Displaced Memoryscapes – Archives of Hungarian Women Authors from Post-Yugoslavia

Abstract

Abstract The article deals with archives of memoryscapes as remembered landscapes of a past society by Hungarian women authors from Yugoslavia. Divided into two separate cycles, it explores how an inhabited geography transgressed from the present into a past, and how it evolved via belletristic practices from the 1990s onward. The archive is therefore assessed as a cumulative development of text-worlds in prose, poetry, and drama by Hungarian women, who either remained in disintegrating Yugoslavia or emigrated to Hungary, both of which led mostly to uprootedness and a misinterpretation of their work. Accordingly, displaced as authors, who remember landscapes that are beyond official memory politics, their archive remained largely unnoticed and marginalised throughout the decades. Emerging in autobiographic writing and literary fiction equally, these memoryscapes are not idiosyncratic but are regulated and systemic representations of a time, a space, and a society. To display such a mnemonic agency, the article integrates the foucauldian notions of the archive with the thirdspace perspective of geocriticism within literary representation, as used in post-colonial thought. Eventually, this enables the exposition of the archive of these female memoryscapes of an ethnic minority not in relation to other “national” archives, or as auxiliary archives of a male perspective, but as a system of thirdspaces and representation in itself.