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Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past Cover

Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past

By: Elena Chiorean  
Open Access
|Jan 2016

Abstract

In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0009 | Journal eISSN: 2066-0464 | Journal ISSN: 1224-8703
Language: English
Page range: 39 - 56
Published on: Jan 29, 2016
Published by: Babeș-Bolyai University
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2016 Elena Chiorean, published by Babeș-Bolyai University
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.