film Festival in Amiens (1994).

20.55

Rostov-Luanda – 1997, Mauritania, 60 minutes, subtitles in Romanian and French, documentary.

Director Adberrahmane Sissako and a former fighter in the Angolan national liberation war, whom he originally met in 1980 in Rostov-on-Don, embark on a journey across Angola and Benin, sixteen years later, searching for a former friend from their student years in the Soviet Union. The film analyses revolutionary hope and its disillusion from the post-independence period in Africa as well as the individual destinies of those caught in the maelstrom of history.

Special mention at the Festival of French-Speaking Film in Namur (Belgium), 1998.

Both films will be introduced (15 mins) by Kristin Roth-Ey (UCL).

Thursday, June 27

19.00

Monangambé – 1969, Algeria-Angola, 18 minutes, subtitles in Romanian and English, black and white, short film.

Director: Sarah Maldoror.

Introduction (5 mins) by Iolanda Vasile (University of Coimbra)

The title of the film is the cry of terror uttered by Angolan peasants upon finding out that Portuguese slave traders were near. It was re-appropriated as a rallying call by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola fighting against Portuguese colonial rule. The short film tells everyday stories of the anti-colonial struggle. It is the first film by director Sarah Maldoror, who studied at the All-Union State Film Institute in Moscow and is widely considered the matriarch of African cinema.

Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971.

19.50

Cuba, An African Odyssey – 2007 – France-UK, 118 minutes, subtitles in Romanian and English, documentary.

Director – Jihan El Tahri.

Introduction (10 mins) by Kristin Roth-Ey (UCL).

The documentary, sponsored by Arte and BBC Films, presents the story of the Cuban military assistance to national liberation movements in Africa from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War. The film shows the central role played by Cuba in Africa’s decolonisation and in wars such as those in Angola and Ethiopia, emphasizing the fusion between socialism, anti-imperialism, and nationalism.

Awards: Vues d’Afrique de Montréal and FESPACO (2007); Sunny Side of the Docs, Marseilles (2006).

Postcolonial Hungary: The Positioning Politics of Semiperipheral Post/Coloniality

május 19, 2019augusztus 11, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

Jon Brett

I am thrilled to have applied for the “Dialoguing Between the Posts 2.0” workshop entitled “(Im)possible Dialogue Between the Progressive Forces of the ‘Posts’”. The interactive workshop is organized by Sanja Petkovska and Špela Drnovsek Zorko, with generous support from the Centre for Cultural Studies and Connecting Cultures at the University of Warwick, and will be held on 15 June, 2019 in Belgrade at the Faculty of Political Sciences. My proposal for contributing is a general overview of my “Postcolonial Hungary” project, with a focus on the current political stakes and potentials of understanding Hungarian colonial discourse in a long-term historical perspective of semiperipheral world-systemic integration.

Abstract

Is there a postcolonial Hungary? While postcolonial studies have been preoccupied with the global economic center and periphery, the complex historical relations, experiences and epistemologies of Hungarian colonialism and imperialism have been remarkably silenced. This paper introduces the concept of semiperipheral post/coloniality to unfold Hungarian coloniality in the long-term historical context of integrating into the world economy, and offer a structuralist critique of constructivist approaches to postcolonialism. Hungarian semiperipheral integration articulated an uneasy and antagonistic in-between positioning dynamic: being colonizer but colonized, catching up to but contesting the center, bridging to but demarcating from the periphery. Historically, Hungarian colonialist-imperialist ambitions followed nationalist and global racial-civilizational aspirations, but pragmatically developed East-West in-betweenness and uneasy criticism against the imperialist West. After WWII, state-socialist anti-colonial solidarity contested geopolitical fault-lines and European Economic Community (1957) protectionism, but were driven by pragmatic, state-led foreign policy aims to lever East-West double dependency by opening to Afro-Asian decolonization. The postsocialist “return to Europe” and neoliberal “transition” silenced both anti-colonial critique and previous cultural-economic relations to the postcolonial world, resulting in “postsocialist amnesia”. After 2010, Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian “illiberal” turn repositioned Hungary in its “global opening”. Geopolitical maneuvering produced a new colonial discourse by positioning Hungary against the liberal, Atlantic-Western colonial-imperial center of the European Union, while constructing selective racial-civilizational demarcation from the periphery, and appropriating global colonial history for Hungarian victimization. The postcolonial identity politics of “we never had colonies” and “we will not become colonies”, and that globalization, multiculturalism and migration is the responsibility of former imperialists feeds the nationalist “defense” of sovereignty, but functions to readapt to ongoing hegemonic shifts in the world economy by exploiting Hungary’s silenced but complex experiences of coloniality. This paper explores the neglected long-term historical continuities and political stakes in the revival of this colonial discourse in current Hungarian politics.

Download in .pdf:

Citation:

Ginelli Z. (2019): Postcolonial Hungary: The Positioning Politics of Semiperipheral Post/Coloniality. Critical Geographies Blog. Link: /2019/05/19/postcolonial-hungary-the-positioning-politics-of-semiperipheral-post-coloniality

Historicizing “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe and Russia

május 15, 2019május 15, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

Venue: Institute for Political Research, Spiru Haret street no 8, Bucharest, 010175

Download in .pdf

Tuesday, June 25

9.15–9.30 – Welcome remarks

9.30–10.45 Keynote – Anikó Imre (University of Southern California)
Colorblind Nationalisms

10.45–11.00 – Coffee break

11.00–12.40 – Colonialism and Imagining the Self in Eastern Europe

Chair/Discussant: Steffi Marung (University of Leipzig)

Monika Bobako (Adam Mickiewicz University)
White Skin, White Masks. Re-reading Frantz Fanon from Eastern European Perspective

Zoltán Ginelli (Open Society Archives)
Hungarian Indians: Racial and Anti-colonial Solidarity in Post-Trianon Hungary

Marianna Szczygielska (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Engendering Wildlife and Whiteness: Elephants, Ivory and Zoos (1870s–1940s)

12.45–14.15 – Lunch

14.20–16.00 – Eastern European Whiteness and the Other: Race, Religion and Gender

Chair/Discussant: Agnieszka Kościańska (University of Warsaw)

Kristína Čajkovičová (Museum of Romani Culture in Brno)
Shifting to the Gadžo Question: The Role of Racialized Sexuality in the Process of Czechoslovak Collectivity

Bolaji Balogun (University of Leeds)
Whiteness: A Mechanism that Sustains Polishness

Cătălin Berescu (Romanian Academy)
White Savior, Black Savior: Pro-Roma Activists in Search of an Identity

16.00–16.15 – Coffee break

16.15–17.35 – Anti-Semitism and Whiteness in Eastern Europe

Chair/Discussant: Emily Gioielli (Missouri Western State University)

Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University – New Brunswick)
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Anti-Communist Legacy in Contemporary Eastern Europe

Raul Carstocea (Europa Universität Flensburg)
Ambiguous Whiteness and the Anti-Semitic Imagination: Jews in Eastern Europe between Colonised and Colonisers

20.00 – Film Screening, Cinema Union (Ion Câmpineanu 22, Bucharest, 030167)
Guardian of the Frontier (intro Catherine Baker)

Wednesday, June 26

9.30–11.10 – Eastern European Whiteness in Global Perspective

Chair/Discussant: Monika Bobako (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Dušan I. Bjelić (University of Maine)
Transnational Analysis of Mexico and the Balkans: Racial Formations of Nations

Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
The Yugoslav Wars and Transnational White Nationalist Historical Narratives

Špela Drnovšek Zorko (University of Warwick)
Re-routing East European Socialism, Historicising Diasporic Whiteness

11.15–11.30 – Coffee break

11.30–13.10 – Socialism as Ambivalent Whiteness

Chair/Discussant: Kristin Roth-Ey (University College of London)

Irina Novikova (University of Latvia)
‘White Gaze’ in the USSR?: ‘Race’ and Technology in the Soviet Films of the 1920s–1960s (from Lev Kuleshov to Mark Donskoi)

Zsuzsanna Varga (Central European University)
Hungarians and White Privilege in Africa: The World Hunting Expo of 1971

James Mark (University of Exeter)
A Revolution of Whiteness? 1989 and the Politics of Race

13.10–14.40 – Lunch

14.45–16.25 – Liminality, Post-Socialism, and Eastern European Whiteness

Chair/Discussant: Ivan Kalmar (University of Toronto)

Bogdan G. Popa (University of Cambridge)
“We Belong to a Great Race, the Dacian Race”: Slavery and the Construction of an Anti-colonial White Race in Romanian Historiography

Chelsi West Ohueri (University of Texas at Austin)
The Jevg Factor: An Exploration of Whiteness, Blackness, and Racialized Identities in Albania

Kasia Narkowicz (University of Gloucestershire)
The ‘Muselmanner’ as the Ultimate Other

16.25–16.40 – Break

16.40–17.15 – Concluding roundtable

20.00 – Film Screening, Cinema Union (Ion Câmpineanu 22, Bucharest, 030167)
Oktyabr and Rostov-Luanda (intro Kristin Roth-Ey)

Colonial Hungary in East and Southeast Asia: The Orientalism of János Xántus

május 13, 2019június 15, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

Southeast Asia and Central-Eastern Europe: Forgotten Connections, Stories and Histories

Panel for the EuroSEAS 2019 Berlin Conference, September 10–13, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Convenors:

Dr. Jan Mrázek (National University of Singapore) – [email protected]

Dr. Mária Strašáková (Palacký University, the Czech Republic) – [email protected]

– PRESENTATION CANCELLED –

Abstract

János Xántus (1825–1894) is remembered as one of the most famed Hungarian natural scientists of the 19th century. As a zoologist and ethnographer, he was a strong supporter and contributor to the Hungarian National Museum, corresponding fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1859), founder and first director of the first Hungarian zoo (1866) and the Ethnographic Museum (1872), and founding member of the Hungarian Geographical Society (1872). Becoming a political refugee after the failed 1848–49 Hungarian war of independence from the Habsburg Empire, in the 1850s and early 1960s he was drawn into North American expeditions, and developed a vast network to transfer specimens regularly back to Hungary. Finally returning to Hungary (for the second time), after the Austro-Hungarian compromise (1867) he gained the opportunity during 1869–71 to participate in a series of imperial expeditions to East and Southeast Asia, including Ceylon, Siam, Singapore, Java, China, Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, and Borneo. The original plan of the Austro-Hungarian expedition was to develop foreign trade relations with the opening of the Suez Canal, but it did not fulfill this promise and internal political tensions evolved between Austrian and Hungarian counterparts. This paper focuses on this expedition to explore a postcolonialist and critical geographical interpretation of Xántus, and to elucidate his activities in colonial networks and his global comparative ideas about colonialism and race. This reading aims to epistemologically contest the dominantly biographical and documentary accounts of Xántus, which follow institutionalist or nationalist legitimation logics (focusing on his collections, personality and merits) and seldom engage critically with the wider social, economic, political-ideological and racial contexts of colonialism. While Xántus’ activities relied on national, imperial and colonial power networks and interests, he was known for his critique of colonialism and his solidarity with the colonially suppressed, and made various colonial and racial comparisons between his local Hungarian and foreign experiences. This paper aks whether he pursued Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentric criticism in his Asian interpretations, and how his depictions of the East fitted in the wider colonial discourse of Western or European Orientalism. The case of Xántus may shed light on how Hungarian colonial knowledge production was embedded in global colonialism.

xántus utazásai

Source: http://www.zoldjovo.hu/documents/Xantus_Janos_Szasz_Eva.pdf

Semiperipheral Postcoloniality: An Eastern and Central European Transnational History of Urban and Regional Development Planning

április 17, 2019április 17, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

I submitted a paper for the “CAT-ference 2019: 8th International Urban Geographies of Post-communist States Conference” to be held in Belgrade at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Geography during September 25–29, 2019. My paper is planned to be part of the panel entitled “The Global East in the global geopolitics of knowledge: Views from between North and South”, organized by Martin Müller (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland) and Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Russia).

“We never had colonies” – so goes the commonly held phrase that repetitively delinks Hungary and most of Eastern (and Central) Europe from (post)colonial history. Despite this dismissiveness, the Hungarian government’s political rhetoric of national victimisation excessively exploits colonial discourse based on a reservoir of unprocessed Eastern European colonial experiences, whilst dissecting the region from global colonial history – a history ruled by a hegemonic narrative of East-West or North-South centre-periphery dichotomies, thereby concealing or marginalising the uneasy, unfit and contradictory semiperipheral position and integration of Eastern Europe in global colonialism. This paper explores these issues of exclusive-inclusive epistemic geopolitics and strategic regionalisms in knowledge production by deconstructing inherited hegemonic and self-colonising narratives and by proposing a global historical and world-systemic postcolonial perspective to grasp the dynamics and potential of in-between semiperipheral epistemologies. The paper draws upon a demonstrative set of 20^th century historical case studies to overview the various ways we may understand (post)coloniality in the global circulation of urban theory and planning knowledge, and the Eastern European context of the transnational interconnectivity and global circulation of development, urban and regional planning knowledge in post/colonial networks. By looking into these forgotten global interactions in transnational planning history, we may reassess how dependency structures and hegemonic structural shifts reorganised global knowledge networks, how these intertwined with regional development and global urbanism, and how peripheral and semiperipheral contexts were ultimately silenced by the narrative networks of the global centre.

A székely, az indián és a néger: A magyar gyarmati identitások földrajzi képzelete

március 19, 2019március 19, 2019Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

Dél keresztje alatt

az indián és a néger
tüzet rakni éppúgy térdel
mint a hargitán a pásztor
számolni ujjain számol
különbség ha van az égen
itt a göncöl jön föl este
fölöttük a dél keresztje

a poncsónak nincsen ujja
ritkán telik mégis újra
rojtosul a rojtja rongya
kigyérül akár a condra
különbség ha van az égen
itt a göncöl jön föl este
fölöttük a dél keresztje
egy útmenti fogadóban
talán még boldog is voltam
rióból murryba tartón
a gitárszót most is hallom
más a dallam egy a nóta
itt a göncöl jön föl este
odalenn a dél keresztje

ó te istenáldott földrész
lenn vagy – a szemem rád fölnéz
érett banán az újholdad
íve akár a sarlónak
nézem hosszan vágyakozva
ha feljön a göncöl este
szívemen a dél keresztje

– Kányádi Sándor, 1983

“A Múlik a jövőnk (1989) korszakától Nagy Gáspár kulturális antropológiai jeltárában egy Európán kívülre, illetve a harmadik világra tekintő perspektíva, a magyar viszonyokat ehhez mérő összefüggésrendszer is kibontakozik. Az Ültem egy indián kövön és az Ideiglenes és örökkévaló című versek ennek az új panorámát nyitó szemléleti tágulásnak a bizonyítékai. A kortárs Kányádi Sándor egy teljes ciklust alakított ki latin-amerikai élményeiből, amelyben a 20. századi székely életváltozás és a bennszülött indián sors egyes párhuzamait is középpontba helyezte (Dél keresztje alatt). Szőcs Géza „indián”-versei (Csingacsguk látogatása a világosi villamossági üzletben; Indián szavak a rádióban; érintőlegesen Az elveszett törzs) szintén az erdélyi magyar lét és a rezervátumba vonult indián törzsek sorsanalógiáit erősítik fel. A kelet-európai ember és az „indiánság” fogalmát közelíti egymáshoz a diktatúra idején Szentmihályi Szabó Péter is (Kelet-európai indián). A Nagy Gáspár észak-amerikai látogatását őrző Ültem egy indián kövön című vers a sorsanalógia hasonló horizontját kínálja fel az olvasatban. Az „indián kőről” a létezést bemérő szerző egykori „fizikai” helye az idegennek minősített, hazájában a létperemre szorított ember közérzetének lélektani, társadalmi pozíciója is. A nomád, a kirekesztett, a nem kívánt, az ellenzéki, a kellemetlen ember figuráját összegzi a mű (más, dokumentatív szerepű vonásai mellett) az „indián kő” centruma köré. „A Nagy Medve Tó fölött / azaz a Big Bear Lake fölött / ültem egy indián kövön / – s tán még most is ott ülök – / azon az indián kövön.” A harmadik világ léthelyzeteivel megvont párhuzam – ahogyan Kányádi Sándornál – a Kárpát-medence történelméből és jelenéből, benne a magyar falu életköreiből felszökve vetül rá Nagy Gáspárnál is az egyetemesebb történelmi sorsra. A kultúrheroikus ihletettségű afrikai asszonylátomás az édesanya figurája mögött az Ideiglenes és örökkévaló című versben az anyára vetített sorspárhuzamban nemcsak a fiziológiai hasonlóságokat tárja fel, hanem a kiszolgáltatottságnak – a nemzeti történelem nagyobb távlataiból megítélt – analóg arányait is. „Édesanyám / afrikai törzsek vízhordóleánya / itt a szaharai délben vesszőkosárnyi / étel a fején / esti harmatban fényes csillagok / alatt botladozva / hol meg harangszó légifolyosóján úszva / haza hazafelé / kontya fölött / tonnányi répalevél – – – És átjön a szavannáson /szálig kiirtott réti tölgyek / temetőin / átjön egy fél országon / úton maradtak csontvázát / megnevezi eltemeti / minden bűnt magára vesz / és elátkozza az utakat / el valahányszor/ – innen és túl – / túl életen halálon álmon.””

Jánosi Zoltán: “Kőbe csiszolt villám”. Kortárs, 2012. 9. sz. p. 76-83
http://www.nagygaspar.hu/honl…/index.php/irasok/kritikak/424

Plotting the Semiperipheral Empire: Hungarian Balkanism and Global Colonialism in Geographical Knowledge, 1867–1948

március 18, 2019április 2, 2020Megjegyzés hozzáfűzése

austria-hungary map

43^rd Annual Conference on the Political Economy of the World-System

Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany

Topic: 2. The Balkans’ inter-imperial linkages

Eastern Europe is the “black sheep” of postcolonial studies: its colonial experiences have been routinely missed out from the relentless focus on (post)colonial centres and peripheries. Since the 1990s, postcolonial literature has extended Orientalism to the Western construction of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and has reinterpreted colonial relations with regards to Soviet imperialism, the postsocialist transition, the European integration, and Eastern Europe’s role in decolonization and socialist globalization. However, due to dominant historical narratives, the imperialist or colonialist ambitions of Eastern or East Central Europe seem to go against the grain, since these countries were often colonized, rarely or never held any colonies, and did not have any significant colonial ambitions.

This contradiction may be resolved by revising the restrictive Western-Atlantic narrative of global history and the territorial understanding of colonialism, and look into the various ways colonialism and imperialism were spatially practiced and geographically imagined in Hungary. Hungarian geographical knowledge production from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th centuries related to the Balkans is a demonstrative case study of semiperipheral imperialism. Hungarian imperialist ambitions grew from the economic boom in the late 19^th century and Austro-Hungarian geopolitical interests to secure southern areas against Russia, Turkey and Serbia. Although the tragic defeat in WWI led to the Hapsburg Empire’s demise, huge Hungarian territorial losses and defensive revisionism, these only replenished arguments for Hungarian civilizational superiority in the region.

Hungary’s semiperipheral “in-between” position constructed a complex and ambivalent imperialist-nationalist discourse on various intertwined scales. On the global scale, Hungary was imagined as part of an Empire and the superior white race and civilization. The country was an active observer, participant, and benefiter of “high imperialism”, and Hungarian Balkanism was both deeply intertwined with and a semiperipheral compensation to global colonialism. Standing at both a global civilizational fault line and exchange border, Hungary’s “turn to the East” represented a geopolitical rhetoric of developing Orientalism, approaching the post-Ottoman Balkans, and searching for the Hungarian homeland in Central Asia as an attempt at East-West maneuvering and cultural imperialism in the Asian continent. On the European scale, Hungary countered (mostly) German and Austrian hegemony and Western Europe, but also expanded national hegemony by upholding the merits of European civilization against the half-European periphery and the non-European world, acting as the “lord protector” of Christian Europe against the Muslim East. On the regional scale, the Carpathian Basin became the stage of a Hungarian “civilizing mission” towards culturally backward and “half-Europeanized” landscapes, in order to both bring and protect European civilization by upholding a “bridge” role and an essential “healthy mix” of Eastern and Western traits. The ideal nation-bearing hearthland landscape of the Alföld basin was geographically co-constructed in relation to the Balkan “Other”, while imperialist visions of cultural and economic expansion were naturalized by transforming the “wild” Karst and opening to “the Hungarian sea”. The Balkans offered a gateway to sovereign Hungarian development by de-linking from Western dependency and maturing as a true European nation by linking through active maritime participation to the global colonial world.

See an earlier version of this project here.

Ginelli, Z. (2019): Plotting the Semiperipheral Empire: Hungarian Balkanism and Global Colonialism in Geographical Knowledge, 1867–1948. Critical Geographies Blog, 2019.03.18. Link: /2019/03/18/plotting-the-semiperipheral-empire-hungarian-balkanism-and-global-colonialism-in-geographical-knowledge-1867-1948

Kritikai földrajz

Critical Geography