Language and Literature paper by Faragó, Borbála
Hungary's Immigrant Women Poets: Reading the Works of Zsófia Balla
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
The diversity of languages and cultures in motion is central to contemporary European experience. Such diversity is represented in a variety of textual forms that challenge existing concepts of genre, audience and cultural production which shape our current European experience. These emerging varieties of cultural expressions connect diverse communities and have the potential to better contextualise our understanding of cultural patterns within Europe.
A significant body of migrant women’s textual expression has been produced in contemporary Hungary by native speakers of Hungarian who have immigrated to Hungary from neighbouring countries such as Romania, Slovakia, Croatia or Slovenia. The present paper’s objective is to examine this phenomenon through the lens of the poetry of Zsófia Balla and also to problematise the manner in which this work has been conceptualised within, and integrated into, the Hungarian literary establishment. In addition, the findings will be placed in a European context.
The paper proposes to contribute to a better understanding of current cultural developments in postcommunist spaces, and the ways contemporary migrants tend to articulate their positions within the European cultural framework; it will also add to the mapping of contemporary women’s writing in Europe. The central objective of this project is therefore the investigation of Hungary’s immigrant women’s textual production in the context of reinterpreting their past positioning within the Hungarian literary canon and offering alternative future readings.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr Borbála Faragó is currently a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow in the Central European University, Budapest. The title of her research project is Migrant Women Writers on the Margins of Europe: The Case of Hungary. She holds a PhD from University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests include literature and cultural studies, poetry, literary theory, gender, ecocriticism and discourses of migration and transnationalism. She is the author of a number of articles on contemporary Irish poetry and is in the process of publishing a monograph on the work of Medbh McGuckian. Her other publications include Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland (2008) and Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (2010).