"Communism: Intimate Publics," Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 34.1 (Winter 2011): 70-82. (original) (raw)
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Everyday of Memory: Between Communism and Postcommunism
Questions debated in this book relate to the role of memory in everyday life in the context of changes since 1989 in post-communist countries, namely the former East Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, the former Yugoslavia and Russia. In our attempt to understand how the memory of the past lives in the present, the forms it takes, the places it inhabits, and the ways in which it is negotiated by individuals and communities, we have put together a volume that captures different research contexts and different methods. Looking at the everyday of memory from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, we present twelve chapters which engage with critical theory, film and literary criticism, narrative studies, cultural sociology, urban studies, visual anthropology, phenomenology and art. The purpose of this combined approach is to achieve a varied overview of the diverse practices, subjectivities and identities that have been influenced by communism and are connected to social and historical spaces and times from ‘before’ and ‘after’ the fall of the Iron Curtain. The dimensions of memory are defined in the subtitle of the book as a space and time ‘between communism and post-communism’. This subtitle questions the dominant polarized understanding of post-communism as an era marked by the ending of the previous system and the transition towards the future. By contrast, in this book we situate the memory of the past in the time and space between communism and post-communism, where ‘before’ and ‘after’ simultaneously merge and collide.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS POST. REVISITING THE TRAUMA OF COMMUNISM IN STYLE
University of Bucharest Review, 2013
This article is part of a larger effort to explain national identity construction as any of four available discourse types informed by as many master tropes. I am looking at Pray for Brother Alexandru, Constantin Noica's memoirs of communist imprisonment in order to show that rhetorical irony and logical/philosophical paradox are the tropological mechanism of coping with the colonial trauma of both Western and Soviet modernization. My discourse-oriented approach (a subjective variant of constructivist theories of nationalism) rests on the premise that (post)communism has been for the Soviet republics and satellite states a " softer " and more complicated form of colonization than that of Third World countries. Noica's use of paradox is complicated by the internal dialogism of his narrative in such a way that it can be made to voice both a radical opposition to communism, capitalism, modern civilization and all received opinion, and also a philosophical contradiction or irony which he uses in order to convert defeat into victory and passivity into action, turning colonial history's victims into victors. Paradox is, therefore, the rhetorical tactic of withstanding the effects of cultural colonization by total acquiescence, of adopting the vocabulary and stance of the colonial oppressor only to undermine and alter its very essence.
Theory and Society, 2020
This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian "collective memory" of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the "true" history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region's approach to its past, one driven by the right's frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticom-munist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: the anticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes. Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism.
The legacy of communism: difficult histories, emotions and contested narratives
International Journal of Heritage Studies
This paper considers contested and traumatic narratives, using a case study of the planned National Museum of Romanian Communism and the site of Jilava Penitentiary, a former communist prison, near Bucharest in Romania. It discusses what happened when representatives from different groups of former victims and perpetrators met together with facilitators and worked towards a shared understanding of the past to reach some consensus about how to deal with different and apparently conflicting narratives within a new museum of communism. It draws on notions of emotional communities in order to understand the role heritage plays in contested situations. It also considers the nature of transitional justice 1 in this context.
"European Journal of Life Writing", 2021
Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.
Memory Studies, 5(4), 462-478, 2012
Using a case study of official representation of communism in Romania, this article addresses the rhetoric of historical representation and some of the ways in which the collective memory of communism is managed in the context of how post-communist democracies reckon with former regimes. It specifically centres on the public accomplishment of coming to terms with the past in the ‘Tismăneanu Report’ condemning communism in Romania. Using an ethnomethodologically inspired critical analysis, the article examines how the report and texts supporting it address the issue of how to take the communist era into public consciousness. The shaping of a specific representation of communism and the making of political-moral judgments in the report is legitimated by (1) treating communism as a category of the macro-social and textually mediated reality, (2) constructing the need for a scientific approach, and (3) conceiving communism as Other, alien to national identity and national interest. General implications for the substance and meaningfulness of coming to terms with recent history are discussed.