Women’s narratives of displacement and their afterlife

Dacoromania litteraria, 2023

This introduction to the Special issue of Dacoromania litteraria on Eastern and South-Eastern European Women's Life Writing (10/2023) presents and motivates our grouping of the articles in the issue under three topics: witnessing, enduring (understood both in relation to suffering and to duration) and recovering (both in the sense of unearthing cultural memory and of personal and collective healing). If it is true that we are living, as trauma theorists have been considering for decades, in what Shoshana Felman (1992) called an “age of testimony”, where Life Writing with a traumatic core has become one of the main literary forms, this is happening because of a perceived “crisis of truth” that started even before the digital era. The paradox that shores the fragments of memory work against the ruins of a monolithic notion of historical truth, making trauma memorialization necessary and, by the same token, difficult, does not seem to have an expiry date. The discarding of Fukuyama’s “end of history” paradigm by Eastern European studies, highlighted, among others, by Agnieszka Mrozik and Anja Tippner (2021) in connection to the rise of late-socialism-themed autofiction, also means that the cultural work performed by Life Writing cannot be framed only through the grid of a retrospective relevance. On the contrary, analyzing women’s auto/biographical, autofictional, and diaristic writings from the early twentieth-century to the early twenty-first, and from various areas of transcultural confluence (from the former Habsburg Empire to the former Yugoslavia, as well as Lower Silesia, Transylvania, and other multiethnic areas), as this special issue does, contributes not just to the understanding of the past, but also to that of the present. Three intertwined notions – agency, persistence, and legacy – circumscribe the issue’s thematic cohesion, while methodologically its main strength lies in the ability to subvert and challenge the epistemic homogeneity in the field of Life Writing and memory studies by not just bringing local examples into dialogue with Western scholarship, but also building on theory coming out of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which in many cases has not been translated yet, and which is used alongside the Western paradigms of understanding and interpreting cultural work. In favoring this close interaction between Western-imported models and the theoretical models of cultural critics with firsthand experience of the inner dynamics of particular Eastern European fields, we respond to a call for epistemic diversification launched a few years ago by scholars such as Chen-Bar Itzhak (2020), who drew attention to the imbalance between the relative democratization of World Literature and the enduring Western hegemony in literary theory, and called for a “World Republic of Theory” corresponding to the World Republic of Letters.

Südosteuropa, 2016

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, ...

This volume addresses the issues of remembering and performing the past in Eastern European ex-communist states in the context of multiplication of the voices of the past. The book analyzes the various ways in which memory and remembrance operate; it does so by using different methods of recollecting the past, from oral history to cultural and historical institutions, and by drawing on various political and cultural theories and concepts. Through well-documented case studies the volume showcases the plurality of approaches available for analyzing the relationship between memory and narrative from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.

2016

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...

The 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 displaced individuals, foregrounding the enduring relevance of locality upon experiences of resettlement: ‘When the semantics we appropriate to represent human mobility are too fleeting, ephemeral, and unbounded, we move from a world where social structures still matter to a world of pure flexibility, deterritorialisation, and disembeddedness

Philologica Jassyensia, 2022

This paper aims to sketch a discursive typology of memoirs recounting the traumatic carceral experience of former political prisoners under communism. This is a body of literature which in Romania is at best marginal in studies of communist repression by historians and political or social scientists, as it has attracted more interest from literary people. Students of prison-time memoirs under communism usually operate with a dichotomy between “factual” accounts that supposedly document actual prison life and “literary” accounts that obscure the factual truth by embellishing it for aesthetic rather than documentary purposes. Unlike them, and in keeping with the views of post-Freudian trauma critics like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), or Leigh Gilmore (2001), I posit that traumatic experiences (re)present themselves to our subjectivity as always already translated into a discursive template and, as such, they are already committed to memory as simultaneously “factual” and “literary”. This is a process which I call “traumawork” (Traumaarbeit) and which helps me modify the sequential model of dreamwork transformations (Traumarbeit) from classical psychoanalysis and suggest that the latent and manifest contents are in fact not just coincidental in the written memoirs, but that they were simultaneously scripted (discursively encoded) from the start. I adhere to a subjective constructivist model that insists on the centrality of discourse in the constitution of our subjectivity. This prompts me to conclude that our memories consist of the mnemic imagos which are discursively processed through traumawork. This means that they are poured into different discursive matrices that differ from each other by virtue of the different “master tropes” which they involve (Hayden White 1973, Bogdan Ștefănescu 2018) which function as structuring principles for our representations of traumatic events. These discursive matrices or templates are constitutive of the psychological and ideological profile of each author and furnishes the memorialist with different manners of inscribing carceral life experience in testimonials. By looking at the memoirs by Ion Ioanid, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla, Ion D. Sîrbu, Nicolae Steinhardt, and Constantin Noica, I exemplify here three such discursive paradigms  the realist approach of antithesis-driven radicalism, the lyrical perspective which pursues inner harmony by means of metaphoric anarchist type of scripting, and the mannerist concern with thought-provoking antinomies and paradoxes voiced in an ironic-conservative mode.

The study focuses on Fanika as an example of documentary writing by first-and second-generation survivors, i.e. women in the mother-daughter relationship (Hanna Altarac/Fanika Lučić and Branka Jovičić), both from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. The timeline of the life story of Hanna/Fanika, born in 1922 in a Sephardic family from Sarajevo, coincides on the macro level with the history of Yugoslavia (the establishment of the state and the interwar period, World War Two and the Holocaust, the postwar socialist period, the break-up of the country and post-Yugoslavia), which is important for the contextualization of the narrative. We have analyzed the motivation of first-generation survivor Fanika Lučić to present her memories of the Holocaust, highlighting the importance of communicative memory as an instrument of their transmission to a second-generation survivor as well as the process involved in their transfer from private to public narrative. Further analysis refers to the generic frames of the narrative, its hybrid character, and its liminal position at a point where biography and autobiography meet and interact. Mediation is a key procedure in Fanika, so attention has been dedicated to determining the degrees of mediation, their variation throughout the narrative and their impact on the substructures (narrative segments). Finally, we have identified,

Идентитети: Списание за политика, род и култура, 2008

Using the small Romanian town of Sulina as a case- study, the authors explore the mutual construction of personal and group narrative in a locale that experienced dramatic change and marginalization. It is argued that individuals shape their identity narratives in an ongoing dialectics between personal experience and group narrative. A powerful master- narrative, focusing on one glorified period in the town’s existence, is identified. The authors analyze the construction and functioning of the master- narrative, its constant re- validation, favorable conditions for its continued existence, counter- narratives, and individual negotiations with both master- and counter-narratives. Continuously reconstructed memories are seen as the prime resources for the elaboration of narrative.

In the form of memoirs, autobiographies, diaries or correspondence, or given a literary spin as autofiction and biofiction, the experiences of East and SouthEast European women during wartimes and under the oppressive regimes of the twentieth century (a period laden with contrasts, which in the West was hailed as "a century of women", Rowbotham 1997, but also framed as an "age of testimony", Felman and Laub 1992) have been surfacing in the past two decades. The transmission of these narratives followed sinuous paths, taking both verbal and non-verbal forms, relying on both "filial" and "affiliative" networks (Hirsch 2012), and coming from both female victims and female perpetrators (Schwab 2010). If deciphering most of what came to light requires the careful eye of a literary or cultural studies scholar, the broad perspective of a historian, or the attentive ear of a psychoanalyst, some phenomena of resurfacing bring back not only traumatic legacies, but also extremist ones, pushing towards repeating a history of perpetrations (Pető 2020), a concerning tendency which calls for a political scientist's perspective. The persistence of women's psychic wounds, passed on through "postmemory" (Hirsch 1997 & 2012) has generated "haunting legacies" (Schwab 2010) as it shaped the next generation's unconscious reflexes, and has found a forceful outlet in works of life writing coming either from second-generation witnesses or from the publication of previously censored works by victims of totalitarian regimes. The transmission of these narratives happened against the backdrop of an uneven social progress, which created gender gaps and accentuated women's vulnerabilities, despite the presence of emancipation movements, which received official support from some political regimes. This issue will look at how traumatic memories (lived, inherited, or transmitted) are transformed through the aesthetic agency of literature (sometimes with additional support from photography or visual art), thus building a safe space where the revisiting of the past allows room for both reflection and learning. The volume focuses on a triad of aspects of life writing: witnessing (following distinctions made by Derrida and Agamben, and recently refined by van der Heiden 2019, between the Latin testis, superstes, martyrderived from the Greek martusand auctor), enduring (which brings together suffering and duration or survival), and recovering (connoting healing in the intransitive form, but also rescuing or preserving in the transitive). We also want to take into account the influence of censorship and self-censorship on the process of witnessing and the way "missing memory" (Schwartz, Weller, and Winkel, 2021) finds a compensation in fictional forms of life-writing. Contributions should cover the large life writing spectrum (biographical and autobiographical narratives, memoirs, diaries, letters, biofiction, or autofiction), including posthumously published or retrospectively written accounts.