Kategória: English Blog

The Hungarian ‘Colonial Turn’ in 2012: Commemorating 1848 as ‘Habsburg Colonialism’ within Anti-Western Public Discourse

On 15 March 2012, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a commemorative speech during the national anniversary of the declaration of Hungarian independence from ‘Habsburg colonialism’ in 1848. The speech was pivotal in setting the course for Hungary’s new official political agenda: “we will not become a colony of the West”. My contribution focuses on contextualizing Orbán’s speech by looking at how ‘coloniality’ has captured the limelight in Hungarian public discourse.

Tovább

Ferenc Kordás and Hungarian Colonies in South America

As part of my research on Hungarian colonies in South America, I’m digitizing parts of the archival collection of the Julian teacher, writer and poet Ferenc Kordás (1911–1993) held at the Déri Museum in Debrecen. In my work, I’m looking at his Brazilian sociographies, diaries, notes and poems about the tropical experience and Hungarian settler colonists during his stay there between 1936 and 1942.

Hungary and Ghana: What do Their 1960s Forgotten Relations Tell Us about the ‘Southern Opening’ After 2015?

My paper for the international conference “Visegrad countries and Africa: History and Contemporaneity” held online on 27 April 2022. I follow a world-systemic and decolonial approach to investigate Hungarian semiperipheral positioning strategies in global colonial history by looking at the interactions and converging interests of Hungary and Ghana in the early 1960s.

‘Hungarian Indians’: Race, Colonialism and Memory Politics in Hungarian ‘Indian Play’

I talk about how semiperipheral “whiteness” should reconfigure our ideas of Eastern European racial and colonial history through the case of Hungarian ‘Indian play’. The “tradition” of whites playing out Native Americans in cultural and racial performances was often an antagonistic practice of anti-colonial solidarity and colonial appropriation. In the Eastern European case, it often became a way of contesting Western hegemony, but through mimicking Western colonial cultures of appropriation and “nativism”. Today, the Orbán government is building on this colonial and racial heritage through nationalist anti-communist memory politics.

Decolonize Hellas/Decolonize the Balkans and Eastern Europe: A first contact

The Return of the Colonial: Understanding the Role of Eastern Europe in Global Colonization Debates and Decolonial Struggles 

I was honored to present my paper The Return of the Colonial: Understanding the Role of Eastern Europe in Global Colonization Debates and Decolonial Struggles at the opening event of the Decolonize Hellas project and research platform on 19 May, 2021. In my paper, I introduced my world-sytemic approach to conceptualizing semiperipheral Hungarian and Eastern European colonial histories and decolonialism from a global perspective.

Tovább

János Fekete in Ghana

After President Nkrumah’s visit to Ghana in 1961, the president requested a wide range of expertise and investment projects from Hungary. Among them was the secret mission of János Fekete as a financial adviser in the summer of 1962 to work out currency management solutions for Ghana, which was heavily dependent on world market prices and loans from Western countries (USA, UK).