Shadow Lines of Selfhood: Subjective Temporalities in Domnica Radulescu's Train to Trieste (original) (raw)
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This article explores some dynamics of identity change that followed the fall of socialism in Romania, and how cultural practices of representing the individual are being reshaped by the manner in which globalization, localization and delocalisation change people's attachment to the past. The fall of empires, the weakening of nation-ntates and their metanarratives (Lyotard 1979), the spreading of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism and growing economic migration all contribute to uprooting of people from the communities of reference and weaken traditional frameworks that traditionally contributed to defining individual identities. New politics of identities are emerging alongside new actors, like economic migrants, in new spaces and in new cultures: the transnational, deterritorialised ethnicity, cosmopolitanism, hybridity. For people who are closely affected by these processes, there emerge new temporal choices beyond the simple opposition of tradition and modernity. These combine in new geopolitical zones that are partly empirical and partly imagined. My analysis is based on research on Romanian immigrants in Europe and in Canada (Quebec).
Postcolonial Readings of Romanian Identity Narratives
The book offers a view of national self-identification in the literary culture of twentieth century Romania with a special focus on the postcolonial paradigm. Romanian identity narratives downplay the colonial setup of the country’s past and the colonial past goes unmentioned in the country’s historiography and popular culture. However, the postcolonial paradigm helps readers grasp national self-identification in modern Romanian culture. The author analyses how Anglo-American reporting on interwar Romania and later Romanian historical fiction establish notions such as hybridity and cultural overlap as conducive to the making of modern Romanian culture.
Displacement and Emplacement in Narratives of Relocation by Romanian Women Authors
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IntroductionThe present argument aligns itself with theoretical positions that question the celebratory interpretations of relocation narratives. The starting point of my analysis is S. Pultz Moslund's study that questions the glorification of the migrant subject as the normative type of consciousness of our times. The author considers that the contemporary critical discourse, with its focus on metaphors of fluidity (migrancy/uprootedness, cultural flows, becoming, nomadic identities) overlooks the enduring relevance of centripetal coordinates (settlement, rootedness, being) in the fabric of contemporary identities.1 Far from minimising the significance of migrancy and cultural flows, this approach suggests a more comprehensive perspective that would balance all these coordinates (movement and stillness, cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity, cultural being and cultural becoming). Along similar lines, Michael Peter Smith argues for the importance of analysing the emplacement of...
Romania as a Trauma: Considerations upon Romanian-American Literature
Linguaculture, 2011
The aim of this paper is to analyze trauma as constructed in a corpus of texts identified as Romanian-American literature. More precisely, we have focused on the violence of departure from Romania and the violence of adaptation to America in the novel Train to Trieste by Domnica Rădulescu, in Petru Popescu’s The Deputy, and in Alta Ifland’s collection of short stories Elegy for a Fabulous Land. All these writers were born in Romania and were confronted with totalitarianism and its impositions upon individual identity. For many years escape was the main target of their identity politics.
The Chronotope of Exile in the Post-Yugoslav Novel and the Boundaries of Imaginary Homelands
COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA No. 7. Against Homogeneity. Transcultural and Trans-Lingual Strategies in Cultural Production, 2018
Although the chronotopic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, the specific features of post-Yugoslav exile narrations evoke a separate chronotopic interpretation. First of all, post-Yugoslav literature is loaded with an additional identity burden as the areas abandoned in the 1990s do not disappear for the exiled writer at a metaphorical level, by turning into a mnemotope, but in the actual breakup of the political entity, whereby the imaginary supranational heritage is transformed into a kind of counterculture, mostly affirmed exactly by the mediation of exile writers. Therefore, return to the once abandoned area often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be comparatively followed, starting from the reflective nostalgia in the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić ("The Ministry of Pain"), through global exile which mirrors the history of the relationship between European persecutions and America as an unfair homeland which destroys all identity countenance in the novels of Aleksandar Hemon ("Nowhere Man"; "The Lazarus Project"). This theme will then proceed to the intra-Yugoslav “inherited” exile in the novels of Goran Vojnović ("Chefurs Raus!"; "Jugoslavija, moja dežela" [Yugoslavia, My Homeland]), which, like a curse of the genus, fathers left to their sons. In the texts mentioned above, the chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope that includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes or motifs, which are fundamental to exile narration. We also encounter these motifs in other genres, but in exile narration they are a pillar of the genre. They are, by nature, chronotopic as they are realised through the binary spatial-temporal categories of presence and absence, affiliation and non-affiliation, anchoring and nomadism. In this paper, I will look at three such chronotope motifs: 1) the motif of a home as a non-place or a place of absence; 2) the motif of the other/mirror country and the other/“mirror” history; 3) the motif of return and travel (by train), which regularly invokes the stereotypical representation of a place and the past.
Exile in Reverse: Constantin Noica as an Example of Paraexilic Life in Communist Romania
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2019
This article illustrates a relatively less charted form of exilic dislocation which I have dubbed paraexile. Unlike Claudio Guillén, who claims that exiled writers can triumph over their native attachments and create a literature of "counter-exile," I propose, alongside critics like Lamming, Rushdie, or Said, that the trauma of displacement can never be entirely left behind and is constantly part of exilic writing. In addition, I make the claim that paraexilic literature is a peculiar form of internalizing exile by means of irony and contradiction. I am illustrating this attitude with the work of Constantin Noica, one of the most popular and respected philosophers in postwar Romania, who rejected emigration and, instead, adopted the paradoxical solution of triumphing over internal and internalized exile by embracing it as a form of liberation. I am proposing the rhetorical category of contra-discourse-a dialogic structure of argument and narrative in which the homely and the foreign are spoken of in the ironically mingled voices of the oppressor and of the victim. I am concluding with the suggestion that, while the work of Noica is in many ways idiosyncratic, it may also be viewed as a typical form of coping with exilic traumas in Central and East European cultures during communism.
Transilvania, 2023
This article aims to discuss two literary representations of postcommunist Romanian emigration to the United States, one of the most understudied routes of migration, in sociological and literary studies alike. Relying on Carine M. Mardorossian’s (2002) research, I understand exile and migrant literature not as taxonomic but as paradigmatic categories. As I show, the paradigmatic difference between them plays out at the level of critical representation, which reveals a subtle, implicit, and rather involuntary critique of North American capitalism and its labor market. My argument is that any critique of capitalism and the labor market is closely connected to downward social mobility.
The goal of this article is to understand the discourse regarding the others in travel reports from Poland to the Balkans. The general question is under what circumstances do we create the images of the other in textual or visual forms? if we treat a diary/memoir as a kind of map of " relocations " within the space of our life's relationships, both those significant and less significant ones, what is then a travel account? in both we find accurate descriptions of situations, encounters, reflections, impressions, and towns on the journey's route. What makes them different from each other is movement (in the case of the first type), which most often takes place through relationships with other people. These relations form the situations, create the exchange and shape the positions or roles fulfilled by the author. in the case of a diary/journey account, in the majority of cases, the richness of the relationship becomes limited to the opposition delineating " us and them " , an observing " non-local " versus an observed " local ". if no bond exists, or if it is superficially formed on the basis of some knowledge of the language, contacts by means of transportation, hotels, entertainment facilities designed for visitors, an enactment of one's role in accordance with the current conventions occurs, without crossing any rules or boundaries.