1. OUTLINE OF THE PROJECT

1.  PRELIMINARY REMARKS: THE SCOPE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT

The current economic and financial crisis has made it more difficult for countries of the former communist block to exit their transition from a state-controlled to a market economy and from a totalitarian to a democratic political regime. The national reconstruction in these countries has become increasingly awkward. Against this insecurity, the public intellectuals in Romania once more are playing an important role in shaping public opinion, as they did in the first years that followed the fall of communism. Arguably, the voice of opinion shapers conditions the public representations of the present and future of the country, as well as the sway of political sympathies. The discourse of public intellectuals can often outline the immediate course for the nation by certain discursive tactics which go hand in hand with distinct ideological stances. These varied discourses generate alternative portraits and narratives of the nation whose interplay generates such a country’s historical and political dynamics. It remains for ordinary citizens to choose their favorite account of the nation and to empower the political figures who claim to be able to translate these stories into reality. And so today’s words are tomorrow’s deeds. It, then, becomes imperative for us to understand the mechanics of public discourse on reconfiguring the nation that we may evaluate and predict its impact on society.

Study Object

Given the premise that the discourse of public intellectuals is one of the most significant shapers of the collective self, this study undertakes to classify and analyze the most noticeable national self-imaging discourse types from public intellectuals in post-1989 Romanian cultural periodicals.

I am using discourse in the pragmatic and post-Foucauldian sense of the term to implicate the relationships between thought, speech and action, between the various domains and instances of discourse in society, between communication and disputes for power, status and legitimacy. Precedence is given to one particular interdependency, that between modes of enunciating and ideological stances as suggested by Hayden White (see Methodology section below).

I take the phrase ‘public intellectuals’ to refer to educated personalities who are well-known outside their own specialism who undertake to discuss issues of general interest for a lay yet relatively educated audience through the channels of the public media (Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals, Harvard University Press, 2001).

The analytical instruments (detailed below) come from postcolonial, subaltern, and cultural studies, falling largely within the poststructuralist paradigm. The methodological transfer is grounded in the relative compatibility between the postcolonial and the postcommunist situation. In both cases, we are dealing with victimized cultures whose identities suffered the aggression of a foreign oppressor and are experiencing a post-traumatic historical interval.

Accounts of postcommunism usually come from historians, economists, sociologists, and political scientists. By contrast, the contribution of discourse scholars to this subject is rather modest. And postcolonial analyses are even scantier, although this is a repository of exemplary accounts of historically traumatized cultures, which were occupied and mutilated by foreign powers, and which eventually gained their freedom and faced the surprisingly difficult task of recovering their cultural identity—which is precisely the condition of former communist countries. This project sets out to compare the two situations and to associate them methodologically for a better understanding of the two hypostases and of the dynamic of post-1989 Romanian culture.

2.  THE AIMS OF THE STUDY

v To identify and classify the ideological discourses on national identity by which public intellectuals secure their legitimacy in the reconstruction of post-1989 Romanian society and shape the public imaginary.

v To analyze rhetorical alternatives for the reconstruction of postcommunist national identity.

v To catalog the prevalent themes and images of the discourse of decolonization and scrutinize how they are inflected in the homologous context of decommunization. This will implicitly validate the methodological transfer between postcolonial and postcommunist studies.

v To document how ideological matrices operate in relative autonomy from historical conjunctures and how doctrines operate differently in dissimilar contexts.

v To compare the inventory and behavior of national identity discourses with those of postcolonial cultures.

By following these routes I hope to evince certain discursive ideological types, that is, an arsenal of categories of self-representation, which function differently in unlike cultural contexts.

3.  THE METHODOLOGY: THE THEORETICAL BASIS, CRITICAL INSTRUMENTS, AND INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORK

The premises of my study are constructivist along the line of such studies as B. Anderson’s Imagined Communities, E. Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition, or E. Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism. Like these scholars, I take national identity to be imagined or invented, rather than given. I will be working with a modified version of Hayden White’s tropology (developed in Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse) in conjunction with the theoretical positioning and the analytical instruments provided by poststructuralist postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.

The corpus will consist of samples of national identity discourse from the cultural postcommunist press where public intellectuals discuss the repositioning of Romanian culture in relation to the West. Such texts will be compared with their pre-1989 genealogies and with their (post)colonial equivalents.

Adopting the methodology commonly used in accounts of postcolonial emancipation in order to analyze postcommunism will ensure a contrastive study of post-traumatic cultures whose shared genus, I argue, is postimperialism. I aim to document both the structural discursive homologies and the different historical conjunctures that define the role of public intellectuals in postcommunism and postcolonialism.

4.  ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION OF THE RESEARCH

v Nationalism and national consciousness are usually tackled by ‘hard’ approaches that focus on economic, political, and social contexts. I am proposing a new soft approach that is concerned with discursive modalities of expressing subjectivity. The quaternary analytical grid I employ (the modified White model) is instrumental in avoiding the simplifying bipolar typologies like civic/liberal/good/Western nationalism vs. ethnic/bad/Eastern European nationalism, or traditional humanism vs. radicalism.

v Though I support Anderson’s thesis regarding the imaginary construction of national identity, I am reserved as to his dealing mostly with objective, hard, material aspects (print capitalism, Protestantism, the lay state and its institutions etc.) and with the instruments of identity construction, while ignoring the constructing/constructed subject and the manner in which such a human subject conceives his/her identity. I, therefore, propose to bring back to the fore of constructivist interpretations their long disregarded protagonist, human subjectivity and discourse as the medium of its expression.

v I am modifying Hayden White’s explanatory scheme by introducing new and more appropriate master tropes like simile and antithesis (along the lines of François Hartog’s study of the representations of otherness in The Mirror of Herodotus), as well as by reconfiguring the correspondences between the master tropes and the ideological archetypes.

v There is almost unanimous opposition to associating postcolonialism and postcommunism coming from traditional historians, or historians of the imaginary, postcolonial critics, and postcommunist scholars. My research articulates a plea for the inclusion of the two hypostases under the same category or genus and a demonstration of the viability of a conceptual and methodological transfer between the two fields.

5.  TOPICALITY AND EXPECTED IMPACT OF THE PROJECT

I believe the alternative perspective that my study proposes will generate a fresh understanding of the postcommunist phenomenon and it may also trigger revisions of postcolonial theory. The discourse of public intellectuals has been analyzed so far from the perspective offered by media and communication studies or by political science. Submitting this subject to a tropological examination would be a first. The present research aims to generate an interdisciplinary field at the crossroads between rhetoric and discourse analysis, narratology, the study of ideology, history, nationalism studies, postcolonialism, and postcommunism.

In order to fully grasp the importance of such a novel critical site, one must size the current difficulties. The understanding of postcommunism has been hindered by the parochialism of the case studies presented by critics and the desire to work within confined and outdated models. Moreover, communication between the various postcommunist cultures has been scarce in the absence of a lingua franca and of translations between these vernaculars.

Perhaps the language is the very key to a solution. My project suggests there are common deep structures of the discourses of national reconstruction whatever the domain, topic or political allegiance. Ignoring the discursive mechanisms which shape political, economic, spiritual or any other representations might preclude a genuine understanding of the postcommunist phenomenon. Discourse analysis might offer the suggestion of a common conceptual idiom for converging the various disciplinary angles.

An additional problem for the study of postcommunism is the belief in a single ultimate truth entertained by social and human scientists, as well as by political contenders. Being impervious to alternative discourses and interpretations obstructs the dialog and the ability to conjugate explanatory efforts. In the West, cultural studies with their poststructuralist take on self-imaging discourses have generated new knowledge and a change of mentality that led to a reorganization of society. Postcolonial cultural studies focus on the power of discourse in self-representations with the aid of a rich and multidisciplinary analytical arsenal. They have given up all universalist claims and have called for tolerance.

It is in this spirit that I propose to approach my topic. I hope that by striving for a non-partisan treatment of apparently irreconcilable theories and ideologies I may foster new insights and a pluralist climate.

6.  PRIOR EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH

Publications:

v ‘On the Discrimination of Nationalisms’, in Krytyka, no. 11/Nov. 1999, Kiew, Ukraine. (The article sketches the principles of tropologism and suggests ways in which it can be used in the study of nationalism.)

v Review of R. Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, in The Bloomsbury Review vol. 28/No. 1/Jan-Feb 2008.

v ‘On the Inconvenience of Being Born a Romanian, or A Third Discourse from the Second World: Postcommunist Dilemmas in the Age of Postimperialist Emancipation’. A chapter on the theoretical and ideological relationship between postcommunism and postcolonialism in Transatlantic Dialogues. Eastern Europe, The US and Post-Cold War Cultural Spaces. Eds. Rodica Mihaila and Roxana Oltean, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2009.

v Dictionary items/articles on ‘colonization’, ‘colonialism’, and ‘postcolonial studies’ in Dicționarul de termeni culturali (A Dictionary of Cultural Terms). Ed. Mircea Martin (to be published by Paralela 45 in 2011).

v ‘Narratives of the Emerging Self: Romania’s First Years of Post-Totalitarian Cinema.’ Chapter on postcommunist Romanian cinematography in Cinema in Transition. Eds. Catherine Portuges and Peter Hames (to be published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia in 2011).

Scholarships:

Guest of the Rector grant by New Europe College in 2003-2004 with a research project on the contribution of public intellectuals to nationalist discourse in post-1989 Romania.

Taught classes:

v Joint MA course on The Rhetorical Construction of National Identity at the British Cultural Studies Center, the American Studies Center, and the Canadian Studies Center, University of Bucharest. http://stefanescu-nationalism.blogspot.com/

v MA course on Postcommunism/Postcolonialism. Siblings of Subalter(n)ity at the British Cultural Studies Center. http://postcommunism-postcolonialism.blogspot.com/

Conference organizer and contributor:

v Co-organizer of the Postcolonialism-Postcommunism joint conference of the Romanian Institute for Recent History and the British Cultural Studies Center at the University of Bucharest held on 29 June 2004. Contribution: one of three keynote speeches on ‘The relevance of postcolonial studies for research on Romanian postcommunism’.

v Co-organizer of the Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps international conference of the Canadian Studies Center at the University of Bucharest held on 23-24 April 2010. Contribution: ‘Noica's Nook, or How the Marginalized Intellectuals May Use Reverse Philosophy in a Communist Country’.