Romanian Revolution of 1989 Research Papers (original) (raw)
My academic option for the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 originates in a personal need to understand, as far as possible, and, therefore, to domesticate the radical strangeness of a founding event from our recent past. For us, the... more
My academic option for the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 originates in a personal need to understand, as far as possible, and, therefore, to domesticate the radical strangeness of a founding event from our recent past. For us, the generation who witnessed it, - in the wider sense of the notion of generation in oral history (as contemporaries with memorable and communally remembered historical events) -, these events divide public history and personal histories into a (self)referential “before and after 1989”.
From the vantage point of the present, this study casts an interrogatory glance at the alterity of this event from the recent past, configuring a historical and anthropological research on the memory of the revolution. I have thus attempted to capture the different ways the social and the collective memory(ies) of the revolution are articulated, the power relations that traverse them, as well as to deconstruct the layers of the taken-for-granted meanings that have overlapped over a span of two decades since the events.
I have chosen this perspective in order to answer not so much the obsessive interrogation “Was there or was there not a revolution?”, as the following questions: “What kind of revolution was it?” What grants the specificity, the radical strangeness of these events, against the background of the 1989 revolutions from Central and Eastern Europe, themselves appearing as uncommon occurrences on the scale of history? Who has appropriated the meanings of the revolution, how and why, and what are the stakes of its posterity?