Practices of Colonization in Regional Literary Histories

The discourses on 20th century Eastern European regional literatures are predominantly determined by the use of terminology and interrelationships of national and ethnic literatures, which originated in social and state organizational embeddedness. Besides, the majority–minority relation is significantly present in the discourse on these literatures, with this relation representing a – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – approach of colonization. If ethnic (or minority) literatures are not only examined as opposed to national (or majority) literatures, it might occur that ethnic literatures themselves often resorted to practices of colonization when describing the literary context. This paper aims at examining the processes of literary history writing of German and Hungarian literatures from Romania, and by looking at them from a transnational perspective, identifying the in-between space where the mutually oppressive spatial practices are eliminated.