The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination

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SUNY Press, Jul 19, 2001 - Social Science - 259 pages
The Remote Borderland explores the significance of the contested region of Transylvania to the creation of Hungarian national identity. Author László Kürti illustrates the process by which European intellectuals, politicians, and artists locate their nation s territory, embody it with meaning, and reassert its importance at various historical junctures. The book s discussion of the contested and negotiated nature of nationality in its East Central European setting reveals cultural assumptions profoundly mortgaged to twentieth-century notions of home, nation, state, and people. The Remote Borderland shows that it is not only important to recognize that nations are imagined, but to note how and where they are imagined in order to truly understand the transformation of European societies during the twentieth century.
 

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Contents

Introduction Regions Identities and Remote Borderlands
1
Contesting the Past The Historical Dimension of the Transylvanian Conflict
25
Fieldwork on Nationalism Transylvania in the Ethnographic Imagination
49
Literary Contests Populism Transylvania and National Identity
77
Transylvania between the Two Socialist States Border and Diaspora Identities in the 1970s and 1980s
107
Youth and Political Action The DanceHouse Movement and Transylvania
137
Transylvania Reimagined Democracy Regionalism and PostCommunist Identity
165
Conclusion New Nations Identities and Regionalism in the New Europe
187
Notes
201
Index
255
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About the author (2001)

László Kürti is professor of Political Science at the University of Miskolc, Hungary. He is the coeditor, with Juliet Langman, of Beyond Borders: Remaking Cultural Identities in the New East and Central Europe.

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