Participants
Lahorka Plejić Poje, Jasmina Lukec, University of Zagreb
Herstory of a (foreign) country: imaginary worlds of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić
This paper highlights the imagery of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić’s historical novel Jaša Dalmatin viceroy of Gujarat (1937). This is a novel of the character in which the young protagonist Jaša from Dubrovnik, a Slavic slave in Constantinople, becomes viceroy of the Indian province of Gujarat. The story first takes place in Constantinople and then in Gujarat, at the end of 15th century, in the period marked by the Ottoman expansion and Portuguese conquest of West India. Instead of evoking exoticist images, space and time of the radical Otherness for the most part become a scenery of (re)creating slavophilic ideologemes, which had traditionally been a vital part of Croatian political discourse dominated by the learned male elite. Hence, these ideologemes and imagemes were mediated into Ivana Brlić Mažuranić’s novel mostly through literary, historical and political authority of her male ancestors: her father Vladimir, who was a historian, and her grandfather Ivan, Croatian governor and author of the The Death of Smail-aga Čengić. Self identification of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić as a writer grows out of a sophisticated interaction of heteroimages and autoimages created by writers and historians in her family, thus reflecting contradictions and ambivalence of her personal, gender and literary imagery.
