Negotiating the Romanian Quest for Cultural Identity After 1989 Between Authenticity and Mimicry, Self and Neo-Colonization (original) (raw)
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This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of local intellectual discourses to the international "market of ideas" had a powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the Western scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian historiography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditionalist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceaus7 escu regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that relativizes the traditional dichotomy between "Westernizers" and "autochthonists," accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from socialpolitical narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the historical research on Eastern Europe.
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This paper catalogs a number of Romanian self-images of the regenerative void as a tropical conversion of the void into something beneficial and revitalizing is a compensating mechanism for traumatized cultural identities. It aims to illustrate how in Romanian culture the reversed symbolism of the void is both culturally comprehensive and historically consistent, spanning several historical periods. Though it may be triggered by particular situations of oppression and denied alternatives, the Romanian rhetorical strategy of converting voids into centers of regenerated meaning spills across historical and social boundaries to become a “tradition”. This rhetorical reflex is ubiquous and it has been invoked starting with the nineteenth century as a response to the traumas caused by ethnic, national, social, political or cultural discriminations. Resting on subjective constructivist premises, my effort is part of a category of cultural studies that operates in the framework of discourse analysis and cultural rhetoric. It documents how the internal, discursive mechanisms of identity formation are more resilient then the economic and political contexts or the social and institutional frameworks commonly investigated by nationalism scholars.
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
The Romanian post-communist culture witnesses a process of value re-definition within which the memory of the totalitarian experience is mediated through identity-focused literary discourses mirroring the bias between two opposing topoi: the Southeastern space and the West, both of them being interiorized as the "periphery ego" legitimizes its writing in relation with Otherness. The experience of "travelling aboard" entails an existential quest during which Romanianness is constantly called in question: the "ego-graphic" writings are coping with the issue of cultural identity by means of recognition process (Charles Taylor, 1994) enabling the identity-otherness interchangeable game.
Finnish Journal of Romanian Studies, NO 1 / 2015, 'Challenging Identities'
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Cultural Identities and the Research of Recent Romanian Past_2002
Published in Southeastern Europe = L'Europe du Sud-Est, Nº 29, 2002 , pags. 1-16. ISSN 0094-4467. The new direction in the field of both history and cultural studies, in the sense of their greater mutual influence is briefly expressed by Lynn Hunt, as "... the more cultural the historical studies will become, and the more historical the cultural studies will become, the better for both." 2 I argue here for establishing new areas in inquiring the recent Romanian history, beyond the event-centred, political history, proposing also a case-study elaborated on the borderline between cultural and historical studies. The core approach consists in analysing the reconstruction of the subjects" relationships with their identities through their narratives and their self-representations, as reflected in their life stories. I chose the identity as a topic for reconstruction because of the centrality it had in the oral history accounts, as well as because identity is the widespread new obsession of the (post)postmodern world. This assumes the intertwining of history with cultural studies (since the past is reconstructed through stories about identities, and the relationship between identities is reconstructed through self-narratives). However, the context of inquiry should be broaden by of changing of the perspective in inquiring identities, and culture itself, from fixed polarisation through a view of interconnecting and developing partial cultures. It ultimately induces a new methodology in representing the recent past, through assuming the cultural dimension of a historical inquiry and using as a vehicle of inquiry the negotiations of identity. For the time-being, the research is limited to members of the Hungarian minority, considering that the negotiations of identities were more visible and stronger, due to the nationalist peculiarities of the Romanian state-socialism.
Fabricating Remembrance and Perpetuating Repression: Nation-Building and the "Romanian Soul"
International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, 2022
Using the playtext of the theatrical performance "Romanian History Abridged," which premiered in Cluj in 2021, I investigate the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis relates to the repression of historical facts, and the perpetuation of a mythicized version of Romanian history. This state-sponsored practice favors the preservation of the ongoing Romanian identity crisis, which, I argue, describes national culture. In the article I also explain the way in which the play deconstructs the dominant nationalist discourse through various theatrical devices such as the Verfremdungseffekt, and the employment of satire and irony, which are used to question, reposition and decontextualize such founding myths as the Daco-Roman ethnogenesis thesis, and the treatment of fascist figures like Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Ion Antonescu in current Romanian historical narratives.
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This article aims at capturing a paradoxical situation of modern Romanian nationalism that is both a symptom and a consequence of the country's postcommunist "liquid" modernity: the tension between the essentialist and the constructionist discourses related to nationalism and ethnic identity. Approaching this topic can be an important endeavor not only for a better understanding of the condition of an eminently liminal geography in Europe's late modernity (East/West, democracy/totalitarianism, tradition/modernity) but also for addressing two questions of major importance to political anthropology: (1) Which are the political consequences of exposing a certain community to the scientific discourse produced in the sphere of the social sciences about that very community? (2) How is it possible for modern national identity to be commodified and for citizenship to be contractualized?