Authors

Discussion

The first section of my presentation lays out three political and ideological master narratives that shaped collective memory and the administration of the past in post-1989 Romania. Anti-communism is linked to the 1990s and the imperative separation from the totalitarian past, as articulated by intellectual elites and mimetically enacted by liberal conservative politicians. Anti-corruption originates in the early 2000s and is prevalent during the Great Recession, when fighting corruption is linked to the ideology of austerity directed against the social state model. Following the recession, economic stability doubled by political tension engenders a third major civil society narrative. Anti-politics emerges in the context of massive protests in the late 2010s, and is related to the emancipatory protest movements of global progressivism. New voices, which were against the disappointing political class and the conservatory social values and regressive status quo, relate their agenda of representations with protesting and emancipatory actions of global progressivism. Anti-politics implies a revolt against a failing political class and an intensified, reactive awareness of the configuration of power relations in capitalist Romania. This paradigm is illustrated in the revisionist commemorative practices of Radu Jude’s  I don’t care if we go down in history as barbarians (2018). The protagonist, a young progressive theatre director, receives public funding for a controversial show: the re-enactment of the 1941 Odessa massacre, an anti-Semitic genocide carried out by the Romanian Army. Although recognized by the Romanian state, bringing it to the foreground of 2010 public life proves difficult. The heroine is faced with three curatorial accounts of the event: an epic, non-scientific version of history; a residual vulgarization of the past, justifying a residual vulgarization regarding the past, justifying racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-Semitic manifestations; and official institutionalized history, which relativizes the Odessa massacre on the global scale of genocide, suggesting the necessary reorienting of commemorative practices toward a safer, anti-communist topic.