CONSTRUCTING CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA: THE CASE OF PEOPLE’S LETTERS
CONSTRUCTING CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA: THE CASE OF PEOPLE’S LETTERS

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines how cultural identities are constructed in communist Romania based on an analysis of the people’s letters sent to Nicolae Ceauşescu. Approaching these epistles methodologically from a post-revisionist perspective, I analyzed them as a means of tracing individual efforts of self-fashioning as revolutionary subjects. In my investigation I also considered the importance of the practices of subjectivization (propaganda, political education) in proposing and disseminating the official cultural model of the socialist man in the Romanian public space and I demonstrated that in some cases people’s willingness to live up to the regime’s expectations for its citizens was not or not exclusively grounded on phony and selfish personal reasons.

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