Adapting to Survive: Postcolonial Studies Today and the Emergence of the Interimperial Reading Method

This paper discusses Manuela Boatcă and Anca Parvulescu’s recent volume, Creolizing the Modern, in relation to the debates surrounding the adequacy of the postcolonial framework for the analysis of East European and, more specifically, Romanian literature. It argues that the authors manage to signal, introduce and put into practice some of the most important methodological updates in the fields of postcolonialism, dependency studies and World Literature. Through a discussion of each of these milestones, Boatcă and Parvulescu’s inter-imperial reading method is shown to provide a highly rigorous and productive world-systemic perspective on modern canonical literature.