Georgescu, Diana; (2010) Raising Socialist Citizens: Cultural Modernity and Social Performativity in Late Socialist Romania. New Europe College Yearbook , 10 pp. 141-164.

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Abstract

Starting its inquiry from the ideological construction, institutional organization, and lived experiences of childhood in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania (1965-1989), this article seeks to advance an interpretive model of Communism rooted in theories of modernity and concepts of performativity. My study capitalizes on the affinity between childhood and selfhood, approaching childhood as a formative period that can illuminate the process of growing into a socialist citizen and thus, the regime’s ambitions of creating a new socialist man. It argues that working with a notion of modernity that eschews the teleological implications of unabated progress can illuminate the Communist regime’s illiberal, but decidedly modern, ambitions of social engineering. Acknowledging the modernity of the regime has significant implications for how we conceptualize the relationship between state and society and the formation of socialist subjectivities out of the intersection of official ideology and subjective experience.

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