The remote borderland : Transylvania in the Hungarian imagination /

Kurti (political science, Univ. of Miskolc, Hungary) presents a comparative, historical analysis of 20th-century Hungarian perspectives of Transylvania. From Budapest, Transylvania appears as a remote borderland where the pristine source of Hungarian identity lies. The region, however, is currently a Romanian province populated by diverse ethnic communities, including Hungarians and Romanians. Throughout the 20th century, Romanian and Hungarian nationalists have attempted to cast Transylvanian identities into mono-ethnic molds through literary imaginings, educational politics, and at times, force. Even communist regimes engaged in nationalist contests over Transylvanian identity masked beneath socialist imagery. Kurti provides an insightful anthropological analysis of Hungarian folk dancing clubs that proliferated in the 1970s and whose young musicians and dance ethnographers discovered "authentic" peasant Hungarian identity among "traditional" communities in Transylvania. For these rebellious youths, the search for Hungarian identity in a remote borderland distanced them from the political values of the older socialist generation. Finally, Kurti argues that potentially explosive tensions over Transylvania's essential identity provide a microcosm of regional problems exposed by the forces of European integration. The work is theoretically dense and navigates a complex political landscape with some difficulty. Graduate students and faculty. P. G. Wallace Hartwick College