The February issue of Transilvania journal hosts an interview with professor José Itzigsohn focusing on his activity within the field of sociology and his latest book with Karida L. Brown, on The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (New York University Press, 2020). It delves into Du Boisian sociology, “double consciousness” and racialized modernity, alongside contemporary decolonial perspectives and new studies and researchers in the field.
As Teodora Dumitru (2016) has convincingly argued in the case of Romanian literary critic Eugen Lovinescu, the evaluation of literature he proposed along his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature (1926-1929) was guided by a solid liberal and bourgeois drive. Claiming the autonomy of the aesthetics, Lovinescu actually built an urban bourgeois literary canon in his effort to systematize the local literary material. Almost 100 years later, Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 (2021) proceeds to a similar effort, but through the lens of New Left critical theory. Both Lovinescu and Iovănel use what I call the administrative language of their time: Lovinescu uses the urban bourgeois synchronism in order to counter the populists’ movements at the time, while Iovănel uses New Left critique in order to counter the vocabulary of the right-wing populists in contemporary Romania. Those are both the mainstream intelligentsia vocabularies of their time: the liberal discourse was the pillar of developmentalism, while the socialist contemporary vocabulary is more and more put to work in order to secure welfare capitalism. The question that arises is how does Iovănel’s history fulfill its goal of recovering the margins, creating a more democratic canon and imposing intersectionality as a center pillar of literary history, while trying to depart from local provincialism and, thus, gentrifying his research time after time.
This article illustrates through a data analysis of “the archive” and of what Jordan A. Y. Smith has recently defined as translationscapes, the way in which “the planetary world-as-world” emerged in Romania through translation only as late as 1948. Since translations of literature, as defined by the polysystem theory, are “a most active system within a polysytem,” one can assume that local production in certain cultures is strongly dependent on imports.
This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).
This article outlines W.E.B. Du Bois’s general sociological theory and literary activity in connection to the recent study of Jose Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. It describes the role of Double Consciousness and Racialized Modernity within postcolonial and decolonial theory and explains how postcolonial Romanian studies have engaged with postcolonial theory by avoiding these concepts.
This article presents the reception of structuralism in linguistics, psychology, social sciences, anthropology, and literature as viewed from the perspective of the most important philosophical journals in Romanian communism, Cercetări filozofice [Philosophical Research] and Revista de filozofie [The Philosophy Magazine] during the period between 1953 and 1967. Following François Dosse’s delineation between two phases of the development of structuralism (before and after 1967), Baghiu argues that in Romania – and possibly in Eastern Europe – structuralism was only taken serious as a methodology after the debate on Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault during 1967. Before that, every structuralist figure was criticized as bourgeois and idealistic. While Barthes becomes one of the most important references of French structuralism, Foucault becomes a sort of a public enemy in 1967, after his Les mots et les choses, which is viewed in socialist countries as anti-humanistic thought and thus rejected. This allows Baghiu to describe 1967 as a benchmark in which both structuralism and poststructuralism gain preeminence in philosophical debates in Romania, yet in different manners.
This article continues the quantitative analysis of translations of novels in Romania for the 1918-1944 period. Baghiu discusses the decay of the French novel (from almost 70% of the total of translated novels during the long 19th century to almost 43% during the interwar period), and the case of two competitors in the second line of translations (American and Russian). The article turns then to the European and Global peripheries from the perspective of the colonial ‘20s and ‘30s, and discusses the eco narratives of the Nordic novel, and the identity function of the Asian novel within this translationscape.
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