Mónika Fodor – författare

Emphasizing the role of travel and migration in the performance and transformation of identity, this volume addresses representations of travel, mobility, and migration in 19th–21st-century travel writing, literature, and media texts. In so doing, the book analyses the role of the various cultural, ethnic, gender, and national encounters pertinent to narratives of travel and migration in transforming and problematizing the identities of both the travelers and "travelees" enacting in the borderzones between cultures. While the individual essays by scholars from a wide range of countries deal with a variety of case studies from various historical, spatial, and cultural locations, they share a strong central interest in the ways in which the narratives of travel contribute to the imagining of ethnic encounters and how they have acted as sites of transformation and transculturation from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In addition to discussing textual representations of travel and migration, the volume also addresses the ways in which cultural texts themselves travel and are reconstructed in various cultural settings. The analyses are particularly attentive to the issues of globalization and migration, which provide a general frame for interpretation. What distinguishes the volume from existing books is its concern with travel and migration as ways of forging transcultural identities that are able to subvert existing categorizations and binary models of identity formation. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the performance of identity in various spaces of cultural encounter, ranging from North America to the East of Europe, putting particular emphasis on the representation of intercultural and ethnic encounters.

In this interdisciplinary study, Mónika Fodor explores how intergenerational memory narratives embedded in the speaker’s own stories impact ethnic subjectivity construction.

Working with thematically selected life experiences from interviews conducted with second- and late-generation European Americans, Fodor demonstrates how the storytellers position themselves in a range of social, cultural, and political discourses to claim or disclaim ethnicity as part of their subjectivity. Tying narrative content, structural, and performance analysis to the sociological and sociolinguistic concepts of "symbolic capital" and "investment," Fodor unpacks the changing levels of identifying with one’s ancestral ethnic heritage and its potential to carry meaning for late-generation descendants. In doing so, she reveals the shared features of identification among individuals through narrative meaning-making, which may be the basis of real or imagined, heterolocal discourse community formation and sustained ethnic subjectivity. The narrative analysis demonstrates how the cohesive force among members of the community is the shared knowledge of story frames and the personalized retelling of these.

Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives draws on inherited, often moving, personal experiences that offers new insights into the so far largely unexplored terrain of the narrative structure of intergenerationally transferred memory retellings, that will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, migration and identity studies.