An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: the Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania's Threshold Generation

The rhetoric of leaving, or the mirage of the fetishized West in Cristian Mungiu’s Occident

“…Caught between Orientalism and Occidentalism, the authentic Romanian identity has suffered in the same way as the identities of people emerging from colonial situations in the aftermath of the breakdown of totalitarian discursive control and revolutionary trauma. The colonial project and the Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II are comparable (see McClintock, 1992;Oţoiu, 2003;Moore, 2001;Ştefănescu, 2012;and to some extent Borcila, 2014, among others), and the post-coloniality evident in territories and populations in places not traditionally considered to be post-colonial, such as Ireland and Eastern Europe, benefits from a nuancing of terms in the 'colonial' family. In fact, Anne McClintock observes that 'the term "post-colonialism" is prematurely celebratory and obfuscatory in more ways than one' (1992: 91), and further unpacks, problematizes and calls for a redefinition of such terms as colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism.…”

Rethinking Culture and Cultural Analysis

“…by this name can only be X, whatever may happen to X and to her identical twin Y. 32 Especially we would not be tempted to say that the following story sounded convincing: say, I was in love with X and she was with me; now, suddenly X irreversably disappears from the scene (and I notice that fact); so I decide to go on with Y. Perhaps some would try to force a sense in the story thus: given that Y ex hypothesi has the same properties as X, I just 'decide' to be in love with Y.…”

“…So spricht er ganz allgemein von der Aufgabe der Kulturphilosophie, "the structure of language, myth, religion, art and science" zu beschreiben, um einen Einblick zu erhalten in "the fundamental structure of each of these human activities". 31 Wenn er in dem Zusammenhang fordert, "the form of primitive mythical thought" sowohl in seiner historischen Entwicklung zu verfolgen als auch analytisch-strukturell zu betrachten, 32 dann heißt das mit anderen Worten, am Mythos sowohl Formgeschichte als auch Formanalyse zu betreiben, wie dies in nachgelassen Texten zur Geschichte und zum Mythos ausgeführt wird. 33 Geht es Cassirer doch um "the general structural principles", die allen menschlichen Tätigkeitsformen zugrunde liegen.…”

“…vom "mythischen Vorstadium" der Denk-und Anschauungsformen handelt. 52 In nahezu Cassirerscher Manier spricht Lévi-Strauss von "Invarianz[en] semantischer oder ästhetischer Art", die jeweils eine "Gruppe von Transformationen" 53 56 Es fällt auf, daß Lévi-Strauss -zumindest in La penseé sauvage -wenig oder selten vom Gefühl als der Grundlage des Mythos spricht. Dennoch finden wir die mit Cassirer 57 konform gehende Aussage, daß das mythisch-magische Wissen konkreten Charakter trage und von "Gefühlswerten" durchdrungen ist.…”

“…These, according to Adrian Otoiu, characterize the "'in-between spaces' of cultural ambiguity where diasporic and migrant identities, hovering in the 31 Ibidem. indecision of in-betweenness, are shaped." 32 Otoiu's judgment is founded on Homi Bhabha's position as to the significance of the "limen", which is used to describe the "in-between spaces where strategies of identity are elaborated …, the boundary [that] becomes the place from which something begins its presencing." 33 The use of "doubling tropes" 34 such as irony, allegory, and parody give a different shade to motifs of dislocation, alienation and threatening events.…”