Papers by Diana Georgescu
Having spent the previous decade in postgraduate degrees in the United States, where outside of S... more Having spent the previous decade in postgraduate degrees in the United States, where outside of Slavic and Eastern European Studies programs, few can place Romania on any physical or mental map, I experienced The Romanians are Coming as a rude reminder of my country’s visibility in Europe and Romanians’ unenviable status as ‘significant others’ in relation to a perceived ‘European’ core of values and economic prosperity. With visibility, however, also comes the burden of (self)-identification.
Slavic Review, 2019
Beginning with the state's successful promotion of purposeful and patriotic tourism for child... more Beginning with the state's successful promotion of purposeful and patriotic tourism for children in Ceaușescu's Romania, this article argues that we should move beyond traditional representations of the relationship between citizens and the socialist state in oppositional terms that emphasize resistance, subversion, and indifference, leaving historical subjects strangely disconnected from their socio-political context. Children and teachers who engaged in summer expeditions, for example, found self-fulfillment not only by opposing the regime or escaping into alternative lifestyles, but also by pursuing the socialist and national values the regime promoted and by activating forms of youth agency that were built into the socialist pedagogy of citizenship, which encouraged activism, voluntarism, and leadership in youth. To investigate young people's engagement with the socialist state, this article proposes a performative approach that has the potential to not only contribu...
Südosteuropa, 2016
In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial dri... more In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that shifted from early concerns with victimhood, justice, and retribution to seemingly apolitical revivals of everyday life under socialism. Drawing on a range of memoirs of socialist childhood published over the last decade by an aspiring generation of Romanian writers, this article examines the role of public intellectuals in articulating hegemonic representations of the socialist past. To understand both the enduring power and limits of such representations, the author argues that published recollections should not be read only for their (competing) perspectives on the past, but also for the sociopolitical effects they have in the transitional present, where they facilitate the socialization of emerging writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia. Exploring the tenuous relationship between dominant intellectual discourses and social memory in postsocialist Romania, ...
... from both of them. Oth-ers have provided much expert assistance: Dessislava Dragneva, Rigels ... more ... from both of them. Oth-ers have provided much expert assistance: Dessislava Dragneva, Rigels Halili, Radovan Haluzik, Gwen Jones, Maria Kostaridou, Vladislava Reznik, Zsuzsa Varga, Kate Wilson. Much of the research ...
American Ethnologist, 2019
Uploads
Papers by Diana Georgescu