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ABSTRACT
Some of the most acclaimed novels from post-communist countries deal with communism through an anti-communist ethos. The emerging international canon of post-communist representations of communism and transition to capitalism has always sought to enfoce a convincing anti-communist ideal. Writers have only recently formulated critiques of the post-communist transition through what Boris Buden describes as post-communist cultures without social utopias. Those novels are not rooted in anti-communism but rather criticize the death of utopias following the fall of communism. Drawing on the Romanian case, we try to outline the heterotopias of capitalism in post-communism from the standpoint of novels on migration and work abroad, addressing contemporary understandings of capitalist realism, post-socialist realism, autofiction, and documented realism. Analysing novels by Liliana Nechit, Mihai Buzea, and Adrian Schiop, we reveal the subjective nature of the testimonial literature on migration and contrast it to the need to incorporate workers’ agency into this literary process. While the description of Eastern European capitalism through novels about migration has become an indictment of communism and a subtle plea for a ‘better’ form of capitalism, the novels about internal migration recover a lost social utopia that ended with the 1989 collapse of Romanian communism.
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Notes
1 See Alex Cistelecan, Raluca Manolescu, eds., ‘Sociologia romanului românesc contemporanʼ (The Sociology of the Contemporary Romanian Novel), Vatra 5–6 (2021): 39–119.
2 Friedrich Engels, ‘Letter to Margaret Harnkessʼ (1888), in Martin Travers (ed.), European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (New York: A&C Black, 2001), 124.
3 See Dumitru Sandu and Gordon F. De Jong, ‘Migration in Market and Democracy Transition: Migration Intentions and Behavior in Romania’, Population Research and Policy Review 15 (1996): 437–57; Dumitru Sandu, Cosmin Radu, Monica Constantinescu, Oana Ciobanu, ‘A Country Report on Romanian Migration Abroad: Stocks and Flows after 1989’, study for www.migrationonline.cz, Multicultural Center Prague (2004); István Horváth and Remus Gabriel Anghel. ‘Migration and its Consequences for Romania’, Südosteuropa 57 (2009): 386–403; Monica Roman and Cristina Voicu, ‘Some Socio-economic Effects of Labour Migration on the Sending Country. Evidence from Romania’, Theoretical and Applied Economics 547 (2010).
4 See Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1991).
5 See Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London, UK: Verso, 1996) and WReC: Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
6 Teresita Cruz-del Rosario, ‘Love’s Labors Lost in the Global South’, in Russell West-Pavlov (ed.), The Global South and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 173–84. For an analysis of the connection between peripheral translation and the rise of a Global South conscience in Eastern European fiction see Ștefan Baghiu, ‘Translating Hemispheres: Eastern Europe and the Global South Connection through Translationscapes of Poverty’, Comparative Literature Studies 56 (2019): 487–503; Ștefan Baghiu, ‘Geocritique: Siting, Poverty, and the Global Southeast’, in Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (eds.), Theory in the ‘Post’ Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 235–50.
7 Mihai Iovănel, Ideologiile literaturii în postcomunismul românesc (The Ideologies of Literature in Romanian Postcommunism) (Bucharest: Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2017); Mihai Iovănel, Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990–2020 (Iași: Polirom, 2021).
8 Boris Buden, ‘Transition to Nowhere: Art in History after 1989’ in (ed.) Paolo Caffoni, comp. Boris Buden and Naomi Hennig (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020), 181.
9 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Eastern European Liberalism and its Discontents’, New German Critique 57 (1992): 25.
10 Gil Eyal, Iván Szelenyi, and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-communist Central Europe (London: Verso, 1998).
11 Liviu Chelcea, ‘Informal Credit, Money and Time in the Romanian Countryside’, in Fourth Nordic Conference on the Anthropology of Post-Socialism, Copenhagen (2002).
12 Swanie Potot, ‘Transitioning Strategies of Economic Survival: Romanian Migration during the Transition Process’, in Richard Black, Godfried Engbersen, Marek Okólski, and Cristina Panțîru (eds.), A Continent Moving West? EU Enlargement and Labour Migration from Central and Eastern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 266.
13 Raúl Prebisch, ‘A Critique of Peripheral Capitalism’, CEPAL Review 1 (1976): 11.
14 Although the concept is preponderantly employed in regard to large-scale mining and forestry operations in Latin America, it can be broadened to cover other types of resources as well, including labour. For a more nuanced debate on extractivism see John O. Browder, ‘The Limits of Extractivism’, BioScience 42 (1992): 174–82.
15 See Dumitru Sandu, ‘Emerging Transnational Migration from Romanian Villages’, Current Sociology 53 (2005): 555–82.
16 We use the term proposed by Cornel Ban for the analysis of Romanian economy, following Immanuel Wallerstein’s envision of world system analysis. See Cornel Ban, Dependenţă şi dezvoltare: Economia politică a capitalismului românesc (Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014).
17 Alejandro Portes, ‘Globalization from below: the Rise of Transnational Communities’, in Don Kalb, Marco van der Land, Richard Staring, Bart van Steenbergen, and Nico Wilterdink (eds.), The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 260–1.
18 Some recent documentation projects, among which Pride and Concrete can be regarded as the most visible, actually document the irrational opulence of returning émigrés, who build imposing houses in their native country. Oftentimes, this phenomenon is interpreted as compensation for the restrictions in the accumulation of private property during communist. See http://www.prideandconcrete.com/.
19 Valer Simion Cosma, Cornel Ban, and Daniela Gabor, ‘The Human Cost of Fresh Food: Romanian Workers and Germany’s Food Supply Chains’, Review of Agrarian Studies 10 (2020).
20 Cornel Ban, Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5.
21 Nica and Moraru, ‘Diaspora’, 410.
22 Hanna Han recently discussed this aspect in relation to this phenomenon in Bessarabian migration fiction. See Hanna Han, ‘Multilingvismul și periferia: o analiză a romanului basarabean post-sovietic’, Transilvania 5–6 (2023): 74–81.
23 Polina Manolova, ‘“Going to the West Is My Last Chance to Get a Normal Life”: Bulgarian Would-Be Migrants’ Imaginings of Life in the UK’, Central and Eastern European Migration Review 8 (2019): 61–83.
24 Cătălin Dorian Florescu, Vremea minunilor (Iași: Polirom, 2005), 275.
25 Saša Stanišić, Herkunft (Munich: Luchterhand, 2019), 235.
26 Caren Irr, ‘When the Migrant’s Perspective Takes Center Stage’, English Language Notes 58 (2020): 182–83.
27 Manuela Boatcă, Laboratoare ale modernității: Europa de Est și America Latină în corelație (Laboratories of Modernity: Eastern Europe and Latin America in Correlation) (Cluj-Napoca: Idea, 2021).
28 Dani Rockoff, Căpșunarii (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2013).
29 Liliana Nechita, Cireșe amare (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2014).
30 Alex Cistelecan, ‘Cireșe amare și gogoși dulci’, CriticAtac (February 9, 2015). See also Alex Cistelecan, De la stânga la stânga. Lecturi critice în câmpul progressist (Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2019).
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Nechita, Cireșe, 134.
34 Mihai Buzea, Gastarbeit (Iași: Polirom, 2017), 324.
35 See Costi Rogozanu and Daniela Gabor, ‘Are Western Europe’s Food Supplies Worth More than East European Workers’ Health”, The Guardian 16 (2020).
36 Mihai Iovănel counts more in his History: Adrian Schiop, zero grade Kelvin (2009), Liviu Bîrsan, Asylant (2009), Albert V. Cătănuș, El sueño español – jurnal de căpșunar (2010), Cornel Bălan, Escroc SRL (Swindler LLC) (2013), Dani Rockhoff, Căpșunarii (2013), Dan Lungu, Fetița care se juca de-a Dumnezeu (2014), Mihai Buzea, Gastarbeiter (2017), Lilia Bicec-Zanardelli, Testamentul necitit. Scrisorile unei mame plecate la muncă în Occident (2018).
37 See Alina Botezat and Friedhelm Pfeiffer, ‘The Impact of Parental Labour Migration on Left‐behind Childrenʼs Educational and Psychosocial Outcomes: Evidence from Romania’, Population, Space and Place 26 (2019); Maria-Carmen Pantea, ‘Grandmothers as Main Caregivers in the Context of Parental Migration’, European Journal of Social Work 15 (2012): 63–80.
38 Adrian Schiop, interview by Vasile Ernu. See Costi Rogozanu, ‘Literatura anti-aspirațională. Greaua renaștere a “socialul”-ului’, Vatra 5–6 (2021): 72–6. Schiop further declares: ‘Regarding precarity and periphery, things started to come together because I was living in Ferentari and was surrounded by real people – who, in their position as others, as alterity of mine, seemed more interesting, even more so since their lives had a sort of excitement, risk, existential stakes – in contrast to the lives of my friends: their desk jobs, talking politics when going out at a pub, smoking a joint at home to fall asleep easier’.
39 Gianina Cărbunariu, Work in Progress (Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 2018).
40 See also Thea Dellavalle, ‘Work in Progress di Gianina Cărbunariu’, Mimesis Journal 7 (2018). For an account of labour in Romanian cinema see Christian Ferencz Flatz, ‘Two Forms of Precarity in Romanian (and Bulgarian) Cinema’, in Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel (eds.), Precarity in European Film: Depictions and Discourses (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 143–60.
41 Rory Archer and Goran Musić, ‘New Perspectives on East European Labor History: An Introduction’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 17 (2020): 19–29.
42 Adriana Stan, ‘Post-Socialist Realism. Authenticity and Political Conscience in the Romanian Literature of the 2000s’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 62 (2021): 5.
43 See Iovănel, Istoria, 408–36.
44 See Stan, ‘Post-Socialist Realismʼ.
45 Iovănel, Istoria, 409.
46 Ibid., 291.
47 See how Andrei Terian describes the general metanarratives over the communist legacy in Romanian cultural milieus in Andrei Terian, ‘Representing Romanian Communism: Evolutionary Models and Metanarrative Scenarios’, in Ștefan Baghiu, Ovio Olaru, and Andrei Terian (eds.), Beyond the Iron Curtain: Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021), 23–42.
48 Here we have a generational battle as well, as Adriana Stan points out: ‘As a proletarianized generation of writers, who struggled between various jobs to make ends meet in Bucharest, or still lived as poor students on their parents’ money, millennials felt righteously angered at their older generation peers. They had a particular disdain for their immediate predecessors, the postmodern writers, who were the last to capture institutional positions in the literary system after 1989. Generational antagonism explains why millennial realism was programmatically shaped as a form of anti-literature, and rejected the estheticism with which the postmodernism of the 1980s was identified. Taking this dispute beyond the theoretical realm, millennials accused their postmodern peers of carrying on a type of poetics that remained tone-deaf to the social realities of post-communism’ – Stan, ‘Post-Socialist Realism’, 7.
49 Dan Lungu, Sunt o babă comunistă! (Iași: Polirom, 2007).
50 Iovănel, Istoria, 291.
51 Andrei Terian, ‘Desfășurarea’ (The Development), Cultura 67 (2007): 10.
52 See how Teodora Dumitru describes contemporary Romanian fiction and poetry in relation to living costs and rents in Teodora Dumitru, ‘Trauma locuirii ca traumă identitară în literatura română a deceniilor 2010–2020. Duțescu, Braniște, Novac’, Transilvania 7 (2023): 36–43.
53 Stan, ‘Post-Socialist Realism’, 5.
54 See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009).
55 Ibid. See also Stanʼs further arguments: ‘it is true that, in post-communist East-Central Europe, capitalism was advertised as the single, necessary direction for the future, in a manner that would discourage the capacities of any contemporary discourse to comment upon the structures of capital’; ‘the alternative to capitalism, which Western societies had lost by the end of the 1980s, could still be imagined in post-communist cultures, albeit only through the (traumatic or nostalgic) memory of communism’. For a discussion on the representation of these shortcomings of the representation of the communist period in contemporary Romanian fiction see Bogdan Contea, ‘Romanul comunismului românesc înainte și după Istoria lui Mihai Iovănel’, Transilvania 5–6 (2023): 65–73.
56 Alison Shonkwiler, Leigh Claire La Berge, eds., Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 2.